Shatterlight

We once walked the pathways between the stars. Light of different hues guided our migrations and over the course of millennia, we travelled the universe. It was our domain for eternity.

Or, until eternity broke. Since then we have been isolated, alone. And unable to travel like we did. Light was no longer rays, but shards that sliced our universe apart like it could rip the fabric of reality to pieces.

“What is it?”

The whispers passed around like nervous glances, unanswered, fading to nothingness. The sky above was ripe with color, mottled blue, black and green. The colors of bruising. Of damage. Shards of light pierced the wounds, red-orange cracks splitting out and spiderwebbing across the sky. On the northeastern horizon the sky bled, red clouds stretching towards the ground, weeping their pain. Southwest, the sky was a mottled, rotten brown, heavy mists oozing underneath it.

I trembled, my grey-winter skin burning hot and cold. My stars were gone, hidden from view behind my sky’s agony. I could not study them, could not see past the veil. My stars were silent, dooming my people to helpless waiting. For what could this be but the End?

That’s when they came. Beings of pure light began to walk among us. And they carried swords made of forged light.

They came from a dying universe, one that had fallen to darkness. But they brought destruction. We, a peaceful kind, were not prepared for the war they brought with them. We fell from the stars to a place devoid of its own light. To us, it was dead. And we couldn’t leave.

I walked among the tents, resting my hands on bowed heads. They looked to me for salvation. The one thing I couldn’t give. They looked to me for restoration, for home. But their home was gone, their world bled empty and dry. It was only here, in caverns of desolate, dead worlds that I could keep them alive.

But the clock ticked in the back of my mind. It taunted me, counting down the time until I lost another brother or sister, calculating when I would next slip.

My shoulders had begun to hunch prematurely as my black hair ran with new silver. I was young, but I wasn’t. I was a Seer, but what could I see? I was a healer, but these wounds I could not fix. I was a warrior, but I could not fight.

I was a savior.

And I had delivered my people to destruction.

We learned to survive without light, difficult as it was. But the darkness was not safe, and our numbers dwindled as we fell to silent monsters and night horrors.

And then she came.

I looked down at a child’s face. A child, but not one of theirs. A star-child. Her skin glowed silver-white, the light of the suns. The light of the gods. Would that I could read the stars, understand what this omen meant. 

The child’s chest rose and fell to the heartbeat of the sky. Her light flickered like an unsheltered candle.

I could not read the lines of the child’s face, yet I could see familiar shapes in the form of her brow, the curve of her lips. I knew this child, as I would know a stranger, and yet… I should know more. I could feel it.

I looked down at my hands, examining them, the pale, dead, grey-winter skin. A greyish pallor of death. Of loss. 

She plummeted from the stars to land among us. She slept, unaware of the world, trapped in faraway lands that I could not reach.

We were frightened. For we had forgotten and seeing her unveiled dark, long hidden memories. Memories we did not want to know, memories we ignored. But it wasn’t only her. She shone with a brilliant light and that light attracted shards. Shards of starlight.

The stars were gone, yet shards of them shone about the child. They pulsed around her, swelling with the sound of her heartbeat. Sharp as knives, dull as light.

I had tried to touch them, but my skin had burned, turning black like a husk. My hand curled up against my chest in its sling. Immobile. Dead. I reached out and brushed white hair from the child’s face. Her eyes remained closed against the world, against me. Still she slept, comatose, as if dead.

Yet I could see the life in her body, so much life that she almost burned with it.

In her dreams she murmured a word. Shatterlight. She spoke of it with increasing urgency. With fear. And I dreaded what it meant, that our sky-born child with the power of the stars could fear this.

And I prayed, hoping that at last the silence of our gods would cease.

Save us.

Then the stars themselves began to fall. Once again, death swung its sword with deadly accuracy. Silver blood ran like rivers. Bodies choked the land. We had nowhere to turn.

My people’s blood anointed my skin. It dyed everything. I stared at the silver of my hands, silver-white tears falling on them, washing my hands in bitter streaks. My sword could do naught against this. Fire and hell rained down around them. It was no monster I could fight. It was not something they could outrun.

I lifted my face to the blood-orange sky and my lips parted, blistered and angry. A howl tore from my lungs, crawling out of my throat, mixing in the dead ash air, rending me apart, spilling my pain. I screamed up at the destruction. I wept my agony. 

Why? 

When we had given up hope and our world burned with starfire, the child opened her eyes. She didn’t speak, just looked at us with unutterable sadness. Her golden eyes were laden with tears as she asked us for one thing. 

I watched, numb to everything, as the child lifted my sword. The silver arced in the air and the child smiled sadly into her reflection. Her small feet carried her forward. Towards the destruction, the burning. Out of the facade of safety, into the star-fire.

I choked out a cry, reaching for her, and the child looked back at me. The sadness in her eyes was gone, replaced with peace.

And the fire consumed her. She vanished as the earth around her convulsed.

I screamed after her, held back only by the hands of my people. I was shaking with rage, shuddering with it. Not her. Why her? She wasn’t supposed to die.

And everything went to white.

Our dead world lit up. Starfire died under the force of the light. And we… we changed. We shed our skin like dead husks and underneath we burned. We shone like stars.

My eyes could see through the light. I could see her burning at the center of it all, sword thrust up into the sky. The light burned like fire. I could feel myself dying, choking on it. My skin blistered in the heat, turning black as pitch. I fell to my knees, tears leaking from the corners of my eyes and evaporating into the air.

I looked down at my hands, at the dead one. It was laced with cracks. White shone out from between it, as though I was breaking apart. And I was.

I closed my eyes as my skin flaked away. I was screaming. My mouth was open. My lungs worked. But I could hear nothing. The roar of my blood, the pounding of my slowing heart, was all.

My hands grasped at nothing, then at themselves. I dug my nails into my flesh, as though to hold me together. And then the pain ceased. It all ceased.

I opened my eyes, and the light was still there. I still knelt on blackened earth. Yet the pain was gone. And the light… the light no longer struck at me, but it came from me. My blackened skin was gone, and white, glowing, perfect skin shone in its place.

I looked up, at the child, now slumped there in the dead earth, my sword clutched in her hands. My people ran to her, calling for her.

But I knew that it was too late. I didn’t know how. But I knew. She would pass on to the place of her forefathers, gone, when she shouldn’t be, dead, when I should be. 

I lifted my face to the sky, golden tears slipping down my cheeks. Who was she? Our princess. The one I had once sworn to protect with my life. The one I had betrayed. The one I had left when I turned my back on the kingdom. 

The one I had forgotten when I forgot who I was.

We remembered.

And we wept.