Beyond the front panel of your ship, across the black abyss on the other side of the screen, a carcass drifts at the final point of your journey, so large that you can barely comprehend its size. Its extent rivals that of a dwarf planet. It might have once floated through space of its own accord, diving into the endless darkness at the very edge of the universe, but now it rests in the nothingness, a lone body without a soul, forsaken by its pod.

A singular piece of dead debris.

You look at the crumpled piece of paper between your fingers, yellowed at the edges from all those years spent hidden in a locked box and nestled between countless unsent letters deep at the bottom of your damp drawer, and you compare the patterns on it with the ones on screen.

They match.

You have always dreamed of witnessing the flying whales in all their glory, and you have fantasized of seeing their bioluminescent skin flicker in the night, looking for them eagerly through a crack in the ceiling of your wretched house, so when you now notice the white shards of bone peeking through rotten flesh and its gaping mouth formed into a ceaseless, soundless cry, something inside you founders.

All creatures, no matter how godly or how frail, await death, but the testimony of its certainty still leaves you with such anguish that it makes you want to subject it upon yourself. You clench your teeth to stifle the insistent strain that plagues your insides. It is becoming difficult for you to ignore, but you must muster through, awarethat giving in to the pain will leave you susceptible to the sorrow that you are trying desperately to evade.

A neighboring star appears in the corner of your vision, and a thread of warmth trickles down your hands as you fly closer to the corpse. It is a sensation you have almost forgotten during your travels, engulfed in the dark and cold in the emptiness of the universe, so it fills you with welcoming resolve.

You steer into the giant maw, carefully entering between the bones of the jaw, and you descend toward the bottom of the mouth. The returning sensation of gravity is a strange one, especially in a body of such an unbalanced shape, so the ship wobbles as you drive it down into the throat of this lifeless world.

Light disappears as you enter the thorax, shrouded by the thin layer of remaining tissue that stretches from the distant spine above you. Thin rays filter through the cracks in decayed skin, but they are not enough to illuminate the edges of the leftover skeleton. When you almost collide with a pillar of bone after hours of flight, regardless of how hard you try to stay conscious of your surroundings and how carefully you have monitored your controls, you decide it is best to land and continue on foot. Your ship won’t do you any good if it is destroyed by carelessness.

Before you allow yourself to step outside, you decide to decipher your exact location, hoping you are close enough to the point you are searching for, but after a few repeated calculations of the ships coordinates, you are forced to accept that the osseous structure you have found yourself on is only the first rib.

This fact overwhelms you with anxiety. You have been travelling for so long and you are exhausted, still drained by the trauma you endured back in your colony. The wounds inside your body might have healed with the help of the recuperation apparatus on the ship, but the pain stubbornly lingers.

Unfortunately, there is little you can do except move forward, no matter how much it hurts to do so. Fatigue might have settled into your bones and become a permanent state of your being, but there is still a long way to go.

You will have to seek respite later. First you have to go a little further and venture through the cavern that once held the heart of this god.

You are not sure how to properly prepare for the rest of your expedition, away from the safety of your deck. Few have managed to venture this far beyond the colonies, and fewer have returned, so even if you were allowed the knowledge about the universe outside the limits of your residential sector, you wouldn’t be able to learn much. But your instincts are guiding you true, no matter how little you believe them and regardless of how unsettling this place might look to you. You opt for a few basic tools, a portable camp capsule, and some rations, all of which will provide you with what you need to reach the end of your journey.

The door opens and you descend outside. You have to crane your neck to take in your surroundings – the remains of strange vegetation that hangs from the roof far above, the abandoned nests and dens of unknown critters scattered around the surface, the fine layer of decayed material that harbors dried flora, and the bones of the spine as thick as surveillance towers that form a border across the sky and serves as a guide that points you down into the interior of the body.

Your exhaustion is palpable through your rugged breaths and heavy steps, but there is expectation coursing through your veins. Hope has carved its way into you, and it drives you forward. You grab some nano-rope with determination and secure it onto a mecha-pin which thrusts its legs deep into the floor. You fasten the other end around your waist, at the designated rings on your suit, and lower yourself into the shadows of the ribcage.

The absence of noise and chaos seems unnatural, like this place has been drained of everything that had tied it to the realm of the living. Even with the help from your visor, you cannot see much, but you know that there are no more creatures scuttling between the cracks, no beasts rustling in the dark, and no denizens strumming a quiet song to honor your company. Even ghosts have departed from the carcass; there was nothing keeping them here.

