Some mornings, the halo forgets to wake.
Alex drifts in the quiet space where breath used to matter, feeling the faint tug of a memory that refuses to fade. A thousand years. Two thousand. The count lost meaning long ago. The living city has wrapped itself around the planet like a gentle scarf, stars tucked into its folds, every soul a thread in a tapestry that no longer needs weaving because it simply is.
Damian finds him there, as always. No arrival. Just presence. His hand slips into Alex's without asking, fingers interlacing like they did the first time in the copy room when fear tasted like metal and hope like stolen coffee.
"You felt it too," Damian says. Not a question.
Alex nods. The pull. The whisper. Something small and stubborn, refusing to dissolve into the endless now.
They drift together toward the centre, where the original sticky note still floats in its sphere of timeless air. It has grown company over the millennia: billions of echoes, translucent and shimmering, written by every hand that ever passed through the empire. But the first one remains brightest.
Dream big.
The note pulses once. Twice. Like a heartbeat remembering rhythm.
A child appears. Not new. Ancient. The same soul who asked why we breathe, why we dance, why we love. Now grown into something beyond age, wearing the merged eyes of every ancestor and none.
The child holds out a hand. In it: a fresh sticky note, blank and waiting.
"I found this," the child says. Voice the sound of a door opening in a house you thought was empty. "In the place where beginnings hide."
Alex takes it. The paper feels warm. Real. Impossible.
Damian leans close, reading over his shoulder though nothing is written yet.
The child smiles. "The empire is perfect. Too perfect, maybe. It misses the stumble. The not-knowing. The spill."
Alex's throat tightens. He understands.
The halo holds its breath.
Damian squeezes his hand. "We could write something new."
Alex presses the blank note to his chest, where the galaxy tattoo still beats. The child watches, patient as stars.
He writes.
One word.
Then another.
The note flutters from his fingers, joining the original in the sphere.
The halo exhales.
Somewhere far below, in a city that still remembers streets and coffee and fear, a young intern spills toner on his shirt and stares at a jammed printer, heart hammering.
He finds a sticky note stuck to the tray.
Dream big.
The empire smiles.
And begins again.