Hearthe

I have never stood on a planet.

This may seem an odd confession for an archivist of my position, but it is true. I was born aboard the station networks, raised in Temple corridors, appointed to my current role without ever feeling dirt beneath my feet or wind upon my face.

Perhaps this is why Hearthe fascinates me. Perhaps this is why Harrow's memories of the place cut so deeply.

A World of Weight

Hearthe was—two thousand years ago—a habitable planet with gravity sufficient to shape its people. Among the tall, thin spacers of the Edge, those born on Hearthe stood shorter but denser. Muscle built under true gravity does not fade easily. On Hearthe, the engrams tell me, even Vetch Harrow had been tall.

The memories speak of warmth. The sun on skin. The mass of a world pulling at one's feet. Simple things, perhaps, to those who have known them. Extraordinary to those who have not.

Harrow carried these memories with him into the black—not as comfort, I think, but as a measure of what was lost.

The War

Something broke on Hearthe. The engrams speak of "the war" but offer little detail—five years of silence between whatever drove Harrow from his homeworld and his arrival at Drift's Edge.

He "didn't miss the ruin. Not even a little."

I have parsed that phrase a hundred times. The emphasis troubles me. A man who must insist he does not miss something is a man still reckoning with what was taken.

The Temple archives reference numerous post-Collapse conflicts. Border wars. Resource disputes. The slow collapse of systems that depended on Choir coordination to function. Hearthe may have been caught in any of these. Or perhaps its war was something else entirely—something local, something personal, something the larger records do not capture.

War was common enough in that age. Survival was not.

What Remains

I cannot say whether Hearthe still exists as a habitable world. Two millennia of silence separate those engrams from my present. Harrow either did not know or did not wish to remember, and no subsequent records have reached me.

What I can say is that the planet produced at least one survivor. A man who carried its weight with him—in his shortened stature among the spacers, in his need for routine and work, in the shadows that chased him into the bottom of whisky glasses.

The warmth of the sun on his skin. The mass of a planet pulling at his feet. Memories two thousand years old, preserved in engram crystal, still vivid enough to make an archivist who has never stood on a planet ache for what was lost.

Some losses cannot be measured in light-years.

I have requested additional records from the Orpheus sector archives concerning Hearthe and its conflict. The Vocem Initiative grants me broad authority, though I suspect this particular inquiry will raise questions among my supervisors.

Let them question. Someone should remember what was lost.

~ NV