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If you’ve learned anything from this ordeal, it’s that there is always time to roast a marshmallow at the end of the universe.
When you started this loop you had a destination and a goal, but by the time you arrived the sun was beginning to swell and you knew you wouldn’t make it. You considered closing your eyes and meditating the rest of your time away, but then you happened upon a clearing with enough trees to comfortably take off your helmet, and it’s been so long since you have taken a moment to simply… breathe easy. Look around you: you have a fire and a place to sit, and the ruby-tinged stars twinkle so beautifully overhead. You don’t have long, but you have long enough. This isn’t home, but it is homely enough. And you know just what to do to make it even more so.
You pull out a marshmallow—a fluffy, white pellet of sugar and air, a little misshapen from the ever-changing pressures of space travel—and slide it carefully onto the end of a stick you found. It’s a good stick, too, just the right length with a humble crook in the middle. Carefully, you hold it over the flames, which flicker from a youthful yellow-blue at their core to a tired old red as they reach skyward. Most would find their glow comforting, but now you find them sad too. They remind you of the stars.
You pull your mind back to the marshmallow, holding it steadily just close enough to the flames to expose it to the heat but avoid igniting it, just as you learned as a hatchling back on Timber Hearth. It’s a familiar ritual, and you reminisce about the countless nights around the campfire back home. Learning to roast the perfect, golden brown marshmallow is something of a rite of passage in your little village, and you’ve put in your hours of practice in front of a fire, listening to the wild tales about Feldspar, Slate, and the rest, and dreaming of being out there among the stars… You remember feeling impossibly young, agonizing that the day of your first launch would never come. You remember your elders telling you to be patient, that the stars would live forever and you’d have all the time you need to explore them. Only one of those things turned out to be true.
The marshmallow! You nearly forgot about it again, and have to jerk back the stick as the tip of it catches flame. Quickly, you puff it out and inspect the damage—nothing too bad, just a bit of soot around the edges. Chiding yourself, you extend the morsel back over the fire, taking care to rotate it slowly to keep the heat even on all sides. That’s the key to the perfect marshmallow: patience and care….
…you’ve become so careless with your own life. You remember the early days of your expedition, how timidly you would navigate the changing gravities and treacherous terrain of each new planet. Waterspouts on Giant’s Deep? Give those a wide berth. Inexplicably glowing Nomai artifacts? Poke it with a stick from as far away as possible. Cacti? Terrifying, avoid at all costs. It was slow, but you knew how dangerous outer space was, and you treated it accordingly. Even after you discovered the time loop, even after you became convinced that your miraculous reawakenings were not just happenstance but actually inescapable, you still maintained your caution.
But over time, the repetition wore you down. The more times you watch the sun explode when you’re just meters from some new discovery, the more you let your frustration overrule your common sense. There’s just never enough time , and if you’re running short on one loop… well, there’s always the next. Now you can’t even count the number of times you’ve thrown yourself unsuited out the airlock, or jumped from an impossible height, or jetted head-first into the mouth of a ravenous anglerfish, impatient to just get on with it already, get back to where you failed and try again. These days you rarely use such violent methods to end a loop and reset the ticking timer on the universe, not since Gabbro taught you how to meditate through even the most violent disturbances. (It takes a special kind of zen to stay calm when you’re on an island that could get tossed up into space by inclement weather at any moment.) The meditation is useful, and far less painful than your old methods—physical pain never fades no matter how many loops you die in.
Still, you can’t help but worry that it removes you one more step from your fellow Hearthians. There was one time when you started meditating right in the middle of your home village, and it wasn’t until you woke in the next loop that you realized how strange it must have looked to friends and family: the rookie, on the day of their very first launch, standing listless and unresponsive in the middle of a random path… and continuing to stand there as the sun explodes and swallows everything they’ve ever known. They must have been so worried about you, and so scared. How could you have been so carelessly cruel? Of course, they won’t remember it when the next loop starts, but it was still real to them in that loop, and that has to count for something. Every loop has to be real. It’s the only way for any of them to mean anything at all.
A deep sigh. It’s not just carelessness, you’ve become calloused too. It's just so much easier, whenever you become stranded away from your ship, or trapped in the slowly-filling chambers of the Sunless City, or misjudge a flight vector around Brittle Hollow’s black hole core and end up warped impossibly far from your destination. It’s easier to rush into the beginning of the next loop, when your world will be young again and full of possibility, than to sit and wait with your own thoughts for all the stars in the universe to die together.
You glance upwards again at the now-scarlet sky, trying to judge how long you have left from the size of the swelling sun. It looks like there won’t be time for your perfect marshmallow tonight. There never seems to be, these days. It’s funny how for someone with so much time—nothing but time, really—so much of your life is still spent rushing against the clock. Twenty-two minutes goes by so quickly—lives weren’t meant to be this short. But then it repeats again and again, and again, and again… people weren’t meant to live this long either.
You push your stick closer to the embers until your marshmallow catches fire. It’s okay, you like them crispy too. You let it burn for a moment, watching its ephemeral blue-white envelope of flame stretch away into a tail of smoke. It reminds you of the Interloper and the doom it brought to the Nomai. You wonder if you’ll have time to find everything you seek, to discover answers to all of your questions. For all the wondrous technology they had, the Nomai never managed it.
But then… do you truly want to find all the answers? As far as you know, you could be trapped in this loop forever. It hasn’t worried you much so far—there’s just so much to do . There have certainly been times when you’ve been frustrated, tired, lost, or lonely, but you’ve never been bored. You’ve always been a curious sort, and there are so many mysteries, so many nooks and crannies to explore, so many planetary vistas to marvel at and old Nomai relics to divine the function of. Your purpose has been clear from the start, to explore the solar system and understand the history of the Nomai, and that has been enough to keep you going so far. But forever is a long time… what happens when you run out of mysteries to chase? Your time may be infinite, but your world is not. There is only so far you can travel in twenty two minutes—not far enough to leave your solar system, that is for certain. What happens when you’ve seen all there is to see, done all there is to do?
No , you chide yourself. This loop is artificial—the Nomai created it, and therefore the secret to ending it must also lie somewhere in their ruins. It’s just another mystery to chase.
You hope, at least.
Anyway.
Your marshmallow is thoroughly blackened, and the sun has reached its fullest expanse and is about to explode. You know this song and dance so well by now, you could conduct it like a symphony—the moment of quiet suspense when the swollen giant hangs quivering on the edge of collapse, then the rumbling katabasis as it crumples inward on itself, and the final burst back out in a spectacular nova. Your motions are swift and practiced—in the opening moment of silence, you extinguish your burning stick with a soft puff of breath and pluck the marshmallow from its tip in a single fluid motion. There isn’t even time for it to burn your fingers, as you toss it in your mouth and bite into the charred exterior with a decisive crunch at the same time as the star’s collapsing layers impact with its dense core.
Gooey sweetness and smokey tang explode in your mouth and you close your eyes against the blinding whiteness spreading across the sky. In a few moments, a star’s worth of super-heated plasma will extinguish everything you have ever loved or feared, every mystery you’ve solved or which tantalizes you still. In a few more moments, you will open your eyes and the struggle will begin again, the same day, the same mysteries, the same endless chase against the clock. But not just yet.
There will be time enough later to deal with eternity. For now, you are here, in this moment, with a gooey, charred, delicious mess that you made with your own two hands.
After all, there is always time to roast a marshmallow at the end of the universe.