Connection

Two worlds. Two beings. One bond that changed the future.

“Attention! Prepare for impact! Attention!”

The giant spacecraft was falling toward an alien planet. This beautiful celestial body was meant to become a new home for the colonists. Humanity had dreamed of a happy life in a distant, wondrous world. Their dreams were never meant to come true, and the planet became the grave of three million people. There was no chance of survival — space does not forgive mistakes.

In the final moments, families gathered together. There was no panic. The adults were the best of the best, heroes born to conquer the universe. No one explained anything to the children, though they could sense that something terrible was happening. Their last seconds were spent saying goodbye. They spoke the words they had always postponed, confessions they had once been too afraid to say aloud. They tried to do everything they had always delayed because of the illusion that there would always be more time.

The ship crashed into the planet, burying part of a plateau beneath its remains and creating a massive crater. The catastrophe killed the colonists and also destroyed and injured countless native inhabitants. The impact shook the planet, disfiguring its surface and transforming its creatures, leaving wounds that would never heal on both their bodies and their souls.

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The sky turned green, black, and white. Sunset came to the distant planet lost in the endless cosmos. The time of night, darkness, and terror had arrived. All living creatures retreated into their crystal cocoons. Sae hid safely beneath the ground. For many years, every night she shared her shelter with her friend, Tie.

Long ago, when the Beast fell from the sky onto the planet, he died. Yet on this edge of the universe, corpses decayed over centuries and millennia. With a massive hole in his body and frozen whiskers, he still looked alive. His silver scales continued to shine, and fluorescent flowers occasionally bloomed on his long, spiked limbs.

Sae had abandoned her home and her family for a lonely journey with the dead. She wanted to find a quiet and peaceful place where, on one of the nights, she could open her cocoon and spend her final night beside Tie. She had no right to do so — they had never become a pair, but far away from her clan, there would be no one left to judge her.

At dawn, the sunrise drove away the cold and the monsters that devoured everything alive. The warmth of the red star touched the ground, dissolved the cocoon, and awakened Sae. She carefully lifted her heavy burden and continued onward, into the misty distance toward her terrible dream.

Ahead of her waited the mountains that sang the Long Hymn. Legend said that the entire world had been created for this song, and as long as its melody could be heard, time itself would continue to flow.

Sae froze. Her whiskers sensed an unfamiliar change in the soil. Directly before her lay a crater covered in crystals. It was filled with clouds of acid that rose and fell, merging with the ground. It was a terrifying place — the very spot where the Beast had fallen from the sky many years ago.

All life forms, even the monsters, avoided this place. But Sae had long stopped fearing dangers such as this. Besides, her limbs had not been able to absorb acid for many days. She was hungry. She rushed joyfully toward the clouds, but they parted before her as if they were alive, drawing her deeper and deeper inside.

At the bottom of the crater, among heaps of twisted metal, lay a small golden disk. When the creatures approached it, the device activated its programs and analyzed them.

One being was alive and dead at the same time. Its structure was too damaged for it to function normally.

The ancient computer made its decision instantly. It had been created to heal and restore the colonists to life. But when its systems became operational again, the entire crew had already been gone for centuries — carbon-based bodies could not withstand the brutal climate of the new planet.

Now, it could finally complete the mission it had been waiting to fulfill for so many years.

The disk illuminated with golden rays and covered the two travelers in a soft, warm light, rebuilding atoms wherever they were needed.

Sae trembled with fear and fury, destroying the remains of the spacecraft. One fragment fell onto the medical disk and damaged its circuits. Everything went dark, and Sae fell silent.

She did not immediately understand that Tie had changed — the hole that had interrupted the flow of electricity through his body had disappeared.

After several moments, Tie awakened. He stretched out his limbs and stood beside his friend. A storm of Sae’s memories flooded into his consciousness. Her loneliness and pain overwhelmed the resurrected creature, filling him with unbearable suffering.

Tie reached out with his threads toward his friend, wrapping both of them inside a cocoon. They were destined to become a bonded pair, a single and unbreakable whole.

Several hours later, the cocoon cracked open.

A creature named Satie emerged from within. She remembered the miracle that had happened to her. The magical object was the golden disk, which she had accidentally wounded. To her, the computer was a living being — someone capable of feeling pain and fear.

Satie carefully removed the fragments from the device, and it began recovering with surprising speed.

She lifted the golden creature that no living being had ever seen before and hugged it gently.

A three-meter-tall glowing creature from a planet at the edge of the galaxy and a golden disk from a crashed spacecraft would not become friends immediately.

But the connection between them would survive for a thousand years and change the future of humanity.

It would become a bridge between two warring races and help them find peace.