Yours is a solitary soul. It has entered a place which others have abandoned, and the thought of it fills you with unease.

Your descent lasts for hours. You drift in and out of sleep, unable to keep your eyes open. Each time you blink yourself awake, you are taken aback by the dark expanse around you. Its sheer magnitude seems limitless to you.

Never-ending.

Flying whales span out for thousands of kilometers; a length impossible for you to comprehend. You have been raised within thin walls of a miniscule structure, imprisoned between towering cascades of stacked confinements your people thought of as homes. It is no wonder this space fills you with fear rather than a sense of freedom.

Your eyes flutter open and you are greeted by a large white shape somewhere at the limits of your helmet’s visibility spectra. It stands out like a beacon in the night, and your heart skips a beat in response.

You keep steady, turn on the jets, quickly call down the nano-rope and the mecha-pin, and then propel yourself toward the structure. You approach the second rib, where you take a moment to pause and catch your breath. Your climbing equipment arrives quickly and settles back onto its designated storage space on your suit.

You check the status of the powercell, knowing that you have to be careful of its use. The jets use most of its energy, and you cannot restore it here without access to starlight, but you do not have to worry about using it for smaller distances – like the one you had just crossed. As long as you keep saving your fuel for the trip back, you will do fine.

The second rib looks as barren as the first one. A fine layer of dust and detritus covers the bone. You look up, to the looming sets of white pillars that make the spine, glancing at the universe beyond them and at the faint indications of shimmering stars that follow you with intent. The vertebras are so far away that they look like a distant chain propelled against the sky, broken up by patches of residual skin. Wads of rotten flesh still adhere to some areas, reminding you of stained cloth discarded on the floor.

At least there is no stench of alcohol or the metal tang of iron here. Your lungs take in the clean, filtered air from the thin atmosphere.

Perspiration appears on your brow and cools you with a welcomed chill. Your skin is strangely warm, not just from the stress you have put it under during your desertion, but from everything it went through before you escaped. You want to reach your destination as soon as you can, but the exertion you inflict upon yourself might prevent you from doing so if you keep up such a rigorous pace. The pressure your body has to endure is much too great for such a small being like yourself.

You have to rest. You are doing well, and you have made incredible progress. Others might have already given up, but you know you have to keep going. This deserted carcass hides what you are searching for. Its core will allow you the relief you yearn for.

Powerless against your own physical limits, you take out your camp capsule. It quickly assembles itself and attaches its hooks on nearby surfaces, so it is securely fastened in place. You pass through the sealed double doors, take off your suit, feed yourself some rations and down some painkillers, along with some emotion stabilizers. All these technological advancements had been overwhelming when you first learned of them – and even more staggering when you realized they had existed for decennia, but had been made unavailable to a person of your status – but now you are grateful for them. The influx of chemicals and nutrients numbs your senses, and you give yourself over to the sweet stupor they create.

But nothing is enough to ward away flashes of stark, grueling memories that hit when you finally decide to clean yourself.

Even with all the discoveries and progress mankind has achieved throughout its whole existence, it has still not been able to procure a more practical solution for collecting uterine blood, aside from the methods used for millennia.

At least, not for you. Effective advancements weren’t available to people that lived cramped up in their living pods. To people who couldn’t even afford a better solution. To people who didn’t even know there was an alternative.

People like you.

And not even to those who manage to acquire a ship with a medical facility. Such services were considered a useless waste of resources when the assigned crews didn’t have the necessary anatomy.

Which is why you are forced to take off your underwear and replace your rags. You might have lulled yourself into a deep languor, but you still cannot ignore the smell.

The color.

The sheer amount of it.

The feel against your fingers.

The reminder of your loss.

Tears stream down your face again, but your body doesn’t answer in violent sobs like it used to at the beginning of your journey. Instead, you weep quietly, acting out a routine you have memorized well in recent days.

Take off, scrub, clean, rinse. Scrub. Clean.

Witness the water becoming red.

Scrub.

Ignore the dried blood under your nails.

Clean.

Breathe in when memories try to seep in.

Rinse.

Ignore the lack of another heartbeat.

Scrub.

Clean.

Rinse.

Repeat.

