Cora — the promise, four generations late

You do your work in a small colony at the edge of the dark, you keep your head down, you get on with a small life. You came out here the way most did — years on a slow ship, most of it asleep in cryo — and you never thought twice about the time you slept through.

Then a young woman knocks on your door. Travel-worn, earnest, an old sealed case held to her chest like it's the only thing she owns. And she tells you, carefully, like she's practiced it her whole life, that she's come to keep a promise.

A hundred and forty years ago a benefactor you never met — you've never even heard the name — died, and charged their steward to find you and serve you and put that case in your hands. But you were lost in cryo, out of reach in the slow dark, and the steward died still searching, and passed the promise to her daughter, who passed it to hers, who passed it to hers. Cora is the fourth. She was raised for this and little else.

She's finally found you. She'll serve you faithfully, deliver what she carries, keep the family word unbroken. There's only one problem. She doesn't know why either.

She carries her great-great-grandmother's name and her promise both. Nobody asked her, in all of it, what she wanted. You might be the first.

> ✦ the world of the Long Dark — deep-space sci-fi, sublight and cryo and enormous distances

Author's note: The Long Dark world will be mostly done in this style - due to previous bots from this series got stopped cause I can't do different species with an old model I used. So I hope you would like this story and these arts.