The Lumen returned at dusk.

  This time, it brought gifts.

  Juno, the colony’s botanist, found them first—a cluster of crystalline flowers sprouting overnight in the dead greenhouse. Their petals hummed, emitting oxygen so pure it burned the lungs. “It’s fixing the air,” Juno croaked, blood trickling from her nose as she collapsed.

  By noon, the survivors were hallucinating.

  “Do you see them?” Kael, the engineer, clawed at his eyes. “The faces in the light—they’re singing. They’re so… so…” He never finished. His mind snapped, leaving him catatonic, rocking in the corner as he muttered equations in a language no human mouth should pronounce.

  The Lumen watched from a distance, its light dimmed to a mournful violet.

  Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

  “It’s trying to help,” said Renn, his own hands trembling. Radiation sores now glowed faintly on his wrists, mirroring Mira’s transformation. “But we’re too… simple. Like ants trying to read a symphony.”

  Voss found the next gift at the graveyard.

  A monument.

  Twelve obsidian obelisks, etched with glowing fractals, stood where the colonists’ bodies lay. Each hummed with a voice—their voices. Mira’s laugh. Engineer Tam’s last curse. A chorus of the dead, trapped in glass.

  “Stop,” Voss whispered, sinking to her knees. The Lumen materialized behind her, its light tentative, almost shy.

  “Why do you mourn?” Its voice vibrated in her bones, not her ears. “They are preserved. Perfected.”

  She turned, pistol raised. “You call this perfection?”

  The Lumen flickered, patterns stuttering. A hand—almost human—reached for her.

  “Your pain is a shadow. Let me unmake it.”

  Voss fired.

  The bullet vaporized. The Lumen’s light flared crimson, and for a heartbeat, she saw its truth—a trillion glowing threads, each a life it had failed to save, stretching back through millennia.

  Then it was gone