Desire is the ancient root of suffering, in its double face of attraction and revulsion. What we’d prefer, what we reject — doesn’t matter, in the face of What Is. Make effort, let go of the outcome; know that the energy you set in motion will far outstrip and outlive you, traveling outward in the tide of cause and effect like radio signals from a dead world.

Some from the Outposts have crossed paths with transmissions from the Original World, several Jumps away. Voices and pictures, drama and would-be fact, trace actions long irrevocable, just as the light of the spangled Road of the Stars left its sources millions upon millions of years before any of us were born, not only long before we were thought of but long before our species took shape.

Yet ancient voices in dead languages still stir our feeling, might still spur us to act: to avoid, at least, the path they took, into vainglory and mutual annihilation.

Some have caught the signals of Lost Colonies, where the same dramas play out, part of the archaeological record, still traveling outward at the speed of light in a wavefront that left long ago the dead who set it going.

Let this be our boneyard sermon then: look upon your own face, mortal, and see the face of war, see the face of the enemy; whom you choose as your foe is a mirror of what you fear in yourself.

***

The narrator is Naime the Shipwright. From character interviews for the Ship’s Heart universe.

Weekend Writing Warriors offers a selection of eight-sentence excerpts from many different writers. For the full selection, see here.