Flash ii: What Haunts the Stars

A world of unending gray, so lonely the distant stars seem like companions, so empty not even a wind disturbs the all-encompassing dust. Closed eyes see hidden light. Aurora awakens in a small room with sunset's golden light streaming through empty holes in the wall. The girl stretches in the small bed, rubbing against the silken soft sheets beneath. A blink, a glimpse at how late it's gotten, and she frowns. Sitting up, then carefully she slips her feet into some slippers, a layer between her and the stone of the floor. The floor isn't just dirt, not anymore --- they had paid to have stone laid throughout the house --- but dirt accumulated between cracks and Sunny hadn't cleaned her room in a few days. She checked her dresser to find a shirt that didn't have a layer of sweat soaked into it. On top of it sit toys (dolls, balls, game pieces), all coated in a layer of dust. There's a clay sword, shattered in three pieces, and a wooden sword Blank had subsequently grown for her. Aurora gives that a second look. It meant that Sus was wrong, didn't it? Blank wouldn't have done that, if it really thought she was annoying. Thinking of Sus is a flare of remembered anger. It wasn't the first time her ambitions had been mocked. When she voiced it to folks in town, it was dismissed as silliness. Like a fool wishing on a shooting star, one lady had said. (It was a reference to an old saying, but Aurora didn't know that, had to ask and ask and ask until someone bothered to explain.) With a new shirt, Aurora is walking out of her room. Her father's in the sitting room, looking over a ledger in the warm waning light. He looks up to her with a smile and sad eyes. "Ah there you go, finally up. You're alright?" He sees her nod and there's some relief, at least. His eyes turn thoughtful. He's frowning, angular jaw working, chewing on his next words. "You get into so many fights, Aurora. I'm worried you're gonna get hurt, one of these days." His jaw chews a bit more, than he finally spits it out, asking, "Can you tell me why? Why do you have to fight so much?" Because it was fun? Because it was the only thing she was good at? Because--- the words didn't seem right. She couldn't say it. "Is it hard to get along with the spirits? Do they bother you?" He'd asked before. He keeps asking. "I like the spirits," she says. "You," --- the words are interspersed with a laugh. Nervous? Worried? (She couldn't tell; Father seemed solid no matter what) --- "you have an odd way of showing it." Was it odd? She had seen other children run at one another, laugh and flee, playing chase. Likewise, she throws a fist, and they avoid it. It was the same kind of game, one of evasion. Why wouldn't you fight people you liked? To land a hit, or avoid one, you had to be paying attention. All of your focus on that other person. If you didn't like someone, you ignored them. It wasn't like talking, where you could hold a conversation without really caring or trying. Where people didn't understand the things she said, where they didn't understand the things they themselves said, and couldn't explain it to her. But a kick, a grab, that was very clear. No ambiguity who won when you pin them to the ground. She could easily tell apart a laugh of joy and the look of fear that meant she'd gone to far. The tactics, how to get what you want, it's so straightforward. It isn't at all like talking. How is she supposed to explain any of this with words? Like trying to fight while tied up, she's helpless. Father's patiently waiting for a response, but what left her mouth isn't exactly words. So her father pats her on the head. "It's okay. Come on, sit with me on the the porch. The stars are about to come out." She didn't mind the pat, though she was almost shoulder height, making the motion awkward. Despite following his lead, Aurora rushed out of the door before him. (Though she pauses to swap her slippers for proper shoes.) Their 'porch' is a plot of dirt where grass doesn't grow. Father is closing the circular door behind him; it slots into a dirt hole in a hill, their hill. He'd raised and shaped it himself, a milestone of earthcanting. Likewise, in place of chairs there sat soft, shaped mounds of earth he'd uprisen himself. Cloth covers Aurora's seat, but not Geller's. Above, the eveningstar is first to appear in the darkling sky, lonely in the west. "The eveningstar isn't like other stars," her father says. "Do you know what it really is?" He'd told her, she did know; but he speaks now in a tone of retelling a story. He has a solid voice, even when speaking of celestial matters. She could stand to hear the stories again. The truth, he say, is that the eveningstar is a wandering world, not unlike our own, with the sun rising and setting in its sky just the same, and a moon all its own. It wanders among the six kindred worlds, the most favored of the sun. Her father can name