[Balada: A Symphony of Eternity 03] • When From My Square Of Window Pane I Draw The Curtain To One Side

3rd book in the BALADA series

..........“When I dream of the stars, do they dream of me……………….of anything?”

From his perch on what could be considered the top side of the ship, Metternich took in that small fragment of the vast visual wonder of the universe.

He could see the light of countless stars that where so old they exploded hundreds of millions of millennia ago, yet continued to shine brightly in the night’s sky, the endless clouds of nebulas that from this distance seemed no bigger that a speck of dust, the great planets of the system he was passing, all shining brightly from the light of their sun, all with their unique beauty.

The gas giants, whose immense gravitational pulls could shatter any comet that threatened its smaller brethren and had moons larger than planets that could sustain life.

There where celestial bodies, that where so close to the sun that no water exited on them, instead there where rains made out of mercury and oceans of melted iron, inhabiting its surface.

The distant bodies of the outer edge planets that during their many millennia long orbit moved so far away from the sun, that the atmosphere would freeze, encasing them in a giant shield of ice, giving the impression that some Titan had been here and created these wondrous sculptures for all mortals to look before them in wonder.

And this was just one small speck, of one tiny fragment, of a single flake, from a great field of snow that was the great beauty of the galaxy and of the universe. Far beyond this system, he knew that there laid other things of wonder and beauty, to great to have ever been imaging by mere mortals, but was the creation of something grander than themselves.

He gazed into infinity and although he could not see them directly, he knew that before him lay things like diamonds the size of planets, systems with multiple suns that graced them with eternal protection from the darkness of night.

Worlds that left their stars and where now wondering the vastness of space, galaxies than seemed to be forever stationary but where forever moving, some were on a collision with each other, one that took thousands of years for it to begin, millions of years for them to finally meet, and a billion trillion years for the offspring of such a union to exist, until it too eventually finds its own pair.

There where ice planets than burned hotter than any fire and bodies of fire that where colder than any winter, gas giants than rained diamonds, vast bodies of space dust clouds that stretched for light years and tasted like raspberries.

Oceans that could encompass whole star systems, a cluster of stars and mass so great that the laws of physics’ denied its existence, yet there it had been for countless eons, ever present, ever defiant!

Beyond where Titanic black holes, who generated massive thunderstorms, that could engulf anything.

There was somewhere out there, stars bigger than any sun, as a sun is bigger than a speck of sand on a beach. There would be a great field of gas and matter, which existed from the very first moment of creation and would no doubt would sound the final rally, when the twilight of all would come.

There would be countless bubbles of space and time always being born into existence, growing, expanding, popping, and from their remains new ones would emerge, each one of them was a universe that was new and young one moment and a whisper latter it would be old and then dying, only to be replaced by the next one.

Nothing but a passing moment in the infinity of space, but an eternity among eternities for mere mortals!

Despite all these wonders, the gaze of the young Commodore always shifted back towards the rear of his fleet, where the mighty Volunian host was chasing him.

A fleet that was at least 15.000 ships strong moved through this system with a speed many times that of light, and as a cause of that they actually outran their own image.

From the journal of Deux,