Some thoughts are best reflected with firelight
Nyr Nordhavn
Season 01 — Episode 06
Written by Alan Tripp
2412
The Sollace Cottage — Ulfrvik
Operations Group Baston
Hell’s Gate Nebula
“The hearth is not sacred because of the fire. The fire is sacred because people gather around it.”
— Beatress O’Lancy
Chapter One
The cottage had settled into the kind of silence that only arrived long after midnight.
Outside, the highlands of Nýr Norðhavn slept beneath the Silver Tide. Curtains of pale silver and violet drifted slowly across the artificial heavens of the Skye Belt, their reflections shimmering across the distant fjord and painting the dark forests with a faint ghostly radiance. The old people of Norðhavn often said the Silver Tide made the world remember itself. Alan had never been entirely certain what that meant, but on nights like this he understood the feeling.
The light did not merely illuminate the landscape.
It transformed it.
The mountains became older.
The forests deeper.
The distance between one heartbeat and the next somehow felt longer.
Moonlight had belonged to Earth.
This belonged to the Belt.
The silver glow spilled through the cottage windows and stretched across the floorboards in shifting pools of cool light, mingling with the warm gold cast by the hearth.
Inside, the air smelled of cedar smoke and pine resin.
A fire had burned steadily for hours within the stone hearth, and though the flames had begun to settle into glowing embers, the room remained comfortably warm. The cottage itself was modest by most standards. Thick stone lower walls supported a timber upper structure built to withstand Norðhavn winters, while heavy beams crossed the ceiling overhead. Nothing about the place had been designed to impress anyone.
That was precisely why Alan loved it.
The cottage asked nothing of him.
It did not care about rank.
It did not care about duty rosters, command decisions, casualty reports, or fleet politics.
It was simply a place to exist.
A place to breathe.
A place where, for a few precious hours, he could remember there was a man beneath the uniform.
At the moment, however, breathing was proving difficult.
Alan Sollace sat alone before the fire with a blanket draped loosely across his legs and an untouched glass resting on the table beside him. The room remained quiet except for the occasional crackle of settling wood and the distant whisper of wind moving across the fjord below the cliffs.
He should have been asleep.
Instead he sat staring into the embers.
Every time he closed his eyes he found himself back inside the Anvil.
He could still see the shipyards.
The work lights.
The scaffolding.
The vast enclosed docks humming with activity.
Most of all, he could still see the Sam Houston.
Not the ship that would carry that name into the future.
The old one.
Her ship …. Ahlayna’s ship.
The vessel that had carried her through storms, wars, impossible frontiers, and more trouble than a single reality could hope to contain.
He remembered standing beside her wounded hull while engineers moved through her compartments like mourners attending a funeral. He remembered watching sections being stripped away for transfer to the new vessel.
Having released Ahlayna’s ashes the previous day to the wind had renewed his thoughts of retiring … or retiring to this cottage and this place.
Of accepting a quiet life.
Then he remembered seeing her bridge dismantled piece by piece.
The command chair.
The consoles.
The bulkheads.
The little details nobody else would notice.
Every piece carried a memory.
And only a few hundred meters away sat the future.
A new hull.
A new ship.
A new beginning carrying an old name.
The sight had left him feeling strangely divided.
One part of him understood exactly why it was necessary.
Ships aged.
Technology evolved.
The frontier demanded adaptation.
Another part of him could not escape the feeling that he was watching an old friend die.
He rubbed a hand across his face and stared into the fire.
He was getting too old for this.
The realization had been visiting more frequently in recent years.
Not as fear.
Not as surrender.
Simply as truth.
Every voyage eventually ended.
Every captain eventually stepped away from the center chair.
Perhaps it was finally time to let someone younger carry the torch into the dark.
Perhaps it was time to become the old storyteller sitting beside the fire while others chased the horizon.
Time to lay down and let someone else carry the torch forward.
There had been so many years.
Too many years, perhaps.
