23. This Is My Path

“It’ll be any moment now,” Talla whispers reverently as we stare up at the night sky together.

Bit by bit, darkness falls on the plateau. A pitch black, moonless night in a world where something brighter than any moon shines in the sky for most of the year. Ironically, it’s the first thing we spot as our eyes adjust to the dark.

During the day, the planet’s ring system—what Fa’aun call the Great Wheel, and the People call the Great Road—was completely invisible, conspicuous in its absence after getting used to it for months. For those who grow up seeing it almost every day of every year, it must be downright eerie. I can see why people once feared the equinoxes—those brief periods where the sun shines down on the rings edge-on, rendering them almost impossible to see.

Almost.

Even with the mountain behind us, it’s impossible to miss the pale, bluish halo of light stretching across the sky in a gentle arc. What usually appears as a bright band is instead a ghostly shadow, only faintly visible in the otherwise total darkness of night.

“There, look!” Talla half-whispers excitedly, as if afraid that her voice will chase away the stars.

I follow her pointing finger and have to blink a few times to spot it—a tiny flickering dot of white standing alone in the inky expanse above. It’s an odd feeling, looking up at the first alien star I’ve ever seen—second, I suppose, if you count the sun. Stars aren’t new to me, nor are they particularly special. I’ve seen stars countless times at night, and rarely thought much of it. And yet, this feels special.

Maybe it’s because it’s special to Talla, or maybe part of me acknowledges that it’s a rare sight in this world, where the nights are rarely ever completely dark. But the sight of that first star fills me with a sense of wonder that I didn’t anticipate, and for reasons I can’t articulate I feel my eyes begin to water.

“Don’t cry you sappy bitch,” Maggie chides me. “We’re not gonna be able to see anything.”

I let out a shuddering chuckle and wipe my eyes. “Sorry.”

We’re all awake for this one, and it oddly feels both crowded and kind of comforting to feel the presence of all my headmates with me. Even Revi is here, silently observing through our eyes as more and more pinpoints of light begin to fill the sky.

I don’t think I’ve ever watched stars appear in the sky before, and it’s a surreal experience. It seems impossible to catch one coming into view. Instead what moments ago was an empty patch of black sky simply isn’t anymore. One by one they appear in the sky, gradually filling the darkness in the corners of my vision, more and more with each glance as if they were always there.

As they keep appearing, well past the point when I think they’re going to stop, it occurs to me that I’m a city girl from a world that never truly sleeps. I’ve never really seen the stars of even my own world in all their glory. I’ve seen pictures of what the stars are “supposed” to look like, but I always figured that they were exaggerated for effect, or taken with special cameras to increase the exposure.

If anything, those photos don’t do a real night sky justice.

“It’s so pretty,” I wonder quietly, sharing Talla’s reverence.

My heart clenches at the thought that this is only visible for three short windows each year. We took our own stars for granted.

“Aren’t they just?” Talla replies. “There are a lot of legends and myths around the black skies—an old term for the equinoxes—but in all of them, the Goddess’ lights are seen as a sign of hope. Proof that even on the darkest nights, in the deepest shadows, the light of the Goddess can still shine.”

“I’ve never seen this before either,” Evie admits. “The older sisters always told us to stay inside on the black nights.”

“Are there any [constellations]?” I ask, not even bothering to attempt a translation of the word.

Talla is maintaining the spell she uses to hear my headmates, which has the added benefit of letting her understand our language—though she barely even needs that these days. In this case, though, I can tell that the magically-aided translation is necessary.

“Not really,” she hedges. “I mean, I’m sure there are patterns to be found, but that word feels like it has more to it that I’m missing.”

I nod. “In our history, most cultures would map out specific stars and patterns—often for navigation, but a common thread in quite a few of our civilizations is to name those constellations after legends. We would map out the sky by recognizing those shapes and their places relative to each other.”

Talla is silent for a long moment before she sighs. “We don’t have anything like that. Astronomers like me do know how to find certain interesting objects, but it’s considered to be esoteric knowledge, even among academics. It’s rare for even astronomers to have more than a passing interest in the stars—the Great Wheel is a more popular subject of study.”

It would be, since it’s always visible.

“Which ones do you know?” I ask.

“All of them,” she replies without a hint of pride or bragging. “The ones that have been documented, anyway. I think all the time I spent trying to memorize them is half the reason I ended up with a class so focused on the [Knowledge] domain.”

“Show me some?”

She pauses for a moment, tapping her lips, then points. “See that cloudy looking cluster just above the horizon?”

Even when she’s guiding me to bigger features like that, it’s surprisingly difficult to find what she’s pointing at, but I think I’ve got the right spot. It’s a cluster of bright lights, connected by the thin, milky tendrils of some distant nebula. I can’t tell from looking whether the stars are part of the nebula, or if they just happen to line up.

“I think so.”

“Stay at around that level and follow the curve of the horizon a few degrees to the left,” she instructs me. “You’re looking for a very faint red light.”

