You step through another thicket of dying something that crumbles away beneath your boots. For a brief moment the leaves perk up when you pass, the light from what you hold in your arms giving them a last sip of life before darkness. But that moment has been getting briefer the longer you travel, and it hardly matters any more. It hardly matters that your run has become a trudge, that this body you inhabit is having trouble holding you inside it, because the thing that pulled you down to earth also pulls you forward. The humans call it gravity, but you call it by name because you know what it really is. Hatred brought you here, and you follow its trail.
Because you are a star, and you carry the corpse of the sun. And if you can’t fix her, no one can.
The humans call her Alara, The Lifegiver, Radiance, Mother of Light. She looks so small in this body, with lips turning blue and red hair fading to gray, only the tiniest of glimmers still sparkling around her. Nothing like the beacon of glory you see every day. But you don’t look like you either, except maybe in the cracks starting to form in this human’s skin, the purple-gold-blue swirls breaking through the brown.
You’re going to supernova soon. And you will use that fury to wipe the moon from this universe’s memory.
The humans call him Navaris. No titles, no worship, maybe a touch of fear. And because of that, he stole Alara’s brightness, her warmth. He ran away with it like the coward he is, down into the human world. You followed him, and pulled the sun with you, taking these forms so you didn’t destroy everything in your path.
They don’t have a name for you yet. But they will.
You crest the top of a hill and you have to stop, because there’s a tightness in your chest you don’t quite understand. The limitations of this body are foreign, the sight so narrow, when you are used to the vastness of galaxies.
The land is gray below you, without Alara shining down. It was green, once, and blue, and all sorts of glorious colors. Navaris is a fool, destroying the very thing he so coveted.
From up here, your sight is not so narrow as you thought. There is a trail of dust in the direction the hate is pulling you. Beyond that, the gray land stops and becomes the ocean. A smile tugs the corners of your lips.
Navaris is a fool indeed.
On this world, he does not have the power he has above it. He cannot go beyond the water’s edge. And even if he changes course now, you will catch him within the day. You look down at a stranger’s face and hope whatever remains of Alara can hear you.
Hold on. I will bring the light back to you. I swear it.
#
By the time you reach him, Navaris is on his knees, soaked and covered in sand, praying to the empty sky. He is shining for all the world to see but it is wrong, all wrong. His light does not give life. It is sick, twisted, jealous.
You gently lay Alara on the sand, taking your time to arrange her limbs and hair. Navaris won’t run; he has nowhere to go. The waves lap unmercifully behind him.
When you finally face the moon, he starts to laugh. The sound strikes something inside you that causes more star to crackle through your skin. “Why?” is all you can manage to say.
“Walk with me,” Navaris says.
“I won’t leave her.”
“Leave her now or leave her later, it’s all the same in the end. You’re close to yours, I believe. Walk with me, and I’ll tell you what you want to know. Perhaps things you don’t.”
You hate his wicked grin, the thing that matches him so well, though he’s never had a mouth before. Your mind is ready to supernova it off his insolent face, regardless of what will happen to the humans, but your body isn’t. Yet.
The sun rests peacefully on the beach. No one is around to disturb her, but if there were, who would dare? Even a babe could see what she is. Was.
Will be again.
“Fine.” You walk across the sand, not sinking as far into it without the sun’s weight. It doesn’t feel quite right. There is a tether there, urging you back, but this is gravity of a different kind, you think. You certainly don’t hate Alara.
The wind blows, heedless of what will soon come to pass. You’ve always liked that about the wind, its unerring sense of duty. You used to like that about the moon, too.
“Do you understand what you’ve done?” you hiss. It’s a sound that comes halfway through your teeth. Versatile things, you’ve learned.
“I enjoyed watching you form, you know,” he says, as if you didn’t say a thing. “And all your brothers and sisters.” He looks up at the dark sky, where they twinkle joylessly. “But no matter how long you’re here, it never hurts less to see you destroy yourselves.”
“I wasn’t under the impression you felt anything,” you scoff. “Give me her light back.”
“And it’s because you never listen—”
“Give it to me!” you scream, grab him by the shoulders, shake him.
There’s a pulse, low in your… stomach, you think. The brown skin on your fingers and arms peels back a little farther to reveal more silver-green-purple.
“Ah, you see?” Navaris says, and you swear he sounds a little sad. “No more outbursts like that, or you will never hear the full story, and she will be lost forever.”
You rein in your anger. Barely. “What are you talking about?”
“Alara, of course. The Lifegiver, Mother of Light. Radiance.” He chuckles softly. “She is all those things. And yet she dies just the same.”
“That’s your fault,” you growl. Gold-purple— you listen to the calming sound of the tide, pulled in by the moon’s proximity. Feel the wind on your face. Breathe.
