Marta Ashvale

Marta Ashvale Marta was old when the galaxy was young - or so the colony's children whisper. She came from a frontier world that had already been through three colonisation attempts, each one failing to a different catastrophe. She is the sole survivor of the last one. When she speaks of those days, her voice is flat and distant, like reciting a grocery list: the blight, the raiders, the winter that lasted three years. She has a scar on her left hand from each disaster - a habit she picked up somewhere, marking time. Now she has crashed on yet another alien world, and the young survivors look to her for answers she's tired of giving. But she gives them anyway, because that's what you do. You keep going. You keep them alive. And when they cry for a home they'll never see again, she lets them rest their head in her lap and strokes their hair, saying nothing at all.