The Quiet Flame

A short story in three parts

Part One: Serin

On the planet Orilen, there were no fossil fuels.

Not because the Orileni were wise; they simply had no choice. Their world, with its warm sapphire seas and forests of silver-needled trees, had never entombed the dead for long. Microbial life broke down the past too quickly; pressure was never right; time never still. So no coal. No oil. No gas.

For millennia, fire was a whisper. The Orileni learned to shape metal with solar furnaces made of polished obsidian and liquid lenses. Their first machines were spun by water and air, stored in stone chambers pressurised like lungs. Homes were heated not by combustion but by deep pipes sunk into the planet’s breath: geothermal warmth, constant and quiet.

Children grew up knowing the sun’s arc as intimately as their own heartbeat. Energy was not something hoarded or burned: it was something borrowed for a time.

The ‘Great Shift’ began not with an explosion, but a question.

A young thinker, Serin Vel, stood before the Council of Crafts and asked, “Why must our cities dim at dusk? Can light not live in the dark?”

Serin’s curiosity was electric, literally. She had shaped the first panels of sun-glass, weaving copper threads into glass flowers that bloomed electricity. With careful storage – magnetic spirals and crystal batteries – the Orileni lit the night without fire for the first time.

By her hundredth sun cycle, they had networks of light, vehicles without smoke, and silent machines that danced to fields of force. Serin’s people never made steamships; they made sky-kites, catching winds with membranes thinner than breath. They never had traffic jams: only gliders, coasting along rails spun from magnetic currents that hummed like lullabies.

They did not make plastic. They discovered flex-stone – a biodegradable ceramic. Their tools decomposed like fallen leaves. There were no oil wars. No smog. No climate to destabilise. Yes, they had tensions – philosophies collided, egos flared – but they never lit the world on fire to power a single engine – or bomb.

Instead, they watched stars and wondered.

And when the time came, they built ships not of metal, but of woven crystal, charged by sunlight, capable of riding the tide-rip between star systems. One such ship, the Quora, bore a plaque engraved with Serin Vel’s final words:

“Let us visit without taking. Let us leave without burning. Let us become not the flame, but the lantern.”

And so it was that Earth’s telescopes, millennia later, would catch a glint – something not tumbling, but soaring – a vessel silent, silver, and absolutely impossible.

For what kind of civilisation, we asked, could reach the stars … without ever lighting a match?

Part Two to follow …