"Please," it whispered. "We are dying."
"Thank you," the voice whispered, stronger now. "What do we call you?"
The silver cities blazed. The oceans glittered. And the people—the fragile, calcium-and-water people—stepped out onto their balconies and wept. starmaker arvus
But Arvus did not scatter. He reached into the star's heart and listened .
He turned back to his work. But now, when he shaped a nebula into a sun, he would sometimes pause—just for a moment—and wonder: Who will love this one? "Please," it whispered
He gathered the stray hydrogen from the system's frozen comets. He sifted helium from the solar wind. He reached into the quantum foam where new elements dreamed of being born, and he stole a handful of strangeness —the rarest fuel, the kind that burned not with fire but with will.
And Arvus, who had made a trillion suns without once being thanked, felt something crack inside himself. Not the Forge this time. Himself. The oceans glittered
It appeared in the Forge of Possibility—a fracture in the fabric where new stars were born. Through it leaked a sound Arvus had never heard. Not radiation, not gravity waves. A voice.