Navaris shakes his head. “If only I held so much sway. Alara is one of you. She burns and burns and burns, trying to provide for all who behold her but forgetting to care for herself. The pressure is too great. No one can withstand so much; none of you are made that way. I have witnessed seven suns burn through the fires that sustain them until they become embers… or until they turn their burning outward, as you soon will.”
“That’s absurd.” He expects you to believe Alara—Alara—is like you? That you are like her? “Her brightness sends the shadows away, keeps the nightmares from stalking the void. She is the greatest thing this world”—You gesture at the wasteland to your left— “or any world has ever known. I am a spark compared to her.”
“Those that burn brightest also burn most quickly,” he whispers. “Often because of such veneration. You are too new to know that, too young to want to understand.” He tilts his head, silver eyes flashing. “Do you know why I brought you here?”
The sheer lunacy of that statement makes you laugh. For a moment you don’t see silver-blue-gold-purple, you see red. “You did not bring me here. I followed you, you monster, to take her light back. And with it all that is good in this universe.”
Navaris stops walking and looks solemnly behind him at the footprints the two of you have left in the sand. He takes a few steps into the waves, so that when the water comes in it reaches up to his calves.
“I brought you here so we could save her, together.”
A wordless sound escapes your lips, and you’re not sure what it means. It’s somewhere between another incredulous laugh and a scream and… something else.
“I am tired of watching them all burn out. And Alara… You’re right. She is the best of them, though not for the reasons you believe. But she can’t survive alone, and I do not have the capacity to help her. That’s not the way I was made. But you—” He turns toward you, and there is something sharp and shining in his hand. “You do.”
You get that horrible, chest-tightening feeling again, though it’s slightly different than before. It hurts, but not in a physical way. Because now your sluggish brain puts together the first part of what he was saying.
The light that surrounds him, sick and fading, is not that way because of him. The sun was on the verge of dying, ready to collapse on herself, and he’d taken what was left of her to preserve it. But why would the moon risk himself to help the sun? That is not who Navaris is.
“I came here to kill you,” you whisper, because that’s the only thing still tethering you to him that makes even a grain of sand of sense. He could be lying, but somehow you don’t think so.
He nods. There is… water on Navaris’s face. You’re not sure where it came from. The ocean couldn’t have reached that high.
“I don’t understand.” There is something wrong with your throat, because your voice doesn’t come out the same as it has before.
“I want her to live. She needs to live, so the ones she watches over can go on to do great and terrible things.” He places the object—knife, the human part that still lingers within your body says—in your hand. “For that, she needs a piece of stability. A core, an anchor. It’s the least I can do to give her that. So you have not failed in your mission. But I would like to die for something.”
You wrap your green-yellow-white fingers around the knife.
“Put it here.” Navaris points to the center of his chest. “It will take more than I have to bring her back. There are laws to these things, after all, and she is worth more than my many lifetimes of hiding in the shadows.” He smiles a tiny, not-insolent-in-the-slightest smile. “Bathe her body in the ocean when I’m gone. And tell her I loved her.”
“I don’t understand,” you say again. Because you don’t know that word, love, but there’s water on your face now too, and you don’t know what else to say.
“You will. If you save her, you will.”
You step forward, and the water is shockingly cold. You squeeze the knife hard, unsure.
But for the first time in millennia, the chaos inside you stills. You are a star, Alara is a star, both on the verge of destruction. And neither of you have to die. Only the moon. Whether or not you hate him anymore, that moment of peace holds a future you didn’t think you had. And you want it. With her.
Navaris smiles when you plunge the blade into his heart.
#
The land is still gray, but the ocean is silver with the blood of the moon. You sprint back along the beach as fast as your blue-gold-green-brown legs can go. Back to the sun, whose body you pick up and cradle in your arms as gently as you carried her across the world. She’s breathing.
She’s breathing.
You rush across the sand, stumble—stupid, weak human legs—wondering how you could’ve ever trudged anywhere in your life as you splash into the water, sink to your knees, and lay Alara down atop the waves. They’re calmer now, without the moon. So are you.
But nothing is happening.
Bathe her in the ocean. Maybe they had to be farther out.
You wade deeper into the silver and tow the sun along beside you, checking every so often to make sure she still breathes. She does. And you swim.
And swim.
And.
Swim.
Until you can’t anymore, but you have no idea where land is because gray looks awfully close to silver without a light shining on it, and you’re starting to wonder if the moon made a fool of you. That would make for quite a tale, wouldn’t it? Something the humans would put to song.
But that tether between you and Alara is still there. So you do something only a fool would do. Floating in the middle of the ocean, a supernova half-frozen inside you, you tug on it.
You swear you sink a little, though the water hasn’t swallowed you. So you do it again.
