The Secret of the Comets

I stir from the Great Sleep, as I have done a thousand times before. The weight of centuries presses against my bladder, an ancient discomfort that plagues all of my kind once we reach the Age of Seeding. My three hearts flutter in sequence as consciousness seeps back into my ganglia. The darkness of my dwelling pulses with the bio-luminescent markers of time—three hundred of what the soft, brief creatures on the third planet call “years” have passed since I last opened my sensory membranes.

Damn this elder’s curse. In the prime of my existence, I could sleep through an entire revolution of Xylos around the great burning orb of Nath. Now? Now I rise in what the younglings mockingly call the Middle Dark, when our world has completed merely half its journey around our star.

I extract myself from the nutrient bath with a sucking sound that echoes through my empty dwelling. My translucent limbs catch the faint light of Nath, still visible through the atmospheric window. My bladder sac throbs with urgency as old fluids seek release. The younglings don’t understand. They laugh behind their breathing filters, but they too will face the Middle Dark risings when they’ve witnessed the death of stars.

The relief chamber beckons. I shuffle across the living floor, each step sending ripples through the semi-conscious membrane beneath me. The chamber recognizes my biorhythms and dilates open, a perfect circle of darkness awaiting my aged form.

“Prepare for evacuation,” I command, my voice crackling like quantum static.

The chamber responds with a series of tones and clicks, ancient machinery awakening for its sacred duty. Few remember anymore the true purpose of our biological functions. The younglings think their waste simply dissolves into the recyclers. They are taught nothing of cosmic consequences, of the great cycle that binds all living things across the endless void.

I position myself over the galactic drain and release.

The sensation is ecstatic agony—three centuries of accumulated celestial waste pouring from my being. The chamber hums with energy, and beneath me, the clear tube fills with luminescent liquid, glowing with the potency of a newborn star. My essence spirals downward, channeled through the ancient pipes that our ancestors built when they first understood their place in the universal order.

Through the viewing port, I watch my contribution join the great collection tank deep beneath the surface of Xylos. There, the combined essence of all elders who wake in the Middle Dark is transformed, concentrated, and finally—magnificently—expelled from our world in a brilliant stream of creation.

Far below, the ejection mechanism activates. A flash of light so pure it seems to bend reality itself erupts from the southern pole of our world. I press my sensory membrane against the viewing port, and there it is—a new comet born of my discomfort, a celestial traveler carrying the seeds of potential life hurled across the endless black ocean of space.

I watch until it becomes a pinpoint of light, indistinguishable from the distant stars. Will it find a barren world and bring the first spark of existence? Will it crash into a developing planet and alter the course of evolution? Or will it simply wander the emptiness for billions of years, a lonely monument to my interrupted sleep?

The younglings would never believe that our bodily functions forge the very messengers of life throughout the cosmos. That every comet that has ever graced the skies of a trillion worlds began as inconvenience in an elder’s bladder sac.

I shuffle back to my nutrient bath, already feeling the heaviness of the Great Sleep returning. With luck, I’ll manage the full duration this time, though I know better. The curse of the elders is eternal. In another hundred and fifty years, when our world reaches the three-quarter mark around Nath, I’ll rise again, cursing and shuffling to the relief chamber.

But I take comfort in one thought as consciousness begins to fade: somewhere, streaking across the velvet darkness, my creation brings the promise of tomorrow to worlds yet unborn. My discomfort is a small price for such cosmic significance.

And so I sink back into the Great Sleep, dreaming of comets and the countless civilizations that will look up at their night skies, point at my passing contribution, and wish upon what they believe is merely a falling star.