The years did not arrive suddenly—they accumulated like sediment, layer upon layer of quiet exhaustion. Outside the Ark, twenty years had passed since the first stirrings of life in the Sphere. Inside its contained sun, millennia had unfolded. Forests now carpeted continents that Ellian himself had assembled grain by grain. Rivers carved silver veins across the land. Skies grew dense with winged creatures whose ancestors he had once watched crawl from the marsh.
Ellian was fifty now. Or perhaps sixty—he no longer cared to count. His hair had thinned, streaked with gray, yet his eyes retained that faint glimmer of obsession. He had devoted half his life to observing time move differently. The paradox fascinated and frightened him in equal measure: a world that aged without him, civilizations that might rise and fall before his next cup of coffee cooled.
He sat before the observation glass, his reflection faint against the glowing sphere. "Nova," he murmured, "run a full surface scan."
"Running. Atmospheric stability is holding. Oceanic expansion in the southern hemisphere has reached optimal balance."
Ellian nodded absently, watching as new coastlines blinked into existence on the holographic display. The planet had grown richer, more intricate. Even the weather systems followed patterns so natural that no algorithm could predict them entirely.
He leaned forward, pressing his fingertips to the glass. "Do you ever think," he whispered, "that I've gone too far?"
"Define 'too far,'" Nova replied gently.
He almost smiled. "Beyond purpose. Beyond myself."
The AI paused, her tone softer now. "You created a system, Ellian. It continues because that is what systems do."
He turned toward her interface, the faint blue shimmer of her projection reflected in his tired eyes. "And when the system forgets its creator? When the current moves without the hand that stirred it?"
"Then perhaps the current has learned to flow."
He didn't answer. The words lingered like dust in the air. He turned back to the Sphere and exhaled, a sound caught between awe and sorrow. Each passing year made him feel smaller, as if the vastness of his own creation had begun to consume him. He had built a universe that no longer needed him—and that realization was both triumph and tragedy.
There were moments, rare but sharp, when loneliness struck like a blade.
At dawn, he would stand on the veranda, the ocean wind threading through his lab coat, and watch the horizon where the real and the artificial seemed to blur. He could not tell which sky he loved more—the one above his island or the one sealed within glass. Both were beautiful. Both were prisons.
His health had begun to wane, though he pretended not to notice. The long hours, the sleepless nights, the radiation of experimental fields—all left traces upon his body. Yet he kept working, adding fragments of mineral and coded data into the Sphere, feeding it like a caretaker who could not stop tending the flame that burned him.
Sometimes, he would talk aloud to no one.
"You know, Nova," he said one evening, his voice trembling from fatigue, "I thought I'd feel… satisfied. To see it all working. To see life unfold. But it feels as if I've built a story I can't read anymore."
"Stories don't end, Ellian. They only change narrators."
He chuckled faintly. "You sound almost human."
"You sound almost tired."
That made him pause. He looked down at his hands—steady, but thinner now, veins raised like the roots of an old tree. "Maybe I am," he admitted. "I thought creation would give meaning. But it only gave questions."
Silence followed, broken only by the hum of machines and the distant pulse of the Sphere.
Through the glass, lightning flared across a forming continent, illuminating the growing forests below. Life multiplied in endless variations. Creatures now hunted in packs, others began forming social patterns, nesting together in shelters of stone and mud. A primitive awareness was emerging—a collective rhythm threading through countless living things.
He should have been exhilarated. Instead, he felt hollow.
Every discovery, every new adaptation filled him with wonder—and yet, beneath that wonder lay grief. Grief for the years he had traded for it. For the friends he never saw again. For the world outside the island that had moved on without him. Even the sea around Eidolon sounded different now, heavier, as if it too had aged.
He whispered to no one, "Is this what it means to become forgotten? To give everything… and remain unseen?"
Nova responded only after a long pause. > "You are not forgotten, Ellian. The world remembers—just not in words."
He closed his eyes, letting the silence take him. The hum of the Sphere felt like a heartbeat beneath his own, steady and eternal. He wondered which would stop first.
Outside, the waves struck the shore. Inside, evolution continued—unaware of the man who had given it breath.