Clarkesworld, March 2026
On a planet of crystalline beings — sentient, ancient, and vast — a narrator known as Unnecessary Expender Of Energy To Satisfy Curiosity raises its child, Awakened From Glacially Eroded Foliated Schist With Garnets And A Uranium Heart. These beings communicate through high-energy photons, and their voices are lethal to the human crew stranded nearby after a spacecraft crash. Unable to speak to one another directly, the rock-beings and humans have developed a workaround: written messages, carved into stone or painted in polymer on lava flows.
The narrator has cultivated a rare friendship with one of the humans, HELGA, exchanging messages and teasing out each other’s cultural concepts. A more hostile human, CAPTAIN TEEGARDEN, has repeatedly tried to weaponize the narrator’s deadly voice against its own crew — requests the narrator flatly refuses. Through patient correspondence, the narrator and HELGA have already translated concepts like “birthday” into the narrator’s idiom, producing the charming “Anniversary of Life Memory Ritual.” Now HELGA invites the narrator to a SPRING CELEBRATION, prompting a rich exchange about seasons, dancing, flowers, bells, and the human instinct to mark renewal and joy.
In parallel, the narrator prepares its child for Three Things — a sacred planetary tradition in which all beings pause when Burnt Rock (an engulfed inner planet) and its moons cross the sky, and each calls out three beautiful things they can perceive. The ritual is traced to their ancestors’ near-extinction during their star’s red giant expansion, which stripped away atmosphere and forced the beings to develop new senses. The child’s first participation in Three Things is tender and quietly devastating: it names its parent’s painted skin as one of its three beautiful things, recognizing the black-and-white decoration as a gesture of shared love across different spectrums of vision.
As part of its planned Spring Celebration gift, the narrator has reshaped one of its three ears to detect photon signals from Earth — eleven light-years away. But when the signals finally resolve, the narrator is stricken: Earth has been rendered uninhabitable, likely by a gamma ray burst from a nearby supernova. The humans’ home is gone. No rescue ship is coming.
The narrator immediately resolves to say nothing. It understands that once CAPTAIN TEEGARDEN learns no second ship is en route, it will attempt to repair and refuel its broken craft — and lacking any fuel source, will try to steal the narrator’s child, whose uranium heart could serve as a reactor. The narrator will not allow this. But rather than confront or mourn openly, it takes a quieter path: it asks HELGA to begin thinking of this planet as home, and gently suggests letting Earth-based celebrations give way to new ones rooted in their shared world.
The story closes with HELGA offering its own Three Things — glacier-eroded rock formations, thriving crops, and the distant sight of the narrator and its child — proof that two utterly alien civilizations have, against all odds, begun to build something real together. The narrator sits with its terrible, protective secret, loving and grieving in equal measure.
Thoraiya Dyer is an Aurealis- and Ditmar-Award winning Australian writer and veterinarian. Her speculative fiction short stories and novellas have ap-peared at Tor.com/Reactor Mag, in Clarkesworld, Analog, Fantasy Magazine, Apex, Podcastle, Cosmos, Nature, anthology Bridging Infinity and boutique collection Asymmetry. Thoraiya’s big fat fantasy novels in the Titan’s Forest Trilogy are published by Tor books. A member of SFWA, represented by the Ethan Ellenberg agency, she is an avid hiker and arbalist inspired by wild spaces and the unknown universe.