"You opened the bubbles without me?!" Helena shrieks upon returning to the living room.

Behind her, two staff members carry platters of elaborate tapas.

"That was supposed to be a surprise, Jasper! I can’t believe this!" She huffs.

"My apologies, my love—" Jasper gets up from the couch.

"It was the perfect pairing for this calamari that I had prepared!"

"Well, you never told me that you had planned such a surprise!"

Berkeley quietly excuses himself from the room as the spat escalates behind him. He makes his way outside, returning to the dry garden. He taps away at his phone with an ecstatic impatience.

The Dead Tyrants…

What does that mean?

The immediate search results confirm that it is indeed a name. The most informative source is a public bounty posted on the Lunar Federation adventuring guild site. They’re a crew of fugitives. Former colonists turned criminal.

Pirates.

Berkeley can’t find any information about the individuals who make up the crew, though he’s able to find a decent amount of information on their ship. A warship known widely as Tyrannis. He finds a few blurry photos of a bipedal aircraft flying in the distance.

However, the most circulated image of the ship isn’t of a ship at all. Instead, it’s a simple drawing of a terrifying beast surrounded by a violent cyclone.

There is a link to a very recent article amongst the search results. Berkeley taps on it to take a look:

The article covers some basic information about the crowdfunding campaign and the bits of drama it garnered as it barely surpassed its funding goal. It then shows an image of a timeline posted by the documentary’s production team. They’re set to begin shooting at the end of the month. One week from now.

Berkeley stares out at the starry afternoon sky.

A faint purple aurora emanates around the distant Earth.

The shimmer.

It slowly grows brighter and brighter.

Soon, the purple Shimmer fills the entirety of the sky, waving peacefully above like waves atop the ocean’s surface.

He stares up at this exaggerated image that envelops him, on the brink of understanding it to be an internal manifestation of something else.

The guilt tangled within him continues to constrict.

He should have reached out more.

Maybe he could have stopped Sebastian from moving away.

His eyes wander down to the garden.

The chrome sphere continues to roll back and forth, leaving a pleasing pattern in its tracks.

Curved ridges laid out asymmetrically.

It should feel unbalanced.

Yet, the distorted nature of the pattern is somehow satisfying.

Closer and closer, the ridges become mountainous.

Towering dunes of glass sand.

Radiating chromatically under the sunlight.

An endless iridescence.