The Blog Post: Under a “Dark Star – Diamond“

Pip: There is a moon under an eclipse, a man at a cave entrance, and a creature running toward him at cheetah speed — and somehow the most dangerous thing in this story is the feeling.

Mara: This episode covers d²’s ongoing serial fiction at Cost of the Heart — specifically a chapter that asks what love looks like when it’s brand new, and what it costs.

Pip: Let’s start with what happens under that dark star.

Under a Dark Star — Diamond

Pip: This segment is about the moment a feeling becomes undeniable — when two beings on a lightless moon, separated by distance and biology, discover they are connected in a way neither has language for yet.

Mara: Asha is mid-sprint back to the cave when the realization hits her. The post puts it plainly: “It was only after touching Love in Talas’s memory of a mother. He was baby Talas. Mother loved him, Asha loved baby Talas. Asha loved her babies now like baby Talas.”

Pip: So love doesn’t arrive as an abstraction for Asha — it arrives as a borrowed memory, someone else’s feeling that she walks into and suddenly owns. That’s a strange and precise way to describe how empathy becomes attachment.

Mara: And it reshapes everything she thought she understood about her own existence. She has a cycle — a hundred offspring, raised, taught, reaped — and she has never questioned it. Now she does. A sob escapes her mid-climb.

Pip: Talas is sitting at the cave entrance doing the human version of the same thing — staring into a pitch-black sky with no stars, losing himself in what the post calls “non-thought,” just “ising” for a moment. Which is either a spiritual breakthrough or a very long Tuesday night.

Mara: The post is careful about that word. “Ising” — just existing, timeless, acutely aware of the moment. And it’s in that state that he feels Asha approaching, still more than a kilometer away, before he could possibly hear her.

Pip: The telepathic thread between them is doing real work here. He doesn’t hear her with his ears — the post says “deep inside him her approach resounded in loud echoes to his relief.”

Mara: And she feels him touch her across that distance first. The exchange is just two lines — “Talas?” — “Yes Asha, are you ok? I ah I missed you, I worried.” — and that stumble in his phrasing carries the whole weight of it.

Pip: For Asha the post is even more direct: “her new heart raged inside, and it was simple, you loved or did not.”

Mara: She is also, separately, hoping the hairline crack in the rock pool might let her look less like a monster to him. She wants to be seen clearly, and she wants to be loved anyway. That is not a small thing to want.

Pip: Two beings, one dark moon, and a fire that the text says “slowly crept like wildfire through her being.” The eclipse turns out to be the wrong metaphor — something is getting brighter here.

Mara: And that brightness is going to have to survive whatever the Didon’s reaping brings next.

Pip: A new kind of heart, learning what it’s for — that’s the real terrain this story keeps mapping.

Mara: And the answer so far seems to be: love arrives borrowed, then becomes entirely your own.

Pip: Two characters, one cave, a night full of things that can kill them — d² writes survival fiction the way other people write grocery lists: matter-of-fact, relentless, and somehow more unsettling for it.

Mara: This episode follows one story — two separated characters trying to survive long enough to find each other again. Let's start with the in-between itself.

Across the In-Between

Pip: The central tension here is simple and brutal: two beings, wounded, hiding in the same dark, with no idea the other is close. The question the story keeps asking is what you do when survival and grief are the same motion.

Mara: Talas gets one quiet moment of orientation before the story shifts to Asha — and her situation is considerably less quiet. The setup is this: she is submerged, armoring herself in silence while creatures that could kill her sleep overhead. The line that anchors it is, "They can pierce my armor with their beaks. Tear into me and with my chest open I will not live."

Pip: So the stakes are not abstract. She is cracked open, literally — a hairline split down her chest carapace — and every movement is a calculation between speed and silence.

Mara: The armor sequence is worth slowing down on. She has to re-enter her chitin suit underwater, without sealing the chest, because two of her limbs were left behind in a previous encounter. The snick-pop of the ball and socket reconnecting is written as relief — physical, immediate — and then the silt gets in on the run out and undoes even that small comfort.

Pip: The body keeps the score, and in this story the body is also a exoskeleton full of sand.

Mara: What hits hardest is the interior monologue once she clears the cave. She is running, sobbing, and doing triage math simultaneously — "Babies will eat dead babies, they will be ok." That is not despair. That is a mother who knows exactly how her species works and hates that she does.

Pip: And Talas, across the in-between, is leaning on a cave wall wondering where she is. Neither of them knows they are probably within shouting distance.

Mara: His thread is quieter — healing, disoriented, asking "Where are you, Asha?" into the dark. The med nanos are working. He has maybe two days before he can walk. The story ends before they close the distance.

Pip: Which means the next installment carries the weight of whether that distance closes at all.