The copious amount of drugs you are taking make the pain somewhat tolerable. The nausea is persistent, but at least you don’t vomit everything you eat anymore. The occasional cramping in your abdomen still makes you cower, albeit less than it used to. Only the gorge across your heart keeps crumbling into itself, growing wider with every breath. 

Oh, you poor, wounded thing.

How much agony you had to go through. How much more you’ll have to endure. But for now, there is nothing you can do, except rest.

You put away the wet cloth on the drying rack, wash any remaining blood and sweat off your skin, and then tuck yourself into bed, under a thin blanket. The stars flicker beyond the carcass, celebrating the warmth that has engulfed you into a silken slumber. You are safe here, in the embrace of the universe.

Know that it loves you more than anyone ever could.

***

There is no light to greet you after your slumber, but you are used to waking up in the dark. Thick smog had always covered your housing, so there wasn’t much to differentiate between day and night. It was all the same to you, much like it is now in the eternal abyss. Get up, clean up, dress, move, work.

The only difference is that you do not need to satisfy your husband anymore. There is no lust to satiate nor wants to appease. No traditions and beliefs to attend to or gratify.

At the start of your travels, back when you had just taken the spacecraft and decided to follow the coordinates left by your sister, it had been hard to mitigate the sudden uselessness of your position. There was nothing for you to do; nobody to please. But it is easier now. You have quickly embraced the privilege of administering extra care to yourself without the constant babble from the man in your house. You have become grateful for the silence on the ship you could fill with your cries and the hum of the engine that brought you sleep when your mind could not.

As much as you loathe this newfound solitude, you are aware that it has kept you alive. You wouldn’t have been able to receive proper medical attention at the colony, even if nobody found out about your violation. They do not teach how to treat such ailments. They leave the afflicted to succumb to their wounds, allowing their bodies to administer the justice they deem appropriate for a biological error they consider a crime.

You should pay no mind to what could have been. You have not left anything important behind. There was nobody in the colony that could have given you what you truly needed, let alone the person that tied itself to you.

When you make the camp capsule retract again, there is a loud crack in the distance. On the other side of the gorge you have flown from, on the rib that corresponds to the one you stand on, a large black line spreads across the bone and splits it in two. The separated piece continues to crumble, and disappears into the darkness below. You wait, your heart beating frantically as you’re looking at the plummeting shards vanishing from your sight. There is a long moment of silence, filled with expectation.

And then a thunderous, roaring fracturing that echoes through the cavern.

It resonates through the bone you’re standing on, and the tremors almost knock you off your feet. As the fragments keep falling, they are followed by other explosions, colliding with the remaining ribs, and tears stream down your face with the thought of the vibrations destroying the solidity of the structure you’re standing on. It would be a tragic end – to come so far, and yet fail so close to your destination.

It is right of you to worry. This world is at its end. It is dangerous and unstable, but you shouldn’t let that stop you. You have survived crueler fates.

You consider your ship on the rib above. Maybe you should have left it at the mouth where the bone is denser and thicker, but you would only be wasting time. Even though you have been granted a safe departure, your movements kept covert by the rebels indebted to your sister, the law enforcement would still have gone after you. They would have noticed a vessel was missing and their radars would pick up on an unauthorized departure from the colony. And they wouldn’t have risked someone like you slipping through their fingers, not when their workforce is dwindling.

A womb is too precious to lose if it is needed to birth more slaves.

You have to keep moving.

You pick up the last of your equipment, watch the mecha-pin drive its legs into the bone underneath you, and then you abseil down again, listening to the echo of dislodged debris still falling down the ribcage.

You reach the third rib, then the fourth, and then you rest again. Hours turn into days, but time doesn’t seem palpable. Nothing much changes, except for the gravitational pull that becomes lighter and you also feel your descent slowing down. Bones flash past you as you advance. You have lost count of them.

The only thing you make sure to follow is how long it has been since you’ve taken your medicine, so you can swallow some more. The time frame between them is growing smaller, but you don’t care about the consequences, you only care about the sweet release from the everlasting ache.

Your limbs grow tired. Weak.

Your mind grows quiet, but your thoughts are deafening. Insufferable silence and the lack of feeling. Recollections of that which you want to forget.

Cramps coming in waves, pulling you under the surface.

Drowning in the memories.

