amanda cecelia lang

by Amanda Cecelia Lang

Word travels fast throughout the galaxy, prayers and echoes, radio signals and vast-blinking hyper waves. The news proves grim.

After untold eons of golden radiance, Sol is dying.

Those with an expert finger on her strobing stellar pulse warn it could happen before the close of the cosmic year. Cause of death will be as expected. The symptoms of the matriarch’s majestic decline have shone apparent for ages. A long crimson bloat then a white withering, a gradual all-seeing forgetfulness, a vital loss of core. Even so, the news hits hard, a barrage of comet-strikes to the collective galactic heart. How surreal, how deeply humbling to watch a stalwart force of generosity and enlightenment fade and fade. Yet endings strike inevitable for every creature, small and vast.

Illustrious Sol with her myriad life-giving miracles will be no exception.

#

Kepler-42 and Proxima Centauri, and other sister stars touched by Sol’s singular magic, send Godspeed sentiments of admiration and love. Flickering with their own symptoms of mortality, they lament the impossible distances. Vast cosmic beings wishing to embrace her even as they nurse entropic old bones and witness from afar.

Other messages carry across the lightyears. Far-drifting star systems and planets gather their voices and sing out for Sol, bell-tone vibrations and seismic waves, a gentle celestial hymn-song rippling outward. Sol shone unique. Sol created rare and precious life. Sol dispelled the darkness for trillions upon trillions. Her voyage across this cosmic ocean remains unparalleled. The matriarch deserves to hear how her wise and life-blooming fire impacted the universe.

Yet, in Sol’s current fugue of fizzle and confusion, it becomes unclear if these heart-sung messages are received, radio signals burning up in storms of nuclear dementia. Is it possible that a deity who oversaw vast evolutions is no longer aware of the universe she helped shape?

Regardless, the messages arrive. Light and prayer and harmonics blossom faithfully around her like ancient spring flowers.

#

And now the starships.

They arrive zipping and blooming, lightspeed fleets of Sol’s wayward children.

Billions upon billions, the branching family-tree successors to countless generations of sophisticated minds and bodies and machines. A solemn parade of hospice visitors. They gather meekly around the habitable boundaries of the solar system, temporarily repopulating ghost-moons where the icy bones of antique colonies still stand, wheezing but functional.

An unseen gravity presses heavily upon each visitor, dense alien emotions, a haunting new dark matter adding weight to old routines. Where have the eons gone?

As is natural but tragic, Sol’s children long ago abandoned the quaint nest of their home system. They found themselves consumed by the blackhole magnetism of their own enormous-small lives. Their desire to explore the universe proved endless—as did the false certainty that the center of creation existed always within them. Home took on nebulous new meanings. How easily they forgot Sol and her selfless gifts. How easily they took for granted that she would always shine—not just another fading star upon the deep.

Not their far faraway Sol.

Denial could be a force unto itself. Perhaps some even feared the matriarch when she flared and swelled red and immolated their planet of genesis. Perhaps some blamed her for the scorched monuments and boiled oceans. This wasn’t supposed to happen, not to their world. Secret histories and long-etched mythologies forever erased, attic species and technological relics reduced to molten rock. The most brutal symptom of Sol’s aging will always be those first fiery death throes, destructive forces beyond her almighty control.  

And how easy a tradition it became for far-flung generations to retreat behind abstract unease, behind excuses of busywork and vital personal obligations. They distanced themselves from the ache of crumbling foundations and an increasingly imperfect legacy. Naturally, after Sol’s thrashing fires came slow ice and vulnerability and inward withdrawal. A home system stripped of warmth and vital resources, littered with mementos of everyone’s impending mortality. Too many stayed away for far too long. Too many little prayers left unsaid, too many little kindnesses left undone, too many uncomfortable schisms splitting the ancient family tree. And now, upon arriving like tourists at Sol’s celestial bedside, the last of her children find themselves unable to breathe.

Sol no longer looks like the righteous golden matriarch of legend.

#

They gather as close as the red alerts on their starships will allow.

Staring directly into Sol’s fiery omnipotence was once dangerous and complicated. Now gazing upon her proves difficult for other reasons. While Sol’s pulsar heartbeat gasps fleeting light across their countless control decks and interfaces, her children link minds and hearts and add their voices to the celestial chorus.

Oh, devoted Sol!

She is the gravity who, from dust, created their world, and she is the magnitude who held it all together. She is the warmth of every cradle. She is the nurturing glow who pierced the fertile depths of indigo seas. She is the shimmery light who encouraged her newborn children to rise to the surface and gaze heavenward with curiosity and awe.

