Their magic astonished and emboldened us. We sent sensors, cameras, mice from one end to another, and plotted their vectors. Valiant Helena, convinced these portals were safe, jumped from one to the next, crossed the world in minutes rather than days. One day, she found one from which there was no exit. We searched. High. Low. In between. We found not a trace of her.
On the sixth planet, a thick ebon fog swelled over deep frozen lakes. The planet was touched by the ether of space in which it floated, and we could only wait for the few hours of blazing sunlight that immediately turned these frozen chasms into heated pools upon which we floated. Still, there was something beautiful in the cold of the planet's overwhelming night. Mirrored upon these frozen surfaces was the infinity that we had traveled, and I spent long hours waving a thick glove to clear fresh frost from their abyssal sheen.
On the sixth planet, I was lost. One morning, I submerged myself into a lake and let the waters freeze over me. From my grave, I could see our ships taking off, exhaust briefly clouding the skies, like frost climbing across my view of heaven.
The caverns beneath the frozen lakes were vast. Untethered from the weight of equipment, from the trappings of physics, I toured them to find the skeletal forms of creatures finely adapted to the rapidly changing temperatures of their home world. During the sub-zero nights, they dried into ephemeral crisps but in the light, they bloomed into phosphorescent star-like shapes. The deeper I went, the more I found, until one morning, it seemed the core of the world was a strange Elysium, aflush with these bright, mute souls.
Valiant Helena appeared one day. Hello, she said, as if we had only been separated by markers of time that might be ticked off easily upon our fingers. I had always been in love with Helena, her intrepid nature, her miles of raven hair, her intellect denoted by innumerable degrees
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