Sharp pain and screaming. The hands inside you. Retrieval of the one who made your womb into a grave. Theft. The dearth of light in the makeshift mausoleum. Blood. Seeping down your legs and onto the ground. Intrusion. Fingers scraping at the remains of your organic cradle.

Stale air and noise from the outside. People yelling. Shouting. Thumping noises above you. Your mouth covered in self-inflicted bite marks. The want to scream, to join the cacophony. The want to be louder.

The need to be heard.

Pills and sleep and pain and exhaustion and the endless rope in the suffocating darkness.

Silence. The absence of sound. Tight lips that are afraid to let the wails out once again.

It would be hard for anyone to bear, let alone you, with such a fragile heart that is able to love anyone and everyone. You have loved your parents, even though they sold you for your parts. You have loved your partner, even though he’d always hold you down. You have loved your neighbors, even though they considered you worthless. You have loved your colony, even though it vilified loss such as yours. Even when it wasn’t sought. Even when it wasn’t expected.

Even when it was accidental.

When you reach the tenth rib, you are struggling to breathe, even though your suit is seamlessly filtering enough air to offer you clean oxygen. Your throat hurts from all the tears you have shed and those you still try to suppress.

The visor casts light upon your surroundings, but it is useless against the thickness of the everlasting shadows, so you don’t notice a protruding rock under your feet and stumble over it. The suit cannot protect you from direct impact, so it hurts when you fall heavily on your knees. For a second you are on the verge of a breakdown and frustration seeps through your pores. You get up and lift your boot to kick at the thing that assaulted you, but you stop when you realize it is not a singular piece, but part of a structure.

It is a straight line made from what seems like chiseled, carefully shaped bone. It is no larger than a dozen centimeters in height and width, but it stretches away from you where it meets another at a right angle.

You navigate down the bone, suddenly noticing organic remains scattered around the area, as well as other strange remains that might have been used as building foundations once. When you approach, you are baffled by the robust constructs on the floor made out of mixed materials you cannot recognize. Broken shards are scattered among the dust and memories. If people lived here, it had been long ago, and when you look around, you only see more evidence that nobody has been here in ages.

It is a frightful thought – to consider that you have come too late. That you have forfeited your chance at taking refuge among people who had aspired to live freely, with acceptance, mutual understanding, and peace. When your sister gathered up all the souls ready to depart with the secret rebellion she had become a part of, you refused to join her, unable to abandon the man you were to wed and the life you were to make. She left without you, knowing she couldn’t wait for you in the colony.

Still, hope had made her hide a parchment with the coordinates of their future sanctuary between old family pictures in your drawer. Where she knew you’d find them. And keep them.

The ruins fill you with an unbearable melancholy. Loneliness has become such an impossible burden and you aren’t sure how much longer you will be able to withstand it. You cling to the thought of finding all the refugees huddled deeper in the carcass, but doubt is starting to cloud your mind.

Unfortunately for your poor, wounded heart, you will have to keep confronting it.

***

Venturing further has become exceptionally hard, especially through the last few ribs, littered with other settlements.

There has been so much evidence of a thriving community, but none of where it had disappeared to. You have to put faith in the possibility of discovering it. Maybe they managed to maintain their sanctuary in the belly of the beast, against all the evidence that points away from such a conclusion.

You have no other choice but to hold onto that belief. It would be unwise to accept the alternative. It would crush you completely.

Instead, you focus on the pull towards the core of the whale, away from all the other remains. Something is at the center of this world, promised by the patterns on the paper you keep safely tucked in the inside pocket of your suit – right above your heart.

You spend your last sleeping cycle on the final rib. When you looked down into the unknown before retiring to your quarters, it had fueled your fear and drove dismay into your limbs. Your rest is overcome with dread, devoid of dreams and filled with sorrow.

You are plagued by the past tenderness of your voice and of words admitting grief. By images of rejection, fear, and betrayal. By the leaking roof of the home that is no more. By hands refusing to touch and by those ready to hurt. By the burning in your lungs and the strain in your legs. By the flashes of narrow streets as you run.

And by the crumpled parchment between your clenched fingers, by the people whose eyes shone with recognition when you unraveled it before them.

By the access key shining between your fingers.

Then visions of rage and incoming violence. Of the monsters hidden behind the smoke of the roaring engine. Of the never-ending blood, and cries, and wails, and shrills, and tiny fingers that break apart on your palm.