The sun starts to glow, and the ocean is shrinking, because energy is not created or destroyed, only transferred, and it will take more than I have to bring her back. It will take the moon’s life and the ocean and a little piece of you, too. You pull on the tether with all your might, all your hope, all your burning.
Your feet touch sand, and as far as you can see the water is gone.
Alara opens her eyes. The universe is once more full of glory.
You smile, and the sun smiles back.
#
It’s strange, to walk next to Alara now. You’ve spent so long looking at her from afar and dreaming of this moment that it doesn’t quite seem real. She practically floats beside you, which just adds to the sensation. You travel over what was once the bottom of the ocean. It is now dry, lifeless. The plants have all collapsed under their own weight and countless bodies of things small and not so small cover the cracked sand. You did not know how much was down here—all the things that did not need Alara to live and may have been better off without her. It’s so very strange.
She’s quiet. And her light is… colder than you remember.
“Did I do something wrong?” you whisper.
Alara stops and looks at you. She takes your hands—they are brown now, with only a few traces of purple-yellow-silver—and the gravity that pulls you to her gives a little leap inside your chest. “Of course not. You did well.” She turns and keeps walking, but she keeps your hands linked together.
“You just seem different,” you blurt out before you can stop yourself. She raises an eyebrow and you feel that leap again; you keep talking in case she can tell. “And I’m not sure if it’s because I’ve only seen you from so far, or if it’s something I did, or something he did, or…”
She squeezes your fingers. Yes, definitely colder.
“It is something you both did.” Alara tips her head back to the sky where the stars should be, but she is so bright you can’t see them. “But it is a good sort of different. I feel calmer. Less… tangled.” She flexes the hand that’s not holding yours and studies it, like the movement of bone and muscle will reveal the secrets of the universe.
You examine your own body but find nothing so special.
“The moon said he would give you an anchor, to stop you from… tearing yourself apart. Do you know what he meant by that?” It had seemed directed at you too, with all his comparing, and the supernova that no longer threatens to break you confirms it.
Alara laughs, and it is the music that fills the space between stars. But it doesn’t match the expression on her face; her eyes are full of sadness. “Navaris once told me ‘the only thing death gives is perspective. Everything else, it takes.’ I think that’s where the tangles and pressure and chaos and weight went. He took them out so I could carry something of him to ground me. His cool perspective, the steadfastness of eternity.” She laughs again, a real one this time. “To ground the sun.”
Navaris sacrificed himself so Alara could not only live, but live forever. The calm that now lies within you is a residual gift of that exchange. You turn that over for a long while, until you’re out of what used to be the ocean and back to the beach that bleeds into the dying hills. “Is that what he meant when he said he loved you?” Part of you quails at the idea. If that is the case, love sounds terrifying.
“Perhaps that is what he meant.” She smiles at you again, a smile full of knowing that makes you feel guilty for your gravity, like you’ve been caught with something you shouldn’t have.
But you see some of it reflected in her eyes, and you think it means there’s another way.
“He surprised me, you know,” Alara says after a time.
You cock your head. The moon is one of the most boringly reliable things you can think of, or he had been before all of this. “In what way?”
“I’ve known him almost all my life. We watched over this world together, nurtured it, cherished it.” She frowns at the dead landscape behind you. “I never thought he would make such a selfish choice.”
You’ve gone from hatred to confusion to… thankfulness, if nothing else, in regard to the moon. And that statement doesn’t sit right in your belly. “He gave his life to save yours. How could that be selfish?”
“Because we are not the only ones he left behind.” Alara gestures forward.
You crest the top of a familiar hill and see the remains of a city below, a great ziggurat standing at its center. The humans emerge from their homes, slowly at first, and then in swarms. You can hear them shouting from here, pointing and crying and falling to their knees for the first dawn they’ve seen in days.
“They need me, but they need him as well. Light and dark, life and death, fire and water. He traded himself and the domains of his power to bring me back.” She shook her head, tossing her red hair in the ever-faithful wind. “Much of the ocean is gone, as are many lakes and rivers. The rain, without his control, will not be enough to sustain the humans now.”
You frown. “What about the piece of himself he left behind? Surely there’s some power in that for you to wield.”
“It is too small for the distance that separates us. I would have no sway here. And despite this new coldness” —she smiles slyly at you when she says that, like she heard your thoughts— “I cannot come closer. Even staying here now puts them at risk.”
The humans will die. It seems a small price to pay for Alara to live, but you don’t think she’d like it if you said so. You’re ready to return home and see what this new, slower chaos inside you will bring. Maybe home could be a little closer to her, now that there might be this tether between you.
At the thought, the words slip out before you can stop them. “We could make a new world, together.”
