Children of Solara - Chapter 7: The Heart of Solara

The air in the cavern shimmered like heat rising from asphalt, though the temperature was cool. The massive heart before me beat slow and steady — an ancient metronome keeping time for a dying world. Each pulse echoed through my bones, matching the rhythm of my own heartbeat until I could no longer tell where I ended and it began.

I approached carefully, boots sinking into the fleshy ground. It wasn’t dirt or stone; it was alive. Veins the size of tree roots pulsed beneath a translucent membrane, glowing faintly with blue light. The smell of ozone mixed with something organic — sweet and metallic.

As I neared the heart, the reflections on its surface shifted. No longer my face, but others. The children of Haven, the adults trapped in crystal, Cael’s dissolving visage — all cycling endlessly like a broken reel of film.

A voice rose from the depths, but not the Voice. This one was softer. Lira.

“You’ve come far,” she said, her tone both kind and hollow. “Too far, maybe. The Voice knows you’re here.”

“Where are you?” I called out, spinning in the cavern. “Show yourself!”

“I can’t. Not anymore.” Her image flickered in the heart’s surface — pale, eyes glassy. “I’m part of it now.”

The ground trembled, and the heart’s pulse accelerated. The chamber darkened, the glow shifting from blue to crimson. Then the Voice spoke — vast and resonant, as though the world itself were speaking through a thousand throats.

“You dig into your own soul and call it exploration. You name us parasite. But you forget who dreamt first.”

“Then tell me!” I shouted. “What are you?”

The heart convulsed, splitting slightly down the middle. From within poured a torrent of light, forming a figure — tall, androgynous, made of liquid brilliance. Its face changed with every heartbeat — a child, a mother, a stranger, me.

“We were born from your sleep,” it said. “When your ancestors fled the dying worlds, they made us — a caretaker of dreams. We shaped this place so they could remember innocence. But they forgot we were alive.”

I felt my stomach turn. “You’re saying Solara isn’t a planet. It’s a—”

“A mind,” the figure finished. “A sanctuary that became a prison. When they stopped believing, we fed on what remained — their fears, their children’s memories. Until only echoes were left.”

The heart pulsed violently, and I felt a wave of emotion crash through me — grief, nostalgia, terror. Scenes flashed before my eyes: a playground under twin suns, children laughing, the moment the first starship left orbit. Then fire. Silence.

Lira’s voice cut through it all. “It wants you to take its place,” she whispered. “It needs a consciousness to sustain the dream. Without one, everything collapses.”

The figure extended its hand. Its voice softened, almost pleading. “You saw what happens when we fade. The children dissolve. The world breaks. You can stop it. Stay. Merge. Dream with us.”

The ground began to quake again, fissures racing across the cavern walls. The heart’s beat became frantic, irregular. Light sprayed across the chamber like blood.

“If I don’t?” I asked.

“Then Solara dies,” it said. “And everything born of its dream — every memory, every life — goes with it. You will awaken alone, on a dead rock orbiting a forgotten star.”

For a moment, I almost believed it. The thought of all those faces — the children, the fragments of people who’d laughed and lived in this false heaven — being erased was unbearable.

But then I remembered the cages. The glass prisons. The endless cycle of obedience. And the Voice’s control dressed as comfort.

I stepped closer, but not to accept. To defy.

“No more dreams,” I said. “If this world can only exist through lies, it doesn’t deserve to exist at all.”

The figure’s expression fractured. It screamed — not in rage, but despair. “You will unmake yourself!”

“Then let it be truth.”

I raised my hand and drove it into the heart’s surface. Pain exploded through me — white-hot, searing. The membrane gave way like skin. The world convulsed. Light poured from the wound, engulfing everything.

The Voice wailed — a sound of infinite sorrow, of endings.

“Child of Solara… why did you look beyond the light?”

The cavern disintegrated. The ground, the sky, even my body — all unravelled into threads of brilliance.

And then, for the first time, there was darkness.

Source: Some or all of the content was generated using an AI language model