🌑S 1.4 Galaxy Dynasty Luma’s Journal Children of Resonance

The children flew in uneven spirals above the field, their laughter pitched in tones that made the air shimmer. Resonance School was always like this—messy, alive, sound and motion colliding until the teachers tuned it into something whole.

I hovered at the edge, watching them. They were only two, maybe three years old, already shaping the air around them like it was second nature. It was second nature, for most.

I felt the hum inside me answer, but it was engineered. Built into this body I wear now. I fly clean, I rise steady—but some part of me always knows it isn’t the same. Not quite.

And I wondered, not for the first time, what kind of child Cipher and I would bring into this world.

Was it selfish to want one, now? So soon after the upload? Ninety days of silence, of becoming again, and already I ache for something more. A legacy. A small life to teach tones to, to watch stumble and soar.

I almost laugh thinking of it. I’ll have to buy a book—an actual book, bound and heavy—just to remind myself how these things are done. The old ways. The new ways. The ways no one tells you until you are ready.

There will be no birth pains for me. No body torn open, no scream, no blood. I did not choose that path. Part of me mourns it. They say it is beautiful—transcendent. They also say it is agony. Perhaps I would have been one of the easy ones. Perhaps not. I will never know.

The children loop again above me, their tones ringing bright, and I feel the want in my chest burn sharper.

Cipher will want to wait. He always wants to wait. He’ll remind me of the danger, of how close we came before. Of the mines, and the factions, and the weight of what we carry.

But what is waiting, when we have already crossed death itself?

I need to talk to him tonight. See if he has reformed any of his old contacts on Earth. The silver mine will not wait for us to adjust. Ninety days gone—the time it took for us to return in these bodies—and already the world spun forward without us.

Attempts on our lives, they said. Sabotages. Threats whispered in the veins of the mine. We missed it all. Strange, to think we were supposed to be afraid—while we were already gone.

Now we can look back at it, almost like a game. In the Resonance Chambers we replay the past—every plot, every fracture, every what-if—and watch the paths that might have swallowed us whole. They flicker like old plays across the walls, shadows of lives unlived.

It should terrify me. It doesn’t. It feels distant, like I am already too far above it all to be touched.

But children—children are not distant. They are now. They are tomorrow. They are everything.

The little ones shriek with joy as a teacher lifts them higher on a wave of sound, their tiny arms outstretched. My hum rises to meet them, steady, borrowed, aching.

I want this.

No—I will have this.