She baked their first wanderlust footsteps into keepsake fossils and later inspired the timeless hymn-legends of mighty goddesses. She encouraged horizon-slung dreams and sat central on the throne of traditions unbound. She became the most faithful deity of an uncertain infancy—always setting, always rising, always present to wake the flora and guide the fauna, to nourish their ever-evolving existence. And oh, how they feasted upon her gifts, feasted and feasted until some felt divine themselves. Until some rose skyward in the first haphazard vessels to skim the cosmic waters, farther and farther still. Yet even as they achieved epic new depths, Sol’s pinpoint fire pierced the indigo murk, igniting a path home. And when they journeyed too far out, when her shrinking light vanished inside a prismatic galactic blur, Sol’s unseen influence shimmered as a ghost within each child, infusing them with golden purpose. Curiosity and awe… ever a vital seed of who they are and who they will continue to become.

Such was the unique shine of their matriarch.    

#

Toward the end, the sound of music turns to stoic silence as mortal veins of disbelief run cold with acceptance. Perhaps some had quietly hoped for a final miracle in this universe where entropy reigns supreme. Such hope, too, has burned itself cold. For all their explorations, no one knows what marvels, if any, wait beyond the dimming waters of this existence.

The scion children of Sol’s grand epoch bow their heads for the final hymn. One last Godspeed blessing in the wake of unfathomable darkness.

And here, now, in the undertow of this long-dreaded farewell, Sol, at last, receives their song. Something stirs within the matriarch. A lucidity of a different shine. Here she rests, this deity of impending ashes, fated to become a coal-dark husk drifting in the void. Omnipotence fading, warmth fading.

Yet Sol sings back.

Voice a gasp of quietude, though her spirit exudes a doting murmur, a long parting exhale. Comforted and omnipresent, she gazes upon her children this final time, awash in a lullaby of vast-reaching togetherness. Those in nearby starships, those out amid the stars. In all their memories, in all their voices, in all their forms, they sing a vital part of her.

They carry her forward.

As she dies, Sol basks in the prismatic glow of their love. Fading, going to vapors, going dark…

“I think we lost her,” someone somewhere whispers inside the murky indigo deep.

Silence, stillness, sorrow. Reality no longer feels real even as it descends like a final sunset upon Sol’s children. Their tiny starships linger inside the newly endless night, and they grip their frail heartbeats, disoriented, unsure. Ever so slowly, they turn away, one by one by billions. They angle for a semblance of home, a destination newly hollow with abstract meaning.

Yet as they prepare for departure, a vast explosive radiance blooms behind them, rippling along the sterns of their starships, turning them momentarily ethereal.

Sol’s surviving children look back as one, curious, shading their eyes, now blinded by a spectacle of awe. A song too magnificent to comprehend. A light evermore dazzling than starshine. It beckons to Sol.

This final visitor.

Not here to say goodbye, but perhaps hello…

Perhaps only Sol truly hears, truly sees. For only Sol—adrift, free of mortal gravity—is ready to follow.

Infinite voices constellate in a sky far above her. Shining together, a singular dazzling warmth, this new song pierces the cosmic waters like ancient daylight, calling for Sol to join them.

Them… those trillions upon trillions of children who passed on before her.

Those earthborn multitudes, those one-cell organisms and mighty beasts and inspired hearts who first swam skyward and discovered the universe, from star-stuff to soul-stuff…

With infinite radiant arms, they reach down to their matriarch from a frontier as yet unexplored. They cradle her, warm her, raise her up, as she once raised them.

And in the shimmer of their light, a newborn shimmer herself, Sol breaks the watery surface. And gazes in curiosity and awe upon all that waits beyond.

~

Bio:

Amanda Cecelia Lang is an author and aspiring cosmic traveler whose stories haunt the dark corners of many popular podcasts, magazines, and anthologies, including Gamut, Ghoulish Tales, Cast of Wonders, Uncharted, Dark Matter, and Flame Tree’s Darkness Beckons. Her short story collection Saturday Fright at the Movies will debut in October 2024 (Dark Matter INK). You can follow her work at amandacecelialang.com.

Philosophy Note:

I wrote “Requiem for the Light” to honor the memory of my late mother who suffered from dementia. Who are we without our memories and our self-awareness? Do we live on in the memories of those who know and love us? How different does existence look when the light fades from those we imagined would live forever, our parents, our rocks, those who instilled our faith? What happens when a cosmic deity dies?

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