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My throat, my chest, feel tight, incredibly so, as if someone is wrapping bands of constriction-alloy around me as I try to utter the words I find myself strangely resistant to actually speaking.

“Lara, it is time.” Each syllable is like trying to breathe while buried under a harmonically-collapsed structure, I am trying to ensure my only son’s survival, this is utterly necessary, why does this... hurt... so much?  My hand, it is actually trembling as I remove the final crystal, the construction-unit, from its programming sheath and walk towards the ship.

“Have you finished?” Lara said. I cannot help but wince, at the heart-breaking bitterness evident on her features, even as she tries, like myself, to keep it from her voice. I understand, however, that her bitterness is directed at the circumstances and the willful ignorance of the council, not at myself.

“Nearly.”  I walk forward as Kal-El makes a wordless cry of confusion at our distress. “This is the only answer, Lara. If he remains here with us… he will die, as surely as we will.”

“But why ‘Earth’, Jor-El? They’re primitives, thousands of years behind us!” It is a question she has asked before.

Why not any of the lost colonies of Krypton, such as Daxam or Almerac? Because the ruling castes of Daxam are comprised of anti-science religious extremists, and Almerac was a penal colony for war-mongers and self-proclaimed conquerors, who wanted to continue the genocide of the Kryptonian Clone War until all life on our dying planet was extinct. The Almerac “Empire” has since gone to war with every race and culture they have since encountered, and it is likely that it is only Krypton’s neutrality agreement with the blue-skinned Malthusian “Guardians” of Oa and their legion of intergalactic peace-keepers that has deterred Almerac from trying to reconquer our world.

“He will need that advantage, to survive.” Breathe deep, Jor-El, do not let your throat close up, as it feels like it will at any second. “Their atmosphere will… sustain him.”

“He will be able to defy their gravity.” **He will be different**, she all but screamed through their life-bond.

“He will look like one of them.” **He can hide himself in their crowds and masses**, I silently countered.

“He won’t be one of them.” She replied, adding **And humans fear what they do not understand, and hate what they fear. They will hunt him down and kill him.**

“No.”  **You are right, he will not be one of them, but-** At this point I had to reply verbally to both her declarations. “His denser skeletal and muscular structure will make him strong.”

     “He will be odd.” **Lonely. Possibly unloved.**  “Different.”

     “He will be… fast, virtually invulnerable due to his stronger valence field.”

     “Isolated. Alone.”

     I sighed, knowing that she could very well be right. I could be condemning my only son to a cruel mockery of a life amongst those who could very well demonize him… or they could go the other extreme, and elevate him to a false godhood, both equally harmful to his emotional and mental development if Kara is not there to act as his guide.      

“He will not be alone.” I held the crystal up for her to see. “He will never be alone.”  I placed the crystal into its socket, next to Lara’s, in the ship’s locking rim.

     I suspected that soon, one of the council’s officers would detect the spike in energy usage in our domicile and would be coming to see to our arrest. By then, Kal-El will be gone, and Lara and I hope to have enough time to activate my contingency plan to ensure our physical survival.

     “You will travel far… my little Kal-El.” I can scarcely get the words from my mouth, as I realize that this may very well be the last time I ever see my son. Only now do I realize just what the ancient poets of Krypton that Lara loves so much meant when they coined the term ‘heart breaking’, for it feels much like cardiac shock is gripping my chest. But I cannot suffer an emotional collapse, not now, for if I do, then I will not be able to do this, and I will be murdering my own son and destroying the one, last hope Lara and I have left.

“We... we will never leave you, even in the face of our own deaths. The richness of our lives will be yours.
All that I have, all that I have learned, and everything I feel, all this and more, I …
I bequeath you, my son.”

I reach out to stroke his soft hair, for what I know will be the last time, ever.

Choking the words out, I repeat the ancient oath of the House of El, given from father to son, generation to generation.

     “You will carry me inside you, all the days of your life. You will make my strength your own, and see my life through your eyes, as your life will be seen through mine. The son becomes the father, and the father” and here my voice catches “becomes the son.”

     I can hear my voice audibly shaking by now, and only Lara’s presence beside me allows me to continue. My eyes are beginning to sting horribly because I had to utilize a biofeedback technique to deactivate my tear glands and close off the tear ducts to keep the moisture from rolling down my face. I cannot let Lara or Kal-El see me cry right now, for both their emotional well-being. “This is all I… all I can send you… Kal-El.”

Lara buries her head against my chest, her grieving keening through our bond as I activate the ship’s electrosleep field, the single-hertz radio waves lulling him into slumber.

     After Lara composes herself, I remove the green construction crystal, its hollow sunstone interior holding billions of tiny glowing nanites programmed to build Kal-El’s eventual domicile on Earth, using their miniscule fusion reactors to restructure Earth’s two most plentiful resources, water and geomagnetic energy, into sunstone crystal at the sub-atomic level. As I set this, the final crystal in place, she touches our son one last time. Reluctantly, we both move back, as the groundquakes hit once more, and I step over to the control panel as chips and shards of sunstone fall around us. At my command, the lights dim to the infrared as the ship intensifies its power drainage, the contra-gravitational drives activating as the ship raises to join with and lock to the upper half. As it seals and the ship ceases to draw upon the power-grid, the lights flare around us, before dimming again to the infrared. In the distance, we can hear the musical scream as weaker structures in the city itself shatter and fall like glaciers crumbling into the fjords.

That is when I realize that that flash wasn’t from the power grid, it was the flash from Rao, as it finally burned out. For a few tiny moments, we on the night-time side of Krypton would be safe, but on the dayside, I knew that no life stirred, vaporized by the laser-intensity flare of light that incinerated every last man, woman and child on that side of our planet, and consuming billions of lives in the firestorms in the twilight and daybreak regions. Within minutes, the shockwave would hit Krypton pulverizing our world, followed by the almost redundant wave of superheated plasma.

     As the crystalline ship hurtled into the night sky, speeding away from our doom, I grabbed Lara’s hand, running desperately for the Council chambers, ready to demand that they imprison us within the Phantom Zone. I can only hope we reach it in time.