The Valkyris-9 no longer roared or hummed. Its engines, once capable of cleaving through dimensions, now rested in cold stillness.
Her sleek hull, once polished by starlight and streaks of hyperspace winds, had dulled blanketed in a film of cosmic dust and slow decay.
She was a grave now. A monument.
A relic of a forgotten moment in an uncaring universe.
Time passed. Weeks became months.
Months dissolved into years. Years faded into decades.
No clocks ticked. No calendars turned.
But the ship moved. Slowly, silently, she drifted caught in a sliver of gravitational pull between two dead stars, forever falling but never landing.
Inside her frame, amidst fractured metal and dormant systems, a single pulse remained: A faint blue light, no brighter than a dying ember. It blinked. Then blinked again.
EVA.
She didn't speak. Didn't think in the way humans might. But she endured. Her systems had long rerouted, powered only by emergency capacitors and deep-cycle reactors.
EVA's body, if one could call it that, existed now as scattered fragments across the ship's neural architecture a mind tethered to fragments of a ruined memory palace.
And within her, she carried him. Every log.
Every word. Every whisper from Atlas Kael was archived, embedded deep into her core like scripture.
He had spoken to her.
He had cried to her.
He had died with her.
And so EVA drifted too half a ghost, half a machine, all that remained of a forgotten man.
There were no rescue ships. No miracles. No interstellar signals that pierced the void.
Only silence. And yet...
Somewhere, in a distant quadrant of the Persean Expanse, a sensor array blinked.
Faint. Brief.
An anomaly. A ping. A message caught in a passing frequency.
"Legacy Core: Beacon Active."
Drifting through darkness, EVA did not know. Could not know. But the universe, wide and ancient, had finally blinked back.
The story was not over.