the baryons in the interstellar medium twinkle in a wide range of densities and temperatures. in her waking, falling dream, Kyniska burns with the ideas of the defunct. in her coffin, she wakes up and screams. Once the dead have died hard, they must take the place as they find it, for no descent can be in the same stream twice.

after the fighting, the soldier wakes up back on Enceladus, in the service of the empire. he walks toward the castle through endless corridors of ice. but the day grows darker and darker, and he knows he will never reach the front gate.

in her bed burning, Kyniska feels everything and nothing at once. she hears the pain of the outcast, who are not and never will be citizens. Yet Xin was once an outcast; she fought for her right to exist, for her identity, and now she is the commander of the anti-rebel army.

in her waking horror, Kyniska sees Arion as the antagonist, hiding far away, far forward in time, flashing back and forward with his photoionized lies, his mouth open with dense gas coming out of it, lies coloured by ultraviolet photons. in her paralyzing illness, Kyniska has chosen the path of spirituality, and the religion of fighting the white whale has led her to a faith in God which is intermingled with her hatred for Arion.

Trapped in a box, she is being fed fantasies through a multiversal screen of the kind once built by Xin. Her love lost fast fuels supernova explosions in her mind, and while she waits until she sees the sun… she remembers how it was to fall in love… to see the break of day of an emptiness so vast, so fast, and the feeling of taking off, soaring, catching shock-heated temperature drops, while connected to stellar coronal gas on time scales far greater than millions of years. and she once vowed that he’d be on his mind forever, that she’d cross the endless oceans of suffering, she’d for an instant exist without acting, that her bewildered mind should stop wandering, and arrive at the highest good.

At the time of love, the earth was rotating, and the interstellar medium was forming the stars, and the dominant source of energy was the yoga of action. the visible appearance of galaxies around her kept urging her to accept words there seemingly inconsistent, such as “I”, “love” and “you”. And as gas evolves to stars, some part of their love was ejected from the galaxy in the form of galactic winds. Upon a dream, she saw a preying mantis, she felt the hurt of loving, and in her illness now she hears a song in the background. What is it?

Young Simon, later the Taoist, while rotting in prison, meditates on his earlier incarnation as a life-luster. When confronted with his mother’s dementia he felt dead in the gut: to feel so much, and to be able to communicate so little.

Kyniska discharges fantasies of love while entombed, in the tight embrace of religion, she explores the myths and lies of her mind with open mind, like a soaring phoenix on her last flight. The regrets of lost love bundled together in the Icarus desert, the all-accepting character of the non-existent knight’s squire, the resentment toward Arion, the sinking feeling of abandonment.

The Nun and her only student left are eating in a diner somewhere in a quiet corner of the multiverse, eye to eye in a manner like some stars compressed into a very narrow space, white clouds dimming their spectroscopic minds. Or is it the soup that burns?

Xin-Angel has the makings of the antagonist. Looking over the burnt out shell of the rebel ship, she remembers the building of multiversal screens, she remembers the plagues that devastated the slave camp where she lived, she remember the narcissus flowers echoing over a dark pool, mirroring her life choices. She, too, has regrets of long lost love.

In the cosmic microwave background, the elecromagnetic radiation pervades the story, and spread-out characters are far flung onto stellar photospheres, gamma rays emitted in nuclear transitions touch the decaying souls of those non-existent people, and dark matter particles provide no well defined boundary to this story, to the fantasy, and the optical wavelength of its narrator.

now with his eyes closed the Taoist sees trimmed starry lamps, glowing in the dark. the inevitable doom that the rebels expected has fallen true.

the student in the philosopher’s garden ponders how one should know, how does one let the right one in. Doctor Firn calls him to dinner, and the large wings upon his shoulders are mine, and the dizzy sky is witness.

after the rebels’ defeat, the multiverse has grown smaller, the emperor expects that the unforeseen does not exist. this very evening, freedom in an unattainable prospect. and while Xin explores her identities in the forests of Solaris, an overnight truce has been called to cremate the dead.

The enemy must lie, it will betray you. It is in its nature. Fighting the just fight is a choice, but first drive your chariot in the middle of the field. From confusion, there is weakness of memory. Tell us, reader, where does your weakness in memory lie? What are the secrets you have buried deep down in the Solaris jungle? What have you restored to the jungle?