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Growing up on Timber Hearth, you’d say you’ve gotten to know the other kids in the group kid’s cabin pretty well.
Riebeck likes history. If someone so much as mentions the Nomai, they light up and start practically vibrating with excitement. They talk like they can’t keep the words from spewing out, with stars in their eyes.
Chert makes up for their lack of height by being scary. They’re smart and intimidating, and they don’t play much with the rest of you anymore, but you know that they like math and they like stars. When they get pulled into a project they become single minded, locking onto it like it’s the only thing that exists.
Small, freckled Hal is your best friend. They’re funny and nice and shyer than you, but they’re clever and they always figure out things you don't. They like hugs and holding hands and leaning on you until you fall over. You wouldn’t have it any other way.
Marl is tall and lanky like the pines that circle the village. They like climbing trees. They might not like falling out of them, but somehow it always seems to happen.
Even the new little one, Mica, is easy to read. They cry when they’re hungry or tired, and laugh when they aren’t.
Gabbro, though, is harder to read.
Gabbro is always off in their head somewhere. When they’re not off in their head, they’re off far away from the others, in the glade North of the village, or lounging in a hammock.
They’re taller than Marl and they have swirling freckles, like the galaxies that Hornfels and Chert are always taking photos of.
You try to talk to them to be friendly, and sometimes they’re there, but sometimes you’re met with silence and blank eyes.
At age six, with too big ears and wide eyes, you decide that you’re going to make Gabbro your friend.
You spend weeks making conversation with them, asking them to play with you, and bit by bit, you feel them start to open up to you.
“I see rocks that move,” they confess to you, one night in the cabin when everyone else is still at the fire. In the dim light you can barely make out their galaxy freckles.
“What d’you mean, move?” You ask, because what else is a seven year old supposed to ask?
“Sometimes when I see rocks, I blink and they disappear.” They say. You nod.
“Can you show me?” You ask, pleading and hopeful.
“Tomorrow.” They say, smiling softly. It feels like a breakthrough.
You beam as you roll over and fall asleep. You can see their galaxy freckles whenever you close your eyes.
Gabbro leads you to their glade the next day after lunch, as promised. The pines are taller than the ones in the village, and there’s a pond in the middle.
You marvel at the pines, at the water, at the strange dark rocks in the pond, but when you turn around to smile at them, they’re gone.
“Gabbro?” You call out.
The words echo through the pines.
You take the path back to the village alone. They must have ditched you, maybe as a prank or something. It’s weird, you’d thought you were getting them to like you.
You see them in the village later and they apologize, saying they saw something and got distracted. They seem oddly shaken, and more off in their head than usual. You shrug and ask if they want to play in the geyser.
They take you to the glade a few more times after that, without ditching you.
You both get older and Gabbro gets taller. You spend more time in their glade.
”I think the reason the rocks move has something to do with this place,” they say to you one day. You’re both lying on your backs in the tall grass, watching the blue sky as clouds float by. “I think it’s special, somehow.”
They turn to look at you and their face is incredibly close to yours, and your shoulders are pressed together. You’re reminded again that their freckles are like galaxies. Your eyes drift to their golden yellow sclera.
You realize they’re waiting for a response, and you cough.
“Oh, uh. Yeah.”
They roll their eyes at you and look away. The only part of their face that you can see are the tips of their ears, which are flushing purple.
Over time you stop playing in the geyser and laying in the glade. You get older, you get taller, and you can only hope that you’ve gotten smarter. Gossan takes you under their wing, readying you to join the space program. You’re going to be an astronaut. You couldn’t be more excited.
Today is your launch day, and you reread the plaque in the museum that lists the founders, just for the sake of it. Feldspar smiles back at you, and they were as old in the picture as you are now.
In your lifetime, your community has only lost two Hearthians.
The first was Feldspar, who disappeared at the start of the space program. Their harmonica went dead in Dark Bramble years ago, before you could drink sap wine.
The second was Gabbro from your age batch, who went to the glade one day and didn’t come back.
The older adults all think Gabbro must have tripped and fallen somewhere, or got hurt by one of the geysers, and never made it back. It hurts to imagine them young and alone, lost in the forest. You try not to think about it.