Nightmares that turn into reality and reality that turns into nightmares.

Wake!

Your eyes open with alarm. Your hair sticks to your temples in frail, long locks. Your mind has exasperated your body. You are haunted by your own memories.

Hunted.

The fluorescent light in the corner flickers. The power inside the camp capsule is diminishing. The heating has been automatically reduced during your sleep to preserve energy, so it has become immensely cold inside your makeshift residence. You are freezing from the touch of chill on your moist skin. Pressure builds inside your stomach again. You pull your knees up to your chest. Your arms embrace them.

The absence of another heartbeat is killing you, and your own is not enough to console you.

You are weak. Your rations aren’t enough to sate your hunger, but you also have no appetite. Your mouth is dry and parched, yet you are not thirsty. No matter how much you sleep, you cannot rest. There is nothing that can stall the withering of your soul.

The light goes off. The walls are swallowed by the darkness. You could stay here and give yourself over to death. You could be transformed into stardust, much like the soul of this world has been, like all other life that had been lost within it. There would be no more suffering. No more tears.

But that is not your fate. You cannot allow it to be. It is just the past, sweetness. It is pain stored in the cells of your body, but it will not harm you unless you let it.

A deep rumble echoes outside. A low, deafening screech following a crack. Something is falling apart again. Somewhere above, this time.

It is moving towards you.

You are compelled by a sense of urgency. Clothes, suit, equipment. Running, stumbling. Leaving the unnecessary behind. Taking only what you need – yourself.

Ignition. Jump. The hissing of engines. The roar of incoming debris.

You turn in horror, witnessing a giant, endless string of loose bone that crushes the camp capsule. It is merciless. Harrowing. And there is so much of it. Mountains of material descend before you, and you glide further away, avoiding anything out to trample you. It is an avalanche of osseous matter intertwined with ruins of settlements and handmade belongings.

You hover, watching the residue plummet in a slow dive towards the abdomen below. It falls like pieces of shredded paper, twirling in the air in complicated patterns. A profound, incomprehensible destruction, a sublime display of chaos. Pieces of history, fragments of the past, remains of something that doesn’t exist anymore. All disappearing into the black cavity underneath.

The powercell of your suit will deplete sooner than you would like, and you will need it to get back to your ship. You must move. You are close, closer than you think.

You must follow the rubble.

You inhale. Enough time has already been wasted. You look up, towards the rest of the universe, into the hole left by the collapsed ribs. Stars sparkle against the abyss, like they always have, like they always will, until they implode in on themselves, leaving behind nothing but an empty space. Between them lies a speck of glistening dust, not unlike the reflection light against your spaceship when you first came here. You might not recognize it for what it is yet, but you will soon enough. Which is why you have to dive.

Now.

More rubble misses you by a hair’s breadth and you push yourself away frantically.

You move.

Floating through the decayed stomach is strange. There is not much to focus your eyes on, no large structure that you should expect, no entity you could comprehend. The soft tissue has probably all but disappeared, depleted by the former residents or simply disintegrated by time. Only the vertebra pass by far above – fragment by fragment – so you are certain you are making progress and not just drifting aimlessly in space.

The gravity soon becomes practically non-existent. You still feel some slight pull towards the center, and the engines are only needed to steer you in the right direction and help you avoid the floating rubble. There’s a lot of it now, and it almost fills the entire expanse, like an asteroid belt around a planet – lost pieces of the past floating around a heavenly body.

In the middle – a form with rows of white lines. A long one at the top, connecting them, much like the spine that separates the heavens above.

A disfigured entity.

Something is amiss. Something is telling you that this… This… is wrong.

You feel it clearly now, better than before. There are no more distractions.

Your breath becomes shallow. You had hoped the feeling would go away, that it was just some part of the grief that had burrowed itself in your hippocampus and latched onto the painful memories of your loss. It had been small at first. Inconvenient, but negligible. But it became heavier, dragging you towards the inevitable tragedy.

There are inconsistencies regarding this carcass.

You figured it is smaller than what you imagined because bedtime stories often exaggerate the experiences of finite creatures such as people. You had thought of it as a simple result of that universal constant, human error.

But there are no indentations in the bones. No growths over healed cracks.

A gigantic piece of rib floats before you. Everything is smooth. Unscathed. As if this being had not known the passage of time before the decay had taken over. As if it had died…

Young.