Alara isn’t moving, but something about her stills. “Yes,” she whispers. She turns to you, eyes alive with fire. “Yes, we could.”
Then she holds up her hand again, and you reach out to take it, and she smiles, and you think you know what it means when the humans say the stars aligned.
And then Alara plunges her hand into her chest.
Your mouth falls open and you grab her by the shoulders, but in the space of a gasp she pulls her hand back out. Something pulses with a silver-blue glow between her fingers.
The muscles in her arm and fingers tense. “I don’t need… all of this,” she pants. “If we can divide his power, some of it can be left here.”
The light around her flares so bright you have to shut your eyes, and only then do you understand what she’s doing. The moon gave the sun his heart, and she is trying to break it.
Some tiny part of you takes joy in that.
Alara falls to her knees. “Help… me.”
Gravity pulls you down again, the sight of her face strained with effort, the veins of her hands bulging with yellow-orange-red beneath the skin. If you don’t do this quickly and give her back some of the moon, you are both doomed.
You wrap your hands around the heart in the spaces between her fingers, feel all the sharp, hard edges of it. And squeeze.
You discover it takes two stars to shatter a moon.
Seven equal pieces of silver-blue stone lay in Alara’s hands. One for each of the suns Navaris lost, you think.
She pours them into one palm and takes a sliver, pushing it back into her chest. The light around her becomes bearable again. “I will have enough to send the rain to you.” She holds up another in front of you. “But someone must remain here to command it.”
No. No.
Leave her now or leave her later. He’d known. Navaris had known. Because Alara is the best of them, and she will always put others before herself. That must be what her version of love is.
It isn’t fair. You meet Alara’s gaze, pleading with your eyes because at the moment words are lost to you.
“Look at this place,” Alara says. “This land is cursed now; it will hold water no longer. The rain will disappear into the ground or back to the sky unless someone is here to tell it otherwise.”
Your stomach twists, and your throat tightens. “Why do you care so much about them?” you choke.
“They are my children.”
Did you imagine that glimmer in her eyes, the way she held your hand? “What am I to you, then?”
Alara still holds the shard before you, but she leans forward and presses her lips to yours. They are soft, and she is all that is joy and goodness around you, but she is also fire and pain, promises and entropy.
There is an infinitesimal supernova in your chest, equal parts gravity and sadness.
“You’re the one that will save them, and in turn save me,” she whispers. “I have already lost a friend today; I cannot lose them as well. I have all the perspective I can take.”
Navaris had known everything. You are half-numb with shock and you can’t quite focus on what Alara is saying.
“I’ll let you choose them. It may take some time, but you’ll know the right ones by the gravity that grows between you.”
That breaks you from your stupor. You weren’t mistaken; she feels it too.
You’re not sure if that makes this better or worse.
You take the piece of Navaris’s heart. The moon was orders of magnitude smaller than you, by size and by soul— so you thought. But when you hold that fragment, you realize you were wrong. You feel the sun and the moon within you, and compared to them, you are a raindrop cradled in the palms of giants.
You may not have to give your life to show you love Alara, but you do have to give something. She was willing to burn herself out for her children. What are you willing to do to make sure Navaris’s sacrifice wasn’t in vain? To make her happy, even if it’s not what you want?
You won’t be any closer, but you won’t be much farther either. And she needs to know your heart is different from those cheering and praying at the bottom of the hill, that your reverence is not the kind that will break her, but the kind that will keep her strong. That means giving more than you take away.
“Alright.” You breathe the word and lean forward to kiss the sun one last time.
She lets you linger in that kiss for many thunderous beats of your heart. Then she pushes the glowing stone into your chest.
The gravity between you pulls taut and begins to shrink. You don’t want to open your eyes because you know Alara is drifting away, though you still feel the touch of her lips on yours. She is leaving you, the one she loves, here to guard the people she loves. The tether is thinning, stretching, pleading, but it stops.
It does not break.
When you can bear to open your eyes again the sun burns high in the sky, though clouds are beginning to gather. You take the five remaining shards from the dirt and begin to walk down the hill, toward the massive city and the people oblivious to what just transpired. You’ll make sure they know, though, what the sun has done for them.
When you reach the wall, it starts to rain.
The droplets are silver-tinted. They leave no trace when they hit the ground. You’re not yet sure how to use the moon’s power to gather it, or what to say to the masses starting to cluster behind the iron gate. They look at you, this silver-green-gold-blue-brown creature, with wonder and fear. You are, after all, part of the sun and the moon now. But it stirs a little worry in you, too. You don’t want to fail Alara, or the tether that strains to hold you together might snap.
You give it the tiniest of tugs. What do I do? What do I say?
A ray of light breaks through the clouds and warmth whispers over your skin. “Tell them to call you Niali. In their language, it means hope.”