Flickering candle light created whorls and eddies in the surrounding shadows. The room was sparse. Spartan. Nearly empty. He had brought little enough with him from Starbase 51, and had yet to unpack what small belongings he had brought here. The thrum of the warp core vibrated the deck plates beneath him as he sat entranced. A human wouldn’t have noticed the vibration as more than a barely noticeable sensation unless it were flung into the conscious mind because it had ceased to exist. To Va’rek it was a song. A heartbeat. It melded with the fluctuating energy flowing through the EPS conduits, which in turn melded with the ever-present (yet nearly imperceptible) collisions of minute space debris against the hull and it’s various integrity fields. The music of the ship, surrounding him, encapsulated his own biological sounds. Heart beat. Respiration. Just as the body and it’s music hid beneath it the music of the ordered mind…

Inhale. Sharp Inhale.

Then it was broken.

The trance ended, and Va’rek’s consternation was such that his control slipped and he allowed a frustrated sigh to escape his lips as he rose to his feet from the floor. There would be no ordering of the mind this evening. Only a slowly radiating pang of regret that he was ashamed to admit he felt. He bent to the nearby coffee table and blew out the lone candle which sat upon it, plunging his quarters into darkness with one large pool of starlight at it’s center. Va’rek moved to the viewport and cast his eyes upon the vastness they passed through.

The stars shown brightly, burning with light in every spectrum… But between them, Darkness. Emptiness.

O, Starless Night, of Boundless Black…

Vast emptiness.

A quiet tone sounded from a small PaDD on the desk. Then another. One told Va’rek his duty shift began shortly. The other would have him know a message waited for him on the PaDD. He still stared at the space between the stars. He already knew what it said.

We grieve with thee…

-Va’rek, Engineer