The debris moves, revealing the crumbling kernel that pulls in the pieces that make this place. The epicenter of the gravitational force. The pith of this oblivion.

The heart that had caused death.

Another corpse. 

Smaller. Underdeveloped. Feeble and contorted.

With limbs still attached to its carcass, pressed against its torso. It’s almost as rotten as the whale, but the interior of the abdomen must have allowed it to stay preserved longer, protected from the outer environment – from the wandering asteroids and surges of energy. A thin veil of tissue still clings to its body.

You keep your distance from it, unable to process ist meaning, to understand the implication of the answer to this mystery.

You don’t want to know it. You don’t want to accept it. It must be a coincidence that this body is trapped within another. There must be no correlation between the premature death of the mother and the existence of its unborn progeny inside it.

It floats, rotating around its axis. You notice the malformations, the wrongness of its curves and edges, the indentations in its remaining flesh, and growths where there should be smoothness.

Numbness overtakes the tips of your fingers. Your eyes sting from the dry, filtered air of this abysmal pit of the universe you have been forced to experience.

As the fetus turns, it reveals the place of its still heart. Laid against its chest, partially obstructed by the remains of its fin, is yet another decomposed figure. It is tiny, barely visible against the bulk of the unborn. The rope around it keeps it secure, mooring it above where the fetus’s heart would have been.

Between its crossed arms – a flimsy white rectangle, clutched in bony hands.

A black ring sits at the base of the left middle finger.

The ring that would always cause you a gentle chill when your palm was pressed against the one of its owner. The one that had smudged the writing on the carefully guarded coordinates for the legendary sanctuary, so that you might find your way to it whenever you are ready. The one that had shined like a star, reflected against the murky light of the makeshift spaceport, before disappearing forever inside the vessel with countless other bodies.

The ring your sister never took off, so that you could find her even beyond death.

A painful cry escapes your lips.

At first, it is a quiet yelp that echoes through the vast, lifeless space around you. A single note of soul that bounces off of myriads of fragmented bone, amplified by the faraway wails of other deserted worlds. It is sorrow transformed into a painful symphony of guilt, heartbreak and loneliness.

Then it turns into an ear-splitting agony.

You have arrived too late.

The refugees have moved on long ago. They couldn’t have stayed. There was nothing left to sustain them here. The carcass had no more life to offer. You had seen it all and still hoped there was something other than death awaiting you at the end. You have pressed on into the black hole of its womb to find her because she promised she would wait for you, no matter what happened.

Your throat burns with your screams. Fingers claw at her skeleton, trying to free her from the embrace of the rope. Eyes sting from the tears.

Your pain spreads across the universe in waves. Countless stars tremble as you try to open her fingers. Galaxies slow down while you rake at the letter. Black holes drink in your voice as you remove the ring.

You open the folded paper, your visor fogged from the moisture and heat of your skin. Another string of coordinates. Patterns across a simple piece of paper that guide you further. To a new settlement. To safety. One more journey. Just one more until you can stop and finally rest.

There’s an urge to pull out your hair. You want to bite through your nails and tear out your own heart. You cannot endure this any longer. The pain. The endless, suffocating, unbearable pain. It reaps you from the inside out. And there is nothing you can do.

It hurts and it will never stop hurting. Cry out all the tears and scream out all the misery. You have been cursed to endure an unthinkable agony, even though you had done everything right. You had been good and listened to your parents. You had prepared to build a family, and were ready to love it. You had been obedient and quiet. You had decided to stay in the colony, unlike your sister, and you had bravely taken on the role it had forced upon you.

A daughter. A woman. A wife.

A mother.

Oh, dearest, if she had known what you would need to go through before you sought her out, she would have never chained herself to the reminder of everything you had lost. She had known this place would survive the longest, and she only wanted to give you as much time as she could.

Oh, sweetness, the tears that burn your cheeks riddle the universe with such anguish. It feels for you. Starlight extends towards you. It embraces you. But nothing is enough. Nothing will ever be enough to fill the space of everything you have been robbed of.

Oh, beloved, you cannot blame yourself. There is nothing that you could have done for the seed that wilted inside you. It was a malfunction in the code of its DNA. It had become disfigured, with parts that could have never sustained themselves, even with the nurture of your body. Your love had kept its heart beating for longer than it should have. 