Entire lifetimes seemed to exist inside his memory now.
The Academy.
The Nelson.
The Borg.
The years afterward spent proving he was still himself.
The commands.
The wars.
The losses.
The realities.
Sometimes Alan wondered how many versions of himself had existed over the years and which one had ultimately survived long enough to reach this point.
The thought left him tired in a way sleep could never fix.
Not physically.
Spiritually.
The kind of exhaustion that settled quietly into the soul and refused to leave.
He closed his eyes and listened to the wind.
For a long moment there was nothing else.
Only the fire, the night and the distant sounds of the fjord.
Then he felt her.
Not heard. … Felt.
A subtle shift in the room. The faint whisper of bare feet against wood. The familiar scent of cedar soap and wildflowers…. The warmth of another presence moving through the darkness.
Alan opened his eyes.
Lyara T’Rihann Thorne stood in the doorway between the bedroom and the main room of the cottage.
For several heartbeats neither spoke.
She wore one of his shirts, the fabric hanging loosely from her shoulders while her auburn hair flowed freely around them. The silver light from outside and the golden glow of the hearth met across her features, and for a moment she seemed suspended between both worlds.
She looked beautiful.
Not because she was flawless.
Not because she resembled some idealized image preserved in a holophoto.
She was beautiful because he knew her.
He knew the sound of her laughter.
He knew the look she carried when worry kept her awake.
He knew the scars she rarely discussed and the strength she rarely acknowledged.
He knew the woman who remained after the uniforms, titles, and responsibilities had been stripped away.
And oh what fun it was in helping her strip those away, he might add with a smirk and a smile.
Somehow, after everything life had taken from both of them, she was still here.
A small smile touched her lips.
“There you are.”
Alan snorted softly.
“I’ve been here the whole time.”
“Physically.”
The amusement in her voice warmed the room almost as effectively as the fire.
“Your mind is halfway across the Expanse.”
He couldn’t argue with that.
She was right.
She usually was.
Lyara crossed the room and, without a word, wrapped her arms around him from behind.
Her cheek settled against his temple.
Her arms rested comfortably across his chest.
The warmth of her body pressed gently against his back.
Alan closed his eyes again. Not because he was tired, because it felt good.
Because after decades spent carrying responsibility, command, grief, and expectation, there remained something profoundly healing about another person choosing to be close without asking anything in return.
For a long while neither spoke. The silence became its own conversation.
The fire crackled softly. The Silver Tide drifted across the heavens. The cottage remained warm.
And for the first time that evening, the weight upon Alan’s shoulders felt just a little lighter.
Eventually Lyara kissed his cheek.
“Want to talk about it?”
Alan considered the question.
Then shook his head.
“Not yet.”
She smiled knowingly.
That answer did not surprise her.
Some things needed time before they became words.
Some wounds needed warmth before they could be examined.
So instead she settled onto the blanket before the hearth and waited.
“Pathfinder? … They should call you ‘Standing Wolf.’”
“And why is that?” he asked.
“Because the wolf inside you will always find a reason to skip laying down … reasons to stand up for this or that,” she answered.
“Even if it’s simply to go see what’s over the next hill or behind that last tree,” she added,
Alan watched her for a moment before joining her.
The floor was cold.
The blanket was warm.
The contrast made both of them laugh softly.
The sound echoed gently through the cottage.
The wolf was one of his spirit guides and as was the hawk, part of his soul.
He considered her words before looking deep into her eyes.
Setting them to the side, he brushed a lock of her hair behind one pointed ear before leaning down and kissing her tenderly, sweetly … then with increasing passion.
Outside, the Silver Tide continued its journey across the night.
Inside, two survivors sat before a fire while the world turned quietly around them.
And somewhere beyond the fjords, beyond the stars, beyond the questions waiting in orbit above Rhya’thor, the future was already moving toward them.
Neither of them knew it yet.
But the storm was not finished with Alan Sollace.
Not by a long measure.