Do You Dream of Terra-Two?

In the darkness, every fear finds a face.

Loving anything is bound to the pain of losing it.

You know,' Astrid said, as Ara climbed off the window ledge, 'sometimes it’s a good thing. When you don’t know it’s the last time.

By day the cities were cement-colored smudges against the land, indistinguishable from the gray-green of suburbs and countryside, but at night, humanity shouted its existence at the stars.

Plenus annis abiit, plenus honoribus,” Poppy said. “He is gone from us, full of years and full of honours.

Fernweh, the doctors called it, or far-sickness. The patients were sick for somewhere they had never travelled. Would never travel.

Some nights we ask ourselves why we chose to leave everything behind. We used to think we had many reasons, but - really - there is only one.

We were taught that, for a while, the universe existed and not one person knew.

...what it’s like just before you’re born. Babies can hear their mother’s voices, they get distressed, they feel pain, even in their mother’s stomach. They turn towards the light, like all of us. The womb, though, is the only world they have ever known. They can see all of it, the beginning and the end, and of course, they think there is nothing else. Can’t even conceive of it. So, being born, being dragged out into the cold, into the searing lights and all the noise, must feel like dying – like their whole world disappearing along with every single thing they ever knew. Maybe dying is like that too; none of us know what’s out there. But we’ve experienced something a little like it already. Being born was the best thing that ever happened to us. The world is bigger and more beautiful than we ever could have imagined and on the other side of it there were people we’d never met who already love us. They’ve been excited. They’ve been waiting.

They all sang the chorus again, one final time, at the top of their lungs. Jesse was so happy to be alive, to be on the Damocles with these people, that he almost cried.

What would you die for? Willingly die for? I’d probably say nothing at all.