What is gone, cannot be replaced, my love, and nobody can cheat the finality of life, not even creatures you deem gods. It had taken the fruit of my womb growing inside me, much like it did yours, but it had also taken me.

Yet, my death has ensured the survival of many others. They have taken my flesh and eaten of it. They have taken my bones and built from them. They have taken my skin and clothed themselves in it. My body had been given another purpose, one I had not expected, but one I am grateful for.

The universe offers a lot more than you think. It might have taken away from your womb, but you are still alive. You have fought to come here! You have fled from the wickedness of humanity and sought out your sister, and while she might not be a part of your realm anymore, she has given you the opportunity to continue further. She had stayed here to greet you, and to direct you towards the refugees you wouldn’t be able to find on your own. She wanted you to continue your journey and to find a place where they won’t see your grief as crime, but a virtue of your strength.

There is much ahead of you. The cavern of your heart may never be filled, but love will form a bridge across it, and you will find purpose on the other side.

You have been so brave, sweetness. You have come this far, and you can go much farther. You have done so well, beloved. The universe will take you in its arms and hold you throughout the rest of your journey, and your sister’s stardust will protect you, embalmed between the atoms that make up her ring.

Now you have to catch your breath and calm your heart. Look up, where the spine crosses the horizon and where gaps in the tough skin show the space beyond. Notice the lights becoming brighter.

Bigger.

They have found you and they are fast approaching.

The uncertainty of your future clouds your judgment. You shouldn’t wonder whether your husband is amongst them. You shouldn’t wonder whether he wants to take you back or whether he is willing to forgive you and absolve you of your crime. You shouldn’t consider the chances of becoming accepted into society again.

No! Look at your sister!

Look at what she sacrificed! For you!

Your sister paved a way toward your salvation. Her death will be in vain if you do not follow it. Remember the vile words from your husband when you came to him in need of help. Remember the woman who had risked everything to take out your little creation, and the people who helped you escape unnoticed. Remember everyone who had fled all those years ago and who managed to create a functional settlement beyond the reach of tyrants.

You are worthy of more. You know the colony would never welcome you back. Not when they only see you as a faulty vessel that hasn’t served them properly.

Breathe, dearest.

Breathe and go!

Your grind your teeth in resolve. You push your engines to their limit. It’ll take you a while to get back, but you have just enough energy to reach your ship and escape before your pursuers reach the carcass. The crumpled letter in your hands fills you with courage. The ring around your finger resonates with anticipation. Your visor clears and you can see again. The bright spine will guide you back to where you came from.

Your sister’s corpse will stay behind, tied to the fragile skeleton I had never come to know. Don’t worry, she will be safe here. My body will be her tombstone, and our stardust has already merged with that of extinguished stars, scattered across the vastness that surrounds you.

We will look over you, until death brings us together once again. For eternity.

The only thing left for you to do is fly.

---

Whale Fall © 2025. Lea Katarina Gobec

[EN] Lea Katarina Gobec has too many hobbies, one of which is obviously writing. She has multiple stories published, and one of her recent works can be found in „Posljednja kuća u Šenoinoj ulici“ – a short horror story anthology about haunted houses. She was awarded the „Chrysalis“ award by the ESFS in 2023, and got an honorable mention for the 2024 „Stjepko Težak“ award. She is also an assistant editor at Morina Kutija.

The short story Whale Fall was originally published in the Morina kutija, no. 8 (veljača, 2025). You can download it for free from our site or Smashwords.

[HR] Lea Katarina Gobec ima previše hobija, uključujući i pisanje. Objavila je nekoliko priča od kojih se recentna može naći u zbirci kratkih horor priča o ukletim kućama, Posljednja kuća u Šenoinoj ulici. Dobila je ESFS nagragu Chrysalis 2023. i posebno priznanje “Stjepko Težak” natječaja za kratku priču. Pomoćna je urednica u Morinoj kutiji.

Priča Whale Fall objavljena je u online časopisu Morina kutija, br. 8 (veljača, 2025.). Časopis možete skinuti ovdje ili s platforme Smashwords.

---

Urednički komentar: Ovaj lijepo pisani, emocionalno devastirajući primjer “grief horrora” – jer i u svemiru osjećamo dubinu tuge – donosi nam izrazito impresivne vizuale i premisu inspiriranu stvarnom pojavom u prirodi.