Light from stars long dead still reached across the black, arriving now at eyes that would never know the fire that made it, traveling farther than memory could hold meaning for. Some of those stars had burned out a thousand years before humanity ever looked up and gave them names. Their light kept moving anyway, patient, indifferent, arriving on schedule long after the source had gone quiet.
Ahead of Storm's slow, drifting glide, a nebula stretched wide across the dark, violet bleeding soft into rose along its outer edge, threaded through with darker veins where dust swallowed the light whole and gave nothing back. Distant stars caught within its folds seemed to strobe faintly as debris drifted slow across the line of sight, flickering in and out like something breathing, some vast and ancient lung expanding and contracting across a scale no single lifetime could ever properly measure.
