There are misconceptions about space, distance, and time. These all stem from the basic fact that none of us can really comprehend any of these things, and we're forced to rely on rough estimations and guesses. Our very existence is something of an enigma we never quite solve. If we were to comprehend, to fully grasp the scale of the universe, there is little debate over the matter: one's head would likely explode.

This is just a simple fact. Infinity can't be understood on an intimate level, and between you and the next object in a room, one could debate there is an infinitely vast amount of space. You could look closer at something forever, and never truly reach an end. Distance, is therefore a fickle thing to try and wrap one's mind about, and if it is to be accepted, one must understand that life could not exist if it lacked the ability to accept, generalize, and ignore.

Frontier life, was at its purest essence, a monument to those three principles.

When your life is a constant testament to survival, and the entire planet could turn against you at any time... Well you could expect individuals in the circumstance to be very good at all of those things. What wasn't right in front of you, beneath your feet, or on your fields, was mostly irrelevant. Thus it was, at least for those that live on the very edge of the galaxy, only a select few might have become aware of a rather strange fact about the void. If you look closely, and then closer still, one might find that awesome expanse of empty space isn't quite as empty as one might first believe.

Still, as to why someone along the frontiers would bother with such a thing is a reasonable debate in and of itself, but a small portion surely would regardless, and a smaller portion of those still would see the impossible.

Scattered about the black between galaxies, and their vast swirling storms of matter, energy, and perhaps life... there is little to nothing. A generalization that all but over looks the fact, that there is something beyond.

In the great expanse of almost nothing, lone stars float along with their systems, along with left over matter and debris that has escaped the clutches of the large forces of gravity in the near infinite distance.

There are systems out there, among the darkness.

Lonely systems.

For the unfortunate circumstance of life to evolve on one of these rare stars, one would have to imagine that they might be trapped by the sheer impossibility of escape. When you're 60 million light years- perhaps more, from the nearest galaxy, there is nowhere to go. Indeed an entire civilization would rise, live, grow, and die, without ever leaving such a purgatory. Without ever seeing another species.

It is more than likely that this has been the case when one considers the infinite possibilities that lurk in the ever distant sky.

A rare few, though, might look at such a distance and consider it a challenge. Rarer still, a species may find a way to conquer it provided the correct motivation- even if it takes them entire generations. Entire lives of those who would never be anywhere but between the gap, so to speak.

No matter where you go, survival, curiosity, and revenge, are of the strongest motivators life will ever possess; as it was, Humanity possessed them all.

...

Unlike the military ships that had guarded their flight from the system, the ring ships possessed a means of FTL travel. It wasn't quick, not at its start, but it was possible. The longer they flew across the unknown, the faster they became.

Their escape was not just from the enemy, but the galaxy itself. That which threatened to consume them.

When the crews finally manned their ships to reach the decided refuge in the black, the rest of humanity awoke from their cryosleep. It had taken them two hundred years. The crews had taken shifts on twenty year rotations- of loneliness and solitude, so that when they finally arrived, they could stand together one final time.

Their bodies were buried on the fertile soil of New Earth. Their names etched in pillars of glass, metal, and stone. Their sacrifice would never be forgotten, and that ground would be forever sacred.

Of the hundreds of ring-ships that had left Earth as refugees, only seventy three had survived the journey. Some had been lost to the will of luck- a comet or an asteroid; some had suffered malfunction- and fell from their long acceleration to coast the void alone... millions of years from refuge. Humanity truly did mourn those first years.

It was said long ago, that phoenix must burn, to rise again.

Mankind rose, from the ashes of their very mantle, and from the corpse of their very heritage they stood. In the distant sky, a beautiful milky spiral taunted them.

From those same ashes, hands reached down and gripped the still burning coals, while blood trickled off them into the foreign soil.

Humanity did not forget.