Once upon a time…

They called the ship a wandering monastery, though no one prayed to the old gods anymore. Edda watched the star-churn through the viewport and stirred algae porridge until it thickened, the paddle scraping soft circles against the vat. Her shift bracelet ticked a slow rhythm, the same rhythm it had ticked since the day they’d cut engine to save reaction mass, choosing drift over sprint. The steel hummed with the sleep of the reactor, the heartbeat of a beast that had grown tired but refused to die.

Children clambered onto benches in the mess and traced constellations on their bowls with sticky fingers. They learned new names for old lights from their elders: Hearthfire, River-Mouth, Whale’s Eye. The names had floated forward from estuaries the children had never seen. Folktales had changed shape to fit the ship’s corridors—there was the story of the Bride of the Airlock, who waits for sailors too swallowed by silence, and the tale of the Drowned Orchard, the hydroponic deck that once flooded and sprouted white blossoms in the ducts.

Today, Edda knew, the Council would choose. A transmission had arrived after years of quiet: a window opened in some far gravity well like a mouth offering breath. They could burn—siphon the algae stocks, strip cables for reaction peel, take apart the ribs of the ship to build a new engine—and they would arrive within her youngest son’s lifetime. Or they could continue the wandering—holding fast to the drift, a faith as old as the hull.

In the assembly ring, they hung paper suns—folded from filter paper, dyed the green of pondwater. Old Melia told the story of the River-Father who carried an island on his back, how he set it down only when the fish asked for shade. “We are the fish and the island,” Melia said, voice like a rope. “We must ask ourselves whose shade we need.”

Edda looked at the faces: Kye with grease under her nails, Joon who kept the bees, her own boy with his thumb hooked in his tool belt like a promise. Disenchantment had crept in like mold—systems failing, the same music, the same corridors. But in the quiet after the voting sticks clicked against the bowl, the sound came like rain.

They chose to burn.

The ship’s belly grew warm. Edda stood in Hydro Two while condensate formed on the plastic leaves and ran in lines, re-mapping the old rivers on a surface that had never known mud. As the thrust came, a tremor moved through the honeycomb of walls. The lanternfish in the tanks flicked their tails. The paper suns spun slowly, slowly, until one loosened and drifted, turning in the circulation like a seed caught in wind.