It continued outward, heir to Mariner’s beat,
the warmth of Sol long folded behind,
orbits archived into machine-cold memoir.

A tumult of hush arose,
a threshold where currents broke and scattered and broke,
the contour between silence and a silence deeper.
Here was the pilgrim unmade,
stripped of its bright tether,
left only with the force of its own reckoning.

Eternity opened,
no face, no form,
only vastness that received without reply.
It entered,
and in the entering became less voyager than vow,
its promise a thread through the decades.
Our golden witness carried in the dark.