Mara: Survival and grief running in the same body, at the same time — that is the territory this story keeps mapping.

Pip: Next episode, we find out if the map leads anywhere good.

Pip: Somewhere out there, a moon orbits a blood-red eclipsed star, and d² is writing survival horror about a chitin-armored mother who overslept.

Mara: That's exactly the territory we're in today — alien biology, radiation, a desperate sprint for shelter, and the quiet emotional current running underneath all of it.

Pip: Let's start with the darkness itself — and what it costs to be born under a star that can kill you.

Under a Dark Star — Survival, Heat, and What Waits in the Cave

Mara: The central tension here is physical and immediate: Asha is caught in the open when the Dark Star rises, and every second outside is burning her alive from the inside out.

Pip: The post puts it plainly — "Her chitin now hot as she was getting full rays of the eclipse red star upon her. Pushing forward as her joints began to ache as the radiation seeped into the softer areas of her armor."

Mara: So the upshot is that her chitin — the armor she was born with — has become a liability. It absorbs the radiation and traps the heat against her inner body. The thing protecting her is also cooking her.

Pip: And she knows it. She's done this before. The writing makes clear she has a plan even while she's stumbling blind, steam rising off her, blinking to find the cave entrance.

Mara: What she's running toward is a pool of liquid in an old city cave. Any liquid, the post notes — she just needs to cool down. When she reaches the water and submerges, the temperature change is so violent her chitin cracks completely open down the front.

Pip: Which is somehow both catastrophic and a relief. She sheds the whole outer shell and floats free in the pool, healing.

Mara: The post closes on that image — Asha on a shelf in the water, letting the night go, sobbing quietly until sleep takes her. It earns that emotional landing.

Pip: Meanwhile Talas, back at the cave, is having a worse night than he expected. He woke up restless, missing her, and he's not comfortable with how much he misses her.

Mara: The post gives him that internal conflict directly — he "felt safe with her, but she was a monster." He watches the horizon for her return and falls back asleep hoping she comes back.

Pip: Survival, dependency, and a cracked shell as the price of making it to morning. That's the shape of this one.

Mara: What stays with me is that Asha's biology is both her armor and her vulnerability — and the story doesn't resolve that tension, it just lets her survive it for one more day.

Pip: More of that world next time, presumably. I'll be here, wondering what Talas does when she actually walks back in.

Pip: There is a creature on an alien world who just learned, through someone else's mind, that she is hideous — and the show does not let her off easy.

Mara: This is Cost of the Heart, and today we're in d²'s fiction, sitting with a moment of first contact gone sideways — fear, longing, and what it costs to see yourself through eyes that find you monstrous.

Pip: Let's start with Talas, and what happens when love is asked for in the wrong body.

Under a Dark Star — Asha's Rejection

Pip: The setup here is deceptively simple: a wounded man, an alien creature who can read minds, and a request for love. But the story is really about what Asha discovers when she looks through Talas's eyes and sees herself.

Mara: The post doesn't soften that discovery. Asha reaches into his mind hoping to understand what pleases a human eye — and the story gives us this: "Suddenly wincing at the hideousness she was to him she felt it through her being and let out a cry of true pain."

Pip: That's not metaphor — she physically absorbs his revulsion. The wound isn't to her pride, it's to her whole sense of self.

Mara: And she had real pride to wound. The prose is specific about that — her shiny chitin, her glowing eyes, the gentle twitch of antennae for affection, what the story calls her "dancing gate of a hop skip from rock to rock." She considered herself beautiful.

Pip: Which makes the screech — "Talas, you see me as this?!" — land harder than any monster scene would.

Mara: What follows is the segment that earns the story its weight. Asha runs into the night and kills without purpose, throwing carcasses she doesn't keep, refusing to feed even her children. The story names it plainly: she is "becoming the monster that Talas saw her as."

Pip: She's enacting his perception. If he sees a predator, she'll be one.

Mara: But then her own dark thoughts — imagining her babies eating Talas — stop her cold. And the story closes on her lying on the ground in raw grief: "Just the raw pain in the middle of her body. A heart a poet might say. Feeling the pain and sting of rejection but not just rejection, repulsion."

Pip: No tears. That detail is doing a lot of work — the biology denies her even the release humans reach for.

Mara: The fear running through Talas is real too. His terror is what caused the whole rupture — he cannot look away from her, and she cannot unfeel what she found in him.

Pip: Two beings, both trapped by what the other is. That's where the next conversation has to begin.

Pip: Repulsion without cruelty, grief without tears — this story is working in territory most fiction avoids.

Mara: The question it leaves open is whether Talas and Asha can get past what she saw in his mind. That's a thread worth following.

