Rebel and Jedi emblems with galaxy fill

Forty years ago, while the Meridian blockade still hung over the gas moons, a cartographer called Oswin Pell drew a ring of fourteen signal stations on the back of a ration card. Each station had a wing-shaped mark for the scattered fleet, and at the centre a small blade of blue light for the old wardens who were never allowed to sign anything. He painted the whole thing over the night sky he could see through a cracked viewport: teal where the dust clouds ran thickest, violet where they thinned, and tiny white flecks for every station the Meridian men had not yet found.

The blockade ended the year your grandfather was born, though nobody announced it. The card went missing somewhere between two repair docks, and Oswin spent the rest of his life redrawing it from memory on whatever scrap was to hand. Your grandfather learned the design from those scraps and never once saw the original. When he sewed it on that jacket, he said it was a map of where people might be, not where they were.

I am writing this because on the dock yesterday I saw a cargo tug with that same ring painted on its hull, faded almost to nothing, and the white flecks were still there, exactly where Oswin had put them. Don't go looking for the card. Keep the sky, and let it guide you home.