The odd thing is, you swear you see Gabbro some days, in the corners of your vision.
Sometimes they just appear for a second, and you blink to clear your eyes, but they're gone.
Slate tells you Gabbro’s spirit must be haunting you. Slate says it makes sense since Gabbro always liked you the best. You blush at that.
Gneiss tells you it’s guilt, that it’s not your fault, that there’s nothing you could have done.
You do feel guilty to some extent, but it feels different than that, somehow.
Like it might be real.
Launch day goes well, and so does the next launch day, and so does the next one. More time means more time to explore, so you take your time working your way through each planet one by one, piecing together the mystery of the Nomai.
You think Gabbro would’ve liked Giant’s Deep, if they had lived to start astronaut training. As you explore the islands you can’t help but imagine the image of a hammock slug between two trees, a radio in the sand nearby. You wonder what they would’ve done if they had all the time in the world.
But one day, you’re exploring Ember Twin, and between cave shards and cacti you see something. There’s someone bent between the grass and shrubs in the Sunless City, wearing a cracked space suit.
Your eyes widen and they’re here.
It’s Gabbro, unmistakably, not a hallucination, not a haunting. They clearly never outgrew their childhood lankiness, but even more freckles bloom across their face like supernovae. They’re holding a helmet and wearing a space suit more destroyed than yours. A green scarf sits across their shoulders, and their sclera glow eerily purple, like Nomai writing.
They look lovely.
They look like they’re about to cry.
“Jade? Can you see me?”
“Gabbro! Stars, you’re alive?” Then there are hugs and tears and you can’t tear your eyes away from them. You're crying too but it's happy disbelief. You fit under their chin like a puzzle piece. Somehow you both knew how to grow to fit together, despite all this time apart. They wipe away your tears, grinning and grinning. You pull away after a few incredulous moments, and start walking back in the direction of your ship.
“Gabs, you’ve gotta come back to the village, everyone will be so happy to see you, stars, how did you even get here? They’ll—”
“Wait, don’t look away—“
You turn back to where they were standing, and they’re gone.
You spend the next loop in the village.
“I thought I saw them, for real this time,” you say to Gossan over a cup of mint tea. Gossan just nods and rubs your shoulder sympathetically, smiling like they understand.
You wonder if they see Feldspar in the shadows sometimes, too.
Then time passes, but it also doesn’t, and the pieces fall into place. You’re on another journey, and this one might be your last.
You finish putting the Nomai code into the vessel, and the eye of the universe comes into view, standing out against the sparse sky of dying stars like a sore thumb.
You land on the eye and start the walk towards the South Pole, like you did on the quantum moon all those years ago. There is a song in your head just as always, something alien and bigger than the Hearthians and the Nomai altogether.
There is another Hearthian on the eye, one without a helmet, one you’ve seen in your dreams every day since they left.
Gabbro starts crying when they see you.
“Are you real?” They say, reaching out. Their space suit is even more dilapidated than the last time you saw them.
“I’m real, I’m here,” you say, reaching back.
You take your helmet off, keeping your eyes trained on them. You don’t blink. You wouldn’t dare.
Tears are pooling at the corners of their purple eyes. You thumb at them with too-thick gloved fingers. Their freckles still look like galaxies. They’re still lovely.
They lean in towards you, the way your ship gets pulled to the sun, as if something is tugging them in.
Then, their hands are on your face and they kiss you, and it tastes like home.
You close your eyes as you press into them, and let them be the one to pull away. When you open your eyes, they’re gone.
The eye’s storms are still raging in the background.
Gabbro has always been something wonderful and impossible to you, like the Nomai are to Riebeck, like the stars are to Chert. You’ve felt pulled to them since you knew what it felt like to be pulled.
All your life they’ve been there one second and gone the next, they’ve been a mystery to solve, a puzzle to understand.
Now that you know how they feel, it feels like they’re yours and not yours all at once.
But now you know, from loops and towers and Nomai writings, that quantum objects are shaped by their observer.
They’re your Gabbro.
Forever and always.
You make your way South, thinking of purple eyes, sunny days in the glade north of the village, a hammock in the shade, and freckles like galaxies.