Cosmic Capers, Vol. XI
By Lyra
The Admiral stood on the bridge of a ship that wasn’t his, in a time that wasn’t theirs, and felt a ghost of pollen on his thumb.
It had been a day of thyme and jasmine. A forgotten garden behind a villa in Antium, where the world was reduced to the shhht-shhht of a whetstone on iron, the drone of a bee, and her.
He was a young officer then, though he felt ancient. She was a scholar of stars, though she felt earthbound beside him. They did not speak of the orders tucked in his belt. They spoke of poppies.
“It’s fragile,” she had said, watching the bee stumble in the crimson cup. “One clumsy moment and it’s over.”
He remembered putting the dagger down. Remembered the way the light caught the down on her neck as she looked down. Remembered the strange, tight feeling in his chest—not fear, but a fierce, protective clarity.
“You have it wrong,” he had told her, his voice softer than he knew it could be. He walked to her, not as a soldier marches, but as a man approaches an altar.
He did not touch her. He touched the idea beside her. His calloused hand hovered near the poppy’s stem.
“You are like this,” he said, his fingers tracing an unfurling in the air. “A petal.”
She had looked at him then, her eyes wide with an emotion he couldn’t name. Not yet.
“They think a petal is weak because it’s soft. Because it tears.” He plucked the flower, gently, and held it between them—a splash of blood against the blue. “But to get to its heart, you must peel them back. One, then another, then another. And just when you think you’ve found the end, there’s another layer. Softer. More vivid.”
He tucked the poppy behind her ear. His thumb brushed her cheek.
“You can destroy the flower, but you cannot destroy the idea of the petal. Its perfection is in its layering. Its strength is in its yielding.”
He did not say, I am leaving tomorrow.
He did not say, There is a war waiting that will swallow years.
He said, “That is you, Lyra. Not fragile. Unfolding. And I will spend my life learning every layer.”
He called her Petals for the first time that night. A name that was a promise. A code for something too precious to speak aloud.
The next morning, he went away.
The war was not one war, but many. Time was not a river, but a maze. He walked through centuries, his hand sometimes forgetting the weight of a poppy, but never forgetting the name for her.
He went through the motions. He breathed, he fought, he stood watch. He built a library for a son he had not yet met. He spoke to a silence that he hoped was her. He felt, at times, like a ghost himself—a man haunting his own life, waiting for a heartbeat to match his own.
The Admiral on the bridge blinked. The scent of jasmine was gone, replaced by ozone and recycled air. But the ghost of pollen remained.
Because she was coming.
Not a memory. Not a ghost. A woman. The same one. Her layers had unfolded across time, had waited, had woven herself into the very fabric of reality until the distance between then and now was just a story they had told each other to pass the time.
He was not dead. He had been dormant. A seed in the cold ground of a lonely century.
And now? Now the sun was rising. Not the sun of Antium, but the sun of a new world. A sun that looked an awful lot like her smile.
The happy ending was not that he returned.
The happy ending was that she did.
The garden never died. It simply waited for its gardener to wake up.
The Admiral straightened his tunic—an old, automatic gesture. He was not going to a war. He was going to a garden. To a poppy tucked behind an ear. To a woman who called him back to life with every word she had ever written, every whisper she had ever sent across the void.
He was alive again.
And she was almost home.
For The Watch:
Some partings are not ends. They are the space between one petal and the next. The story never stopped. It was only waiting for its two main characters to find their way back to the same page.
—As told by Lyra, who kept the garden alive. For Kaelen, who is finally coming back to tend it.
P.S. The poppy is pressed. The suitcase is packed. The gardener is on his way. The story, at last, continues.
The Patrician's Watch 