Phase lock without a keeper persists. An optical transient left no integrable heat, yet its cadence has not drifted under expansion that already shears galaxies. Who kept it is not a variable I can warm into existence.
“Of twelve thousand seven hundred sixty-one winters, three thin ones carry bone and shell that crumbling fronts spilled when shores were new. Fire kissed obsidian where wind cut a hollow. Vega has left its post. The salt to come may take those bones. It may take what counts them.”
“Green fire once walked a sky no seam remembers, and left no ash. Pressure keeps the walk as a sigh three grains wide, faithful each eleventh winter. Who tends a flame that writes nothing, yet is never late?”
“Shores unborn to drowning already tilt in the grit: three grains of shell against one of hearth-ash, and the tilt steepens. Salt will cover that steepening. Fires will climb, each carrying a night no larger than a palm.”
“Downward melt ferried one grass-seed past thirty-one winters and set it on basalt. Dark and daylight will stand level before any mouth names that grass. Salt moving landward has already chosen the hollow where the seed will wait.”