Starfall

Night in northern Sabaku gets cold so fast. Little Nadia Ziel wrapped her cloak tight around her as she walked across the cool sand. She liked the cold. The sun made her head hurt, night was her favorite time. It was the night of the dark moons, when Tan’aran and Hel both remain below the horizon, the night the stars are brightest. This night each month, Nadia made sure to sneak out her window, out away from the village and the noise and the people.

They called her a “starchild,” what they call all the quiet children like her. She happily accepted this, she loved the stars more than anything, they were good friends. People were too loud, with their shouting, hammering metal, wheels of caravans passing through, guns shooting.

She reached a big jagged rock, with a red stripe across the middle. It was an ancient rock with layers made eons ago, forced up from under the ground by a quake and worn smooth at its corners by years in the turbulent sands. The lines and their colors told a story of ages long before humanity. There were other boulders around the outskirts of the village, but they were all clustered together, and this one stood all alone. It was her favorite rock.

In front of the lonely boulder, a little pond would fill up when the rain came. It was still mostly full. The pond was a piece of the bigger oasis in the village, a little child of the lake hiding out alone behind a rock. It was her favorite place. Most people were afraid to come there because of a nest of deadly water snakes, but Nadia knew they liked to sleep deep under the sand at night, and they would only bother you if you made a lot of noise.

Nadia sat under the overhanging tip of the boulder and imagined she was sitting there millions of years ago when those bottom layers were young. She imagined that the stars were brighter then, and the sun was dimmer. The desert was probably a lake of shimmering water surrounded by green plants, trees as tall as mountains with massive branching leaves swaying in the sky like clouds.

She laid back on the soft sand and felt it slip through her fingers as she ran them back and forth across its surface. The longer she stared at the stars, the more would appear. Maybe if she looked long enough, the whole sky would be covered, but nobody could because the sun would rise before they all awakened.

A bright blue star caught her eye. Two bright stars beneath it formed a triangle, the skeleton of a constellation, a mountain up in the sky with the blue star at its peak. It was her birth sign, and the star was named Kal Zeri. It was her star, and it would always be here this time of year. The stars always appeared right where they were supposed to be, right at the time they were supposed to. It was like a neverending song that cycled through the year and always came back right where it started. And she preferred such predictable company to the chaos of village life.

Out beyond the stars there must be some place far from the sun, where there is only starlight. It must be a quiet place, where everything happened when it should. The only noise there was music, an endless song. Maybe she came from that place, and fell down to Zenaran with the people who wanted to talk all the time and make loud noise all day. She imagined that she and the other starchildren must have fallen down from the stars. She couldn’t remember the other world because she hit her head when she fell.

She felt something slither down her arm, a snake coming out of her sleeve. Her white scales looked bright under the starlight. Nadia stared at the diagonal pattern of her scales sliding out from under the horizontal pattern of the threads of her sleeve and onto her patternless black skin. It went on forever, until she had crawled all the way out and her tail came out and it sadly ended.

“Zeri, aren’t you cold?” Nadia lifted her arm up to her face, where Zeri had coiled her long white body around