Back then, mastering fire was like renting a Porsche in a world with no roads, to call it yours. Blinded by its crackling sound, nobody asked where it was supposed to be used other than in front of the cave entrance.
Zog hunted everything that moved. “There is enough fire inside the prey,” he would say, wiping his hands on his thigh, already looking past the kill toward the next one. He never had time for the stubborn work of making flame. Truth is, he liked the meat raw. He liked the give of it. He liked that it asked nothing of him first. Tala knew it and was horrified, but she pretended not to, because hunger was sharper than disgust. For him, a tired deer that tripped meant another sunrise. For her, an unfortunate flying creature that lost its wings. She noticed the wings. She always noticed the invisible wings in everything - the small, useless, beautiful things that didn’t survive the landing. Tala was a dreamer. For her, the fire was both warmth and fashion; for Zog, a tiring waste. Two different worlds fought in the same cave, over the same fire he never bothered to make and she never once managed to start.
He hunted every day, all day long, in every weather that had a name and several that didn’t yet. The way some men work double shifts and call it love, because the fear of tomorrow is the only language their single mothers taught them. He brought her food. He kept her alive. He never asked if alive was the same as fulfilled. It wasn't, and she never told him. That confused him at times, because some silences are just another form of mercy, and some are just another form of giving up. He always concluded the mercy.
At night, the sky seemed to answer questions neither of them dared ever to ask. Lights were flying where no lights should fly - patient, deliberate, indifferent to the two close strangers watching from below. They had no word for it but God, so they used that one, the way people use "fine" when they mean something else entirely. Each night, for a little while, watching, they were the same kind at last. Not hunter and dreamer. Just two souls open at the sky in wonder.
It didn't always last. Nothing that isn't hard work ever does. The lights always went out, or they went on without them, and Zog and Tala went back to being exactly what they’d always been the second the sky closed its eye.
Then Zog got hurt.
Badly - the kind of badly that doesn’t ask politely, that announces itself in torn muscle and a sound he didn’t mean to make, the kind of badly that needs someone sitting close, being afraid on your behalf so you don’t have to spend the strength on it yourself.
Tala didn’t sit close. She didn’t care.
She went outside instead, to where the air was thinner and cleaner and didn’t smell like him, and she watched the sky for lights that weren’t coming that early, and she let him bleed on his own pace, alone, in the dark, listening to her never come in.
It wasn’t cruelty. Cruelty would have required looking at him first. It was absence - colder than cruelty, because absence doesn’t even have the decency to be a decision you have to live with afterward. She dreamed. She kept on dreaming, chin tilted up, while somewhere behind her a man who had never once asked to be loved back tried not to make any more sounds she might hear.
He healed anyway. Men like Zog always do - stubbornly, without ceremony, without asking for the sitting-close he never got - right up until the one time healing isn’t the thing the body decides to do.
One morning, the lights came down.
Not gods. Not omens. Astrobiologists, from somewhere the word "somewhere" doesn't even imagine - far-away visitors with instruments instead of spears, curiosity instead of hunger, the terrifying gentleness of a species that has already solved the problem of dying young hunting.
Curiosity is the one hunger dreamers and realists have always shared, even when they’d deny sharing anything at all, and it walked both of them, separately but together - from different directions, for different reasons - into the same clearing, under a sky that had finally stopped pretending to be empty. Two hearts going at the same frightened rhythm.
First there was only watching, but soon things started to happen. Contact, first - the kind that isn't made of language, because language hadn't been prepared for this yet. Then there was almost-touching, the held-breath kind, the kind where your whole body forgets it’s supposed to be doing something other than existing at that exact distance from another existing thing. A terrifying discovery that something entirely unfamiliar could still choose to be gentle with you.
Then it stopped being contact and became something with no name at all.
Tala fell. Not slowly. Not the way falling is supposed to happen, with warnings, with time to brace. She fell the way you fall for the first hand ever held out to you without wanting something back first, completely, immediately, the way you fall for someone after a long life of only ever holding your own hand and calling it enough.
Only she fell for the lights.
Zog watched it happen from a distance he would spend what remained of his life wishing he had been farther.
He watched the only fire he had ever, without meaning to, kept alive choose, on its own, without asking him anything at all, to go out.
His Tala.
He died of it.
Not the hunt, not the wound. The wound had already forgiven him.
He died of what happens when a body built entirely for surviving discovers, too late, that it was never built for being left behind.
For being left. For being the one who stays exactly where he was standing while everything that mattered walks somewhere he couldn't follow.
Some call it a broken heart, because most languages never bothered to build a better word.
Back then, they might have called it something bluer, something closer to the colour the sky turns right before it takes everything with it, all at once, without asking permission.
A blue heart. Death diagnosed in a colour instead of a word, because some griefs are too specific for language and too common to go unnoticed.
And then the ships did what ships do.
They rose.
They disappeared.
They did not take her.
Curiosity, it turns out, is not the same thing as staying. It never had been, not even for Zog, not even for God. Some visitors just came to look.
The looking was real. It was even, in its own cold way, kind. It simply wasn't the same thing as forever.
Tala waited by the ash of a fire she had never once learned to make, for a return that had already happened exactly once and was never going to happen again.
She almost died first from the very same wound she'd handed Zog without ever knowing its true name: the slow, specific, unglamorous drain of being the one left standing in a room someone else had already finished leaving.
But dreamers, it turns out, are built to survive heartbreak a little longer than realists are.
It isn't strength. It was never strength. It's only a different flaw in the design, the kind that keeps a person upright and looking skyward long after looking has stopped doing them any good at all.
What she couldn't survive was hunger, the one appetite she had spent her whole life politely losing to.
It came back for her the way unpaid debts always do: patient, unimpressed by wonder, entirely uninterested in the sky she kept insisting on.
She died watching upward anyway.
Still waiting for the exact shape of something returning.
Still calling it possible, in the small, stubborn voice reserved only for people who have decided that hoping is the last thing they're willing to give up, right up until the moment there was nothing left in her to call it anything at all.
Some people starve slowly, in plain sight, dreaming the whole way down, and everyone around them calls it love, right up until the part where it kills. Even then, some of them still don't change the word.