The Quiet Flame

A short story in three parts

Part Two: Maen

As we know, on the planet Orilen, there were no fossil fuels.

Not because the Orileni were wise – at least, not at first – but because their world left no remnants of the past buried deep enough to rot into fire. No coal seams. No oil fields. No gas pockets. The dead returned to the living in days, not eons.

They learned to live by the rhythms of their world: wind that pulsed, sun that danced, rivers that hummed. They shaped tools from light, built cities with air, and stored energy in coiled stone and magnetic webs.

In the seaside city of Naren-Kai, a ten-cycle-old child named Maen wandered through the spirals of her learning pod.

She was small and sharp-eyed, obsessed with broken things. While others her age sketched star-birds and coded wind poems, Maen pried open old wave turbines and rewired defunct gliders. She had questions, always questions.

One day, she found something forbidden.

A replica of a combustion chamber, locked in a teaching archive. It was an ancient experiment – purely theoretical. A pressurised chamber, fuel injection, flame release. It was described as a ‘flame trap’ – an ‘engine’ that stole motion from fire.

“Why was this never built?” Maen asked her tutor-cloud.

“Because it consumes without returning,” the voice replied. “It converts potential into ash.”

“But it works.”

“So does jumping off a cliff.”

Maen did not ask again – but she remembered.

Years passed. Maen grew into an engineer of interstellar vessels. Her people had reached the stars on sun-drives, their ships shaped like mirrored kites, folded through space-time without ever touching fire. Maen captained  the Quora, the first vessel to attempt contact – not just exploration.

The planet they had chosen: Earth.

When the Quora entered Sol’s orbit, what they saw astonished them.

The planet itself was blue and gold and green – a sibling to Orilen in many ways. But the air was stained, the seas swollen, the poles bleeding. Great cities burned beneath clouds of carbon. From orbit, they saw vast strips of blackened land, machines vomiting smoke into the sky, towers glowing with flame.

And yet … life. So much life. Radio chatter, music, satellites, space stations. A species, barely surviving its own progress. Earthlings had developed technology in a few centuries that had taken the Orileni many millennia.

“They are us,” Maen whispered. “But a version that lit the fire.”

“They burn to live,” said her second officer, “and live to burn.”

Council protocol demanded non-interference. The Orileni had never imposed their ways, not even on one another.

But Maen stood in the observation chamber, watching Earth’s destruction bloom across its surface, and felt a terrible pull.

“If we leave them,” she said, “they will die. But if we intervene – if we show them what we are – they may twist it. They may burn us too.”

The Council debated. The Quora drifted in orbit for three Earth days.

Then Maen did what no Orileni had done before: she defied silence.

She launched a child’s message pod. Not technology. Not a gift. Just a story. Her own story.

It fell through Earth’s atmosphere like a shooting star, self-guided to a quiet forest near a research station. No metal. No radio. Just a flexible crystal slate, and etched upon it in pictographic script:

“This is how we rose without fire.”

Back on Orilen, Maen returned to her work. She never knew how her story was received. But sometimes, at night, she stood beneath the black sky and wondered.

And sometimes, far across the stars, a radio telescope somewhere on Earth would catch an impossible pulse. Not noise. Not static.

Something patterned. Gentle. Like the flicker of a flame that never burned.

Part Three to follow …