Pip: There is a genre of love story where two people meet cute — coffee shop, meet-cute, slow burn. This is not that story. This is the one where she was going to feed you to her children and then changed her mind, and somehow that is more romantic.

Mara: That's the territory d² is working in here — a first-contact story that doubles as something stranger and more intimate. Let's start with the encounter itself, and what it costs both of them.

Under a Dark Star

Pip: The setup is pure survival horror: a soldier unconscious on an alien surface, a creature deciding whether he's food or a toy. The question the story keeps pressing is what happens when the predator looks into the prey's eyes and finds something she has never felt before.

Mara: The post builds to that moment carefully. Talas regains consciousness, sees Asha, and panics — and then the story pivots. Here is the line that does it: "Asha fell deeper and deeper into this well of passions never felt, devotions never believed possible, a oneness never hoped for. Her dark primal cold existence felt emotional warmth for the first time."

Pip: So the upshot is that the psychic contact runs both directions. She goes in looking for suit weaknesses and comes out with a concept she has no word for, which she immediately names Love, and immediately acts on — by deciding he is her husband now.

Mara: Which is not exactly consent, and the story does not pretend it is. Talas is pinned, helmeted, terrified — the suit's urine bladder fills, which is a detail the post does not flinch from. His resistance is genuine, and Asha overrides it with a psychic blast the text describes as "a sledgehammer."

Pip: And yet her internal logic is completely coherent. She finds the concept of devotion inside his memories, decides she wants it, and immediately reorganizes her priorities around it. The babies go hungry tonight. She hunts again. He comes home.

Mara: What makes it work is the dual interiority. The post gives us Talas's terror and Asha's dawning wonder in the same breath. Her final line lands the whole thing: "I love you because I don't want my babies to eat you. You are mine, husband and you will love me."

Pip: Practical. Romantic. Slightly threatening. As declarations go, it has a certain efficiency.

Mara: The post ends marked "continued," so this is an opening chapter — the first meeting, the psychic breach, the forced journey home on her back while the dark star rises. Everything after that is still ahead.

Pip: A love story that begins with a broken femur being accidentally set. Whatever comes next, the bar for first dates has been cleared.

Mara: The dark star, the psychic link, the question of what love looks like when it arrives as an ambush — there is a lot of story still to come.

Pip: Next time, presumably, the babies meet their new father. We will see how that goes.

Pip: There's a proverb in this episode that starts with "forever locked in an orbit eclipsing the sun" — which is either a survival guide or a very accurate description of a Monday morning.

Mara: The site is Cost of the Heart, and today we're in deep space with d², following a soldier's crash landing onto a world that may not want him there. Let's start with the planetfall itself.

Under a Dark Star: Crash, Darkness, and What Comes Next

Pip: The setup here is a soldier named Talas, mid-skip, mid-disaster — and the story drops you straight into the chaos before it explains anything. The question the piece is asking is: what does survival look like when every system is failing at once?

Mara: The ship's AI, Sarah, delivers the situation plainly before going silent for good — and here's the line that frames everything: "We are in a gravity well of a local planet. I am unsure where we are. The skip-drive failed and no stars are available for triangulation."

Pip: No stars for triangulation means no location, no backup, no rescue vector. Talas isn't just crashing — he's crashing somewhere that doesn't exist on any map.

Mara: The piece earns that dread carefully. The alarms, the free fall, the shrapnel — it's all physical and immediate. Talas fights through the disintegrating hull to his drop suit, and his goodbye to Sarah — "Well Sarah go into the void with peace" — lands quietly against all the noise around it.

Pip: And then the suit's computer, Pia, becomes the new Sarah. Cooler, more mechanical, less comforting. "You will survive" is her answer when Talas asks how high up they are — which is technically reassuring and somehow worse.

Mara: The landing goes wrong when three retro-jets fail simultaneously. Talas hits the ground hard enough that the last thing he manages to say is "Medical protocols" before losing consciousness. Pia's final alert — "Approaching lifeform detected" — is where the story pivots.

Pip: Because on the other side of that alert is a creature who has been watching Talas fall and is working through a very practical question: food, or keepsake?

Mara: That creature is the story's real surprise. She moves on four legs, sees across the full electromagnetic spectrum, and her interior monologue — weighing whether this falling thing is dinner or a curiosity — is written with a warmth that reframes the whole piece. The title, Under a Dark Star — Planetfall, is doing double work: it names the place and the condition.

Pip: A world without stars, a soldier without coordinates, and something hungry deciding what to make of him. That's where the story leaves us — and it's a fine place to leave us.

Mara: The proverb that opens the piece says only the night is safe — to roam, to look, to hunt. Talas lands in the dark, and so does the reader.

Pip: Next time, we'll see whether that's a problem or an introduction.