Return To Tamaran

Once upon a time, a small cylinder arrived at Titans Tower from very far away.

It was a Tamaranean courier probe, warm from its journey through hyperspace. Inside was a message in the formal script of the royal court, beginning with Koriand'r's name. Ion storms had swept the Vega system and cracked the crystalline energy nodes inside Tamaran's ancient palace conduits — channels that carried sunlight through the city for those who needed it most, the very young and the elderly. Could Koriand'r come?

She could. She would.

Robin packed immediately. She had not asked him to come; he simply started, the way Titans do when something important requires not going alone.

Three days through the Vega system in a borrowed spacecraft. Robin sat at the navigation console, studying charts with the calm focus he always brought to new territory. Koriand'r sat at the port window and watched the stars go past and remembered everything — the twin suns warm on her skin, the silver-leafed trees rustling in the palace gardens, the harmonic sound her people made when they were celebrating. She had not heard that sound in years.

Then Tamaran appeared through the window.

Both suns were low in the late afternoon, and their combined light fell across the planet in amber and gold. The silver-leafed forests. The palace towers. She made a soft sound. Robin looked over and then quietly away, giving her a moment.

The welcome was formal at first — High Councillors in ceremony sashes spoke the correct words of arrival, and there were formal bows and the careful language of the court. But what moved Koriand'r most was what came after the ceremony. Children who had been born years after she left Tamaran — children who had grown up with her name as a story their parents told — pressed forward to see her. An old warrior she recognized from her earliest training pressed both fists to his heart in the warrior's salute, eyes bright with something that might have been pride. And a very small girl with eyes like polished copper pushed through the crowd, stood in front of her, and pressed a single silver-leafed branch into her hands without a word. Just looked up at her with serious, trusting eyes.

Koriand'r held the branch carefully.

The conduit repair took a full day. She flew into the shafts herself, navigating the deep passages, firing small, precise starbolts into each broken node — not battle-fire but something softer, like sunlight through a prism, focused and warm. Each node took careful work.

Click. One reactivated. Click. Another. One by one through the long hours.

Late in the day she reached the last node, felt the energy gather warm in her palms, and released it in one steady beam.

The crystal blazed. Light flooded upward through the district in a wide, golden bloom.

From beyond the walls came the Tamaranean harmonic of celebration — a sound she had not heard since childhood — four hundred voices rising together into the amber sky.

She stood in the courtyard and let it move through her.

Before departure, the High Councillor asked quietly whether she might return permanently. A place. A duty. A throne, if she wished it.

She took a moment. She thought of the silver-leafed branch in her pack. She thought of Jump City's harbor and Robin on the roof and Cyborg's chili and the way Beast Boy turned into a puppy when she was sad and Raven's small, private smile. She thought of the parking lot crater and the English word "home."

She thanked him. She said: Tamaran lives in me and always will. But I have chosen somewhere else to be, and I choose it every day, and that is not a small thing.

Robin was at the ship. She climbed aboard, and Tamaran fell away below until it was a small amber circle between two bright points of light.

She still had the silver-leafed branch. It sat in her pack.

Tamaran had made her. Earth had welcomed her. She chose Earth every single day, and that choice — freely made, renewed with intention — was its own kind of love.

Close your eyes. Think of the places that shaped you, and the place that is yours to keep.

Both of them belong to you.

Sleep well.