Fiery Remote Scan 5 -

Thorne saw it all in a flash. The loneliness of a god that could never die, trapped in a body of endless fire. And then, the arrival of the humans. Their scans were not curiosity. They were needles . Every pulse of the remote scan had been a pinprick to a mind that had forgotten touch.

He opened the comm channel.

And it was angry.

“Unknown?” Thorne leaned closer. In astrophysics, “unknown” was a four-letter word.

The viewscreen flickered. The Cinder’s fiery surface, once a chaotic ballet of thermonuclear rage, began to organize . Whorls of plasma arranged themselves into spirals. Spiral arms. A shape. Not a face—too alien for that—but a presence . A mind forged in degenerate matter and magnetic fields, vast and slow as a continent, thinking in centuries instead of seconds. fiery remote scan 5

In Thorne’s neural link, the AI translated: “Now you know. Don’t leave.”

Death either way. Stay and burn in the mind of a star. Leave and burn in its death throes. Thorne saw it all in a flash

The Cinder answered .