Toccata and Fugue in Canis Minor
In the silence between the stars, nothing watches, and nothing waits.
Nothing needs to. The great slaughters ended long ago in this stretch of the void, long enough ago that even their airless echoes through the gas-clouds of hemoglobin-laced nebulae have died. There are no more war-engines named for a fledgling species’ virtues and heroes, no more celestial nightmares older than sentience and suffering. Only wiser creatures shod in repurposed metal remain, and immensities content enough in their age to be placated.
Nothing in this constellation is ancient enough for such forgiveness. Nothing here has outlived its own need for hatred. Nothing is so peaceable that it merely stirs when it hears a former war-engine’s voice on the solar wind, the painted panels that once housed racks of star-killing fire opened instead in a worshipful chorus.
Nothing knows this song’s history, incomplete as it is. The species that sings it no longer remembers what instrument first played its notes, nor which storied name deserves credit for its composition. Generations of past war-engines, their weapons reshaped into mechanisms for interstellar melody, have flown ahead of star-faring fleets for eons now, knowing only that this song above all others ensures safe passage for those in their wake.
Nothing remembers this former war-engine well. Nothing remembers when it trespassed this constellation alone for the first time, its new voice uplifted in harmonic song rather than the combustion of its decimated companions. Nothing remembers that each time this engine has trespassed since, it has housed a different rhythm flickering at its heart, each one the subtly unique symphony of a single biochemical life.
Nothing hears the song of this latest life now, and perceives anew the structure of that existence: flashes of sodium and potassium ions through tissue, the concatenation of impulses into ordered thought. The shiver of muscle fiber. The shallow rasp of carbon dioxide. The enraptured stench of awe and fear. The panicked eruption of pupils tearing open wide, neurons misfiring to conjure in the vast black an endless maw with cosmos-spanning teeth—
Chord: in B-flat major.
The song’s last notes tremble. The life at the former war-engine’s heart breathes. Nothing is there. Nothing has always been there.
Life moves on, as it has been permitted to do.
Nothing, for its own part, returns to its slumber, a tendril of itself curled deep in the fatty membranes of a body that it will never meet again.
Nothing twines alongside the memory of a song it cannot sing.
Nothing is home.
©2026 Jeoi Gawain Lin
Jeoi Gawain Lin is a fiction and game writer from Singapore who carries their parents' folktales with them. He enjoys thunderstorms, liminal spaces, and all things avian. In their spare time, they tend a goldfish plant.