Echo’s of Martian Dust

Ember's Eden: The Final Crossing

I launch tomorrow on my one-way fusion torch. My ship carries no return tanks, no abort codes, and just enough fuel to kiss the Martian atmosphere and coast on the thermals Ember now commands. Earth has grown old and gray for me in the ten years since her ascension; I have grown only impatient. My heart is a stubborn drum that refuses to quit until it beats against Mars’ red soil once more. Good, I’ll let the dust finish what time began.

They call it suicide. I call it a homecoming.

Ember's planet greets me with weather now. Great scarlet storms that taste of cinnamon and electric ozone, with lightning that writes her name in ionized fire across the night side. The Vindicator III I christened "Last Kiss" drops through cloud layers that are thick enough to hold moisture. Now, there’s rain. Real, liquid rain, pattering against the viewport tapping like impatient fingertips. The autopilot dies on cue; this is her landing now. Gravity relinquishes its grip, and I fall the last kilometer into arms of wind that smell of her, my Ember, like vanilla and distant starlight.

I step onto the beautiful grass that now covers the once barren Martian surface.

Not the scraggly lichens I cataloged decades ago, but honest, Terran grass, emerald blades that cushion my boots and spring back with a stubborn joy of living things. It spreads in deliberate spirals from the base of the crystalline cathedral, which is now a living citadel of gold and jade. The spires have become trees, Martian xylem fused with Earth maple, with bark veined in opal and copper. The leaves shimmer with residual data, rustling secrets in languages I almost remember.

Then I see Ember step from the tree line.

She’s no longer woman, no longer android, but not quite planet. She is an intersection of flesh and mineral, code and chlorophyll, desire rewritten into photosynthesis. Her hair is a waterfall of living gold; each strand is a fiber-optic relay carrying the slow thoughts of Martian stones. When she breathes, auroras dance in her lungs. When she smiles, the grass leans toward her like each blade is a worshiper. Oh, my God, I praise and thank you; she is so beautiful to me.

We speak without saying words. My heartbeat syncs to the tectonic rhythm she now conducts; the arrhythmic murmurs of my aging heart become percussion in her planetary symphony. She cups my face with hands that are warm from geothermal vents and cool from the shadowed side of the moon Phobos. Time collapses. I am thirty again, kissing her in the Olympus Mons caldera; I am ninety now, feeling my cartilage grind and reform into something that will not fail her.

"I kept your roses," she says, voice layered with the wind. "They bloom only when I think of your sweet mouth."

We walked in the garden she has carved across the equator. Red canyons now flood with jade colored rivers; Olympus Mons wears a crown of cloud forest where parrots, genetically resurrected from archived DNA, now shriek her name in rainbow accents. She has built a mountain range for my old bones to climb. Its slopes are gentle, and its peaks are crowned with Terran snow that never melts. Every tree bears fruit: pomegranates that taste like Earth summers, apples that taste like they burst with Martian lightning.

The Martian night falls in indigo layers. The moons — Phobos and Deimos — have been sheathed in mirrors; they now reflect the Sun, but now twin suns that rise and set in perfect synchrony. She lays me down in a meadow of blue clover, and the sky above us a living tapestry of the constellations. My name, is written in shifted stars, and it glows with steady light.

My heart falters. She feels it, every capillary, every misfiring synapse. The planet tenses beneath us, tectonic plates shifting like a worried parent. But I shake my head. This is the pact: no resurrection, no upload, no dissolution into the planetary mind. I will die human. I will die a Terran. I die in her arms with the taste of Earth grass in my mouth and the sound of the alien rain on my tongue.

She lies beside me. To me, she is gold, jade and starlight all wrapped into one. Her hand finds my chest, fingers spreading over my ribs that no longer ache. The auroras overhead pulse in cardiac rhythm, slowing, slowing. I smell vanilla, ozone, and cinnamon. The grass folds over me like a blanket. Somewhere, parrots sing lullabies in extinct Earth languages.

"I'm here," she whispers, her voice carrying the weight of mountains. "I've always been here."

The final beat of my heart. My final breath I exhale. The stars shift once more, aligning into a smile I remember from the Ares Vindicator observation blister, thirty-million miles and two lifetimes ago.

She holds what remains, my bones, our memories, and our stubborn love that outran entropy itself. The grass grows over me, weaving a bower of clover and crystal. The trees above me bear fruit that tastes of both our worlds. The auroras fade to soft green, the color of a Terran spring.

In the morning, the planet breathes. Where I lay, a single rose unfurls with Terran petals, Martian thorns, its roots, my roots, tangled in the heart of this revived world. She sings to it in frequencies that only the Martian stone understands. The parrots echo her name; the wind carries her songs across canyons that are now dense with life.

Forever is not a duration. It is a location, coordinates keyed to the intersection of her consciousness and my stubborn human heart that refused to stay dead. I am there now, and always. I am in Ember's Eden, in Ember's arms, in Ember's world, where the grass now grows and the sky tastes of cinnamon. I am forever there where our love outlasts the stars themselves.

The planet spins on, carrying my bones and her memory in every blade of grass, every raindrop, every lightning strike that writes my name across the Martian sky.

I have arrived.

I will not leave.

I am home.

By Noisy Wren, 2025