Where Starlight Finds You: Ben Athem

The war is over. Learning how to live is harder.

Medic Emmett Vale has spent five years moving from one damaged world to the next, repairing what he can before leaving again. Staying would mean facing everything-and everyone-he could not save.

Krahlelen Orr, an Auren restoration coordinator whose emotions show through the colours beneath his skin, prefers schedules, statistics and careful control. The work is simpler when grief can be reduced to numbers.

Assigned to the same reconstruction vessel, they begin restoring the connections the war destroyed: silent relay stations, isolated settlements and communities learning how to hope again. Somewhere between shared breakfasts, difficult memories and ordinary acts of kindness, professional respect becomes friendship-and friendship becomes something neither man expected to find.

But building a future means accepting that survival is not a debt, love cannot be managed like a mission, and home may be a person before it becomes a place.

Where Starlight Finds You is a tender, hopeful, slow-burn M/M science-fiction romance about trauma recovery, found family and choosing to remain when a lifetime of loss has taught you to leave.