Lament of the Last Fleet

The Void's Last Note hung in the dark like a forgotten lantern, orbiting a neutron star whose faint pulses were the only heartbeat in this sector of nowhere. Inside, the air smelled of ozone, spilled nebula-brew, and the faint metallic tang of old regrets.

Verity Bleu stepped onto the levitating stage. The crowd—smugglers, crystalline miners, tentacled exiles, and things that defied easy description—barely glanced up at first. Karaoke here was usually loud, vulgar, and forgettable.

She selected no normal anthem, no trending galactic pulse-track. Instead she whispered the ancient title to the glitchy AI console: Lament of the Last Fleet. The machine stuttered, holographic glyphs flickering like dying fireflies as it tried to render lyrics no living translator could handle.

Then she sang.

Her voice wasn't merely sound—it was memory made audible. The Aetherian tongue curled through the bar like smoke from a world that no longer burned. It spoke of silver migration arks scattering across the void, of oceans that sang back to their moons, of a final sunrise swallowed by silence. Each syllable carried frequencies that tugged at something deeper than ears: grief encoded in bone, in crystal lattice, in forgotten DNA.

Here are glimpses of the moment when the song took hold:

The Elder Kravaxx's facets ignited in soft, pulsing blue, silicon tears tracing geometric paths down its surface. Lir'ath, the shadowed descendant, rose and answered in a fragile harmony—two voices braiding across ten thousand years. A young scavenger collapsed against a table, weeping for blue-green worlds they'd never seen. Even Quor'vex the bartender froze, one tentacle still tracing runes it hadn't drawn since childhood stories.

For three minutes and seventeen seconds, the bar wasn't a dive in the deep black. It was a temple again.

When the final note faded—soft as a dying star—the silence lasted longer than it should have.

Then came the questions. The awe. The hunger.

The Kravaxx approached first, voice like grinding geodes: "Child of dust… how do you carry the Makers' grief?"

Verity met its many-faceted gaze. "I don't know," she said honestly. "It just… lives in me and it didn't seem right that it should die."

Lir'ath slipped a data crystal into her palm before melting back into the crowd. Coordinates. A warning. An invitation. She didn't look at it yet.

Others pressed closer—scholars with hungry eyes, collectors with stasis cages already half-prepared, cultists whispering of prophecy. The air thickened with possibility and danger.

Verity understood then: she had sung a beacon. Anonymity was over. The galaxy had remembered something it was supposed to forget, and now it wanted the voice that remembered it.

She left before dawn-cycle, slipping out the service hatch while arguments about "preservation" and "reclamation" grew louder behind her.

Her small ship waited in the docking ring, patient and scarred. She climbed in, sealed the hatch, and let the autopilot take her away from the neutron star's dying light.

As the station shrank to a pinpoint, Verity sat in the cockpit's dim glow and finally examined the crystal Lir'ath had given her. Coordinates to a hidden archive. A single line of Aetherian script: Sing again when the stars are ready. We are not all gone.

She closed her eyes. The song still hummed under her ribs, warm and terrible.

She would not sing it again—not soon, maybe not ever. The price had become too high. She had given the remnants a moment of remembrance, and in return they had taken her solitude.

Verity pointed the ship toward Earth, where no one would know her name, and no one would ask her to sing of things older than grief.

Behind her, faint as a whisper, the neutron star pulsed one last time—like a heart remembering how to beat.