Six light-years from Earth, four small worlds orbit Barnard's Star in silence—tidally locked, stripped of air, and built from minerals that cannot hold water. Their inhospitality is not a matter of misfortune but of chemistry: the star's unusual composition wrote the verdict into the planets before they were fully formed. In the long human search for life beyond our sun, these worlds offer a sobering reminder that the elements a star carries determine the fate of everything born from it.