all six. Not uncommon; there's a rhyming verse recounting the mythic creation of the kindred. Aurora interrupts to ask an odd question: "If those are worlds like ours, what do they look like? Do they have mountains and rivers and clouds?" She watches him carefully. They're all different, says he; Father tells a story of a world of endless ocean and ever-hanging fog, and then a world covered in tarnished copper, a world with no land at all and one where the sun sat unmoving and one where the stars could always be seen. They're the one constant, really. Every world turned under the stars. He tells of more worlds than the six kindred. Beyond them lies three strange outer worlds, tracing far-ranging paths in the sky. He could name the outer worlds, too, so rarely seen; and no one else in Willowind could do that. According to his tales, the lands and skies of the outer worlds are even stranger, escaping mortal description. Sunset glow now fading, the brightest stars deign to be seen, and he continues her journey through the system. Beyond that, there spin the hidden worlds, wandering cloaked in the black spaces between the stars. But they aren't really cloaked; but only highly trained eyes can make out the nearest hidden world. Another hidden world was supposedly known for centuries to the mystics of the Nistran desert tribes, and the third discerned in his own lifetime by the scrying of royal gemsingers. Six kindred worlds, three outers worlds, and three hidden worlds. "But I think there's more. Each world is more hidden than the last... who's to say there aren't more of them? Some say there's as many as five hidden." Aurora hums though. "Do they ever end? Maybe there's more worlds forever." "Oh, they end. Because in the darkness beyond the hidden worlds... there be comets." Aurora tightens at the mention, tension from excitement or fear. By now, twilight draws to a close, and the sky lies properly gleaming with stars. The shadows around her shouldn't be menacing; no comet would come creeping from the dark. Comets arrive in meteoric fire, and roam the earth dazzling with alien light. Still, it's thrilling to wonder. Could there be a hidden comet, like the hidden worlds? Her father points up, and at last, they stargaze. He names the stars, traces constellations. He speaks of the milky cloud across the sky, describes galaxies and nebulae. "Sometimes the stars dance in pairs, and sometimes they explode, and sometimes they are... yet stranger still." Aurora frowns. Opens her mouth, but doesn't form the words. Her eyes drift, and she catches a hint of motion. A streak of light across the sky. "Only a fool wishes on a shooting star," she repeats. "I heard someone say that. What does it mean, daddy?" He gives a long blink, as if closed eyes could hide his reaction. "Shooting stars are small bits of the heavens, so feeble they disappear in moments. Wishing on one, it's placing your hope in a brief, dazzling flash of light that will only turn to nothing." The emphasis, the trailing off --- a hint of bitterness laced those words. "But that's not what you really wanted to ask, though, is it?" "A fool wishes on a shooting star," Aurora echoes the full saying, "but only a madman wishes on a comet." He doesn't respond. Aurora looks at the sky, sees the streak. "Is that a shooting star, or a comet?" She only receives silence in response. "What happens if a bit of heaven falls and doesn't turn to nothing? Is it always a bad omen --- a comet?" At length, he murmured. "They say... if you wish on a comet, then it might come to you. Comets... They say when one touches the sky, it dazzles. When one touches the earth, it destroys. If there's an exception... well I couldn't say." "I'll stop them." She sees her father look at her, perplexed, no words in his reaction. "I'll become a knight and if evil spirits fall from heaven, then I'll fight them and win." Comets were so very far away, farther than the outer worlds. If she wished on this comet, would she be strong enough to fight it when it finally came? Her father laughs with a stutter. "So it's practice for you, then? That's why you pick a fight with everything that moves?" Really, it was the other way around. This time, rather than not knowing how to put that into words, Aurora didn't know if she should. She looks away. Eyes going back to the sky. She knew she hadn't figured out the right words to say it, but she had to. She had to prove Sus wrong. "How do you know so much about the heavens, daddy?" "Oh, I've heard many stories over the years, read even more. I have a good memory for them." Heard them where, though? He doesn't travel, and he's far more knowledgeable than anyone she met in the village. (Well, except for that lady, who gave her strange stares she didn't like, who had a metal hand, whom no one else seemed to like. Aurora'd never asked her and didn't want to.) He doesn't travel, and Aurora had already read every b