The journey to the insignificant blue world was a meandering stroll. Astra took his time, detouring to watch a binary star system where the stellar winds painted the nebula around them in shimmering, violet hues. He paused to observe a gas giant where storms larger than planets raged for centuries, their patterns a mesmerizing, violent ballet. There was no hurry. The universe was his to appreciate at his own pace.
When the Ouroboros finally slipped into orbit, the world was exactly as he remembered: a stunning mosaic of blue oceans, white cloud swirls, and brown-green continents. It was beautiful in its simplicity. A Class-M world, teeming with primitive, carbon-based life. His sensors picked up the faint, chaotic radio whispers of a species just beginning to reach for the stars, their signals full of music, conflict, and hopeful, clumsy attempts to talk to the void.
He felt no urge to descend. He had no lesson to teach, no conflict to resolve. His role as the Storyteller was a hat he could hang up. Here, he was just a visitor.
He powered down everything but the life support and the viewport, and he watched.
He watched the terminator line sweep across the planet, plunging continents into night and waking others to dawn. He saw the glittering constellations of their cities, fragile pockets of light against the dark. He saw the great, gray smudges of storms spinning over oceans.
It was… peaceful. He was a ghost at the window, observing a family he would never meet, sharing in the quiet drama of their existence from an impossible distance.
Days turned into a week. He learned the rhythms of the world. He saw a massive hurricane form over an ocean and spend its fury on a coastline. He saw the ice caps glitter at the poles. He saw the great, dark expanse of a rainforest, a lung of the world breathing in and out.
He found himself smiling at their television broadcasts—the earnest news reports, the dramatic fictional stories, the silly comedies. They were so small, so localized in their concerns, and yet each life down there was the center of its own universe, just as his had once been.
He was about to finally move on, to continue his endless, aimless tour, when a new signal caught his attention. It wasn't a distress call or a declaration of war. It was a simple, mathematical sequence, beamed from the planet's surface not out into the galaxy, but into a precise, empty point in their own solar system. A test.
It was a child's drawing, translated into a digital code. A stick-figure family standing under a smiling sun, with a wobbly, heart-shaped spacecraft nearby.
The sheer, unvarnished hope of it struck him with a force that a planet-buster never could. It was a message in a bottle, thrown into the cosmic ocean by a species that had just learned to make bottles.
He looked at the image, then back at the vibrant, living world below. He had spent lifetimes dealing with gods and monsters, with cosmic wars and the end of reality. But this… this simple, brave act of reaching out from a cradle world felt more significant than any of it.
He wouldn't answer. To do so would be to shatter their innocence, to pull them into a cosmos they weren't ready for. Their story needed to unfold at its own pace.
But he could acknowledge it.
Using the barest whisper of the [Stellar Forge], he made a single, subtle adjustment to the void at the precise coordinates the signal was aimed at. He didn't create a message or an object. He simply made that particular point in space… warmer. For exactly 24 hours, any sensor pointed at it would read a faint, impossible heat signature, a gentle, cosmic wink.
It was a secret between him and the universe. A silent affirmation that someone was listening, that their drawing had been seen, and that the universe, for all its vastness and danger, could also be kind.
Satisfied, Astra powered up the Ouroboros. The Blue Marble turned below him, its people unknowingly blessed by a passing stranger. He set a new, random course and jumped, leaving them to their future, a quiet, fond memory in his heart. The tourist had seen his sight, and it was more wonderful than he could have imagined.