The river of cinder flame finally flowed through the entire universe.
It was no longer merely an undercurrent flowing among ruins, no longer merely a faint light reviving lingering souls, no longer merely a whisper in the dreams of civilizations. It now spanned everything—from the remnants of stellar tides at the universe's northernmost edge to the spacetime rifts at its southernmost reaches; from the graveyards of the first stars to go dark to the nascent embryos of the youngest galaxies. Like an eternal, dark-red vein, it threaded through everything, connected everything, nourished everything.
It was no longer "fire," nor was it a "river."
It was a river of stars.
But this river of stars was unlike any other. It was not composed of stars, did not revolve because of gravity, and could not be measured in light-years. It had evolved from the vein of walking, coalesced from the will of countless footfalls, and been infused by every existence that "had walked" and "was still walking." It wound through the void like an immense vein of life, pulsing with the universe's new heartbeat.
Walking had become a cycle.
The river of stars, serving as a vein, began to function.
It drew silence from the ends of the universe, compressing deathly stillness into the potential energy of walking; it flowed through the sleeping ruins of civilizations, awakening the roots of name-eroding grass, activating the leaf wheels of four-leaf shoots, and letting the last words of bodies of echoes resound through the void once more; it passed through the atmospheres of newborn planets, infusing the instinct to "walk" into the genes of life; it skirted the boundaries of black holes, carving an indelible footprint beyond their event horizons—a denial of "the end."
It produced no light, yet restored rhythm to everything.
It released