And so her days continued, one after another after another.
After one such day—a long day of work and an even longer evening of particularly frustrating studying—Demi decided that she really needed to get some fresh air.
It was dire indeed when the library could not soothe all of Demi’s troubles, but the time comes for every booklover when they have stared at words on pages for so long that their eyes have become crossed and they cannot concentrate on anything. If she hadn’t been a goddess, then she would surely by this point have worked herself into a fever.
Such a thing definitely called for fresh air. That was wisdom from her mother, who had been as likely to game or to read herself into oblivion as Demi was.
And whenever a person really needed a sense of scale and a glimpse of the infinite to reorient themselves, then looking at the night sky was just the ticket.
Demi had often gone with her mother onto the roof of Forest Home to watch the stars. The panorama of uncountable brilliant stars over the nighted depths of the Deep Wood was an image that had been seared into Demi’s very essence.
This place surely had its own splendors to share.
So out she went with Dollop to look at the night sky, crawling out a dormer window on the third floor and situating herself comfortably on the roof of the farmhouse.
The night was deep, and the stars were beautiful.
Demi’s mother had been right, as she almost always was. The night sky was what Demi had needed to see.
She leaned back against the carved shingles of the roof and looked at the dark sky overhead. It was both familiar and unfamiliar. There were stars she could definitely pick out, even whole constellations that she recognized, but some things were a little different.
(And some things were very different.)
She held up her hands, using her fingers to make a pale, slender frame around what seemed to be a familiar constellation.
“The Pleiades,” she murmured quietly.
But they were backward. The arrangement of the stars was mirrored.
“That feels so strange,” she said, laying her head back against the roof behind her.
The stars were where they ought to be in relation to one another, as least so far as she knew them, but it was as if the entire association had been flipped as a single unit. What made it feel even more surreal was that when she looked for them, the Hyades appeared as they ought to have. The Golden Gate of the Ecliptic was open; it was just that one of the posts was backward.
Demi looked over at Dollop and said, “This is your sky, so of course it looks normal to you, but when I look up at this sky, it’s a little bit topsy-turvy. But only a little bit!” she hastened to emphasize. “It’s the familiarity that’s most peculiar, honestly. The stars we identify in the sky as constellations or asterisms aren’t usually close together at all. Sometimes they are! The Pleiades are actually an open star cluster. It’s a stellar nursery where blue baby stars are born, shining cool and brilliant. They burn hot and bright, and they’re comparatively close by, which is why they’re so easy to spot and why there are so many different names for them. But most constellations”—she raised her hands again to frame a different arrangement of stars this time—“like Draco, are made up of stars that aren’t physically near to one another at all. We just associate them together because they look like they might be neighbors because of our line of sight from the ground. In fact, if we looked at Draco with a telescope, we would be able to spot objects much, much farther away, that still look like they’re inside of Draco.” She shrugged bonelessly, letting her arms fall to her sides again and folding her hands over her chest. “That’s why it feels so unusual to see some stars that I recognize in patterns that I recognize. The only way to see Draco is from Earth, or you know, the relative vicinity of Earth.”
She drew a heart in the air with her index finger, tracing the line between distant stars, many of which could not even be seen, and yet they still existed in the vastness of space and time.
“This isn’t Earth, but it’s Earth,” she said, letting her fingers flash up briefly in the universal sign for “Who even knows what’s happening? But I suppose all fictional worlds are like that,” she said philosophically. “Even in a very realistic procedural crime novel, even in well-researched historical fiction, the world we read about is not our world. I wonder what the stars look like from those Earths.”
“Pi pii pipi pii pi,” Dollop squeaked, and Demi smiled at them affectionately, giving them a pat.
“It’s complicated, right?” she wondered. She put her hand in her pocket and pulled out The Shadowstep Alchemist Volume 1. “I wonder what stars you see, when you look up at the sky.”
She brought the book to her chest as she let her eyes wander across the night sky.
As she looked into the darkness, she saw a brilliant ribbon of light cut across it, and then another and another.
“Shooting stars!” she trilled with the wonder of a small child. “It’s, it’s—I think it would be—” She counted on her fingers. “It’s still Gwlanog, isn’t it? That would be, that would be March, the end of March. Is it April already? Would it be April by my calendar? Ceirios?”
A pop-up in the corner of her vision confirmed that it was still Gwlanog. The moon was half in shadow, allowing the brilliant lights of the meteorites to paint themselves across the sky.
“It’s March though. What meteorites are those?” she wondered. “It’s too early for the Lyrids, isn’t it?”
Her informational pop-up offered a different name.
“The Poet’s Tears,” she murmured. “That does sound very nostalgic, doesn’t it? It feels like ‘hiareth,’ the deep longing for something lost, something that you may not even have ever experienced,” she said softly. “And yet you know that it’s missing. You know that it’s lost.”
Demi often felt deep parts of herself tugged at by that almost nameless emotion, that longing for the thing that was missing, that yearning for something that she had never experienced herself.
Partner.