It takes a lot of squinting and adjusting my glasses to get there—curse my danged eyesight—but eventually I do spot the little red dot she’s leading me to.

“We call that one the Traveler,” Talla explains. “The sky is a little different during each season, depending on where you look at it from, but most stars stay in the same place relative to each other. Not the Traveler—it appears somewhere different each time, or sometimes not at all. Seemingly at random.”

“A planet!” I gasp.

She smiles sadly and sighs. “And you have grasped in an instant what it took my predecessors centuries, if not millennia to understand.”

“Sorry,” I reply with a wince.

“Don’t be!” she giggles. “The knowledge of your world is a blessing, not a curse. I’ll admit, I was conflicted at first. It feels sometimes as though the efforts of my peers and I are invalidated by the answers you hold, and I’ve been hesitant to seek your knowledge because of it.”

“Yeah,” I mutter, biting my lip. “Sorry again about the computer thing—I shouldn’t have brought it up when I don’t even know how they work.”

She shakes her head. “Again, don’t be sorry. In fact, I feel that I should apologize.”

I turn to give her my full attention, raising an eyebrow, but she keeps her eyes locked firmly on the sky as she goes on.

“My reasons for bringing you here are partly selfish,” she admits. “Of course, I would have come to see this regardless, but sharing it with you is as much for my own benefit as yours.”

She gestures up at the sky, taking in the dazzling beauty shimmering above us.

“This is what I live for,” Talla murmurs. “I was born to lead my people. To take on the burden of matriarch when the day comes that my mother is no longer fit to do so. But this is all I’ve ever wanted. I’m more rebellious than Rara, in my own way, even if I don’t go around dyeing my hair or painting my hooves.”

The latter of which is a trend that I brought to Stebaari just by asking Rara about nail polish. I see her point, though. For all that her younger sister likes to visibly challenge the expected image of a proper Fa’aun Lady, she’s not the one wandering the countryside with a weird alien and completely ignoring her social obligations in favor of pursuing an academic career.

“Mother encouraged my scholarly pursuits at first,” she notes with a bit of wry humor. “She thought it was a good fit for our family, and by the time she realized how seriously I take it, she was far too late to stop me.”

I nod, but don’t reply. Lady Tamara Goa Baanu isn’t the sort of person that fails to notice her own daughter’s passions. I think she’s more supportive of her daughters than either of them realize, but there’s really no point in contradicting Talla here.

“The faith I have in my chosen path rivals that of my faith in the Goddess herself,” she admits bashfully. “And I could get into quite a lot of trouble for saying that back home.”

“No kidding,” Evie drawls.

“So please, don’t take this as an indictment when I say that meeting you was perhaps the first thing to ever shake that faith.”

A pit forms in my stomach, but I stay silent, knowing she isn’t finished.

“In moments of weakness, I wonder to myself ‘what’s the point?’ Nothing I discover from studying the skies will ever make life better for the common Fa’aun. No matter how many stars I catalogue, it will not feed the people I will one day be responsible for. And half the mysteries that have haunted me for years are simply common knowledge to you. You know what stars are, don’t you?”

I try to swallow, but my mouth is terribly dry. “Do you?”

She doesn’t answer, just waiting in silence for my reply. After a bit of hesitation, I give up and sigh.

“They’re flames, sort of,” I tell her. “The same as the sun, but much farther away.”

“Mm,” she hums in acknowledgement. “That confirms the theory that they’re derived from the Light of the Goddess.”

“Well, no,” I correct her. “It would be more accurate to say that they have a common origin. Most of the stars are probably older than the sun. And they are huge, by the way. Like, hundreds of times the span of the world, but so far away that they only appear as specks in the sky.”

“I see. What else?”

I hesitate. “Are you sure?”

“More than ever,” she replies without hesitation. “I understand now that it was a mistake of pride that led me to falter. I would be a failure as a scholar to ignore a source of knowledge, and just as much of a failure to think that finding the answers I seek means that there’s nothing more to learn.”

She releases a shuddering breath, as if suddenly relieved of a great burden, then smiles up at the sky, reaching out as if to grasp the stars in her hand.

“This is what I live for, and I’m glad I could share it with you. The world is always so much larger than we can imagine. I’ll never truly grasp the whole of it, so why should I shy away from a few shortcuts? I brought you here to prove to myself that I am still true to the path that I have chosen. To show you what drives me.”

Talla closes her fist around some unseen phantom, then brings it to her chest. It’s a gesture I’ve seen from her before, when she casts some of her more difficult spells—grasping glowing motes from the air and bringing them together within her.

“I’ve never shown this to anybody. My most useless and precious spell—the very reason I sought magic in the first place. This is my path, Maev Allison—[Witness the Stars].”

Above us, the shimmering tapestry of the night sky lights up impossibly. Each point of light grows brighter and sharper, their colors coming into perfect focus. It’s bright enough to illuminate our camp as if it were daylight, yet the stars remain in a vivid tableau unlike anything I’ve ever seen.

“This is what moves me, Allie,” Talla murmurs softly. “What about you?”