Under the Aurora

You unlatch the outer door and step into a silence so total it rings. The aurora unfurls overhead in slow, liturgical sweeps—green bleeding into violet, violet into a blue so deep it feels like drowning. Your breath crystallizes the instant it leaves you and falls, tinkling, to the snow.

On the horizon, a single point of warm light pulses. It looks like a lantern. It looks like a window. It looks, impossibly, like the sun.

You take one step toward it and the cold reaches through your parka with patient fingers. Another step, and the light seems closer. Or you are smaller. Behind you, Vostok-9 is already a black smudge, the open door a wound leaking yellow generator-light into the dark.

Two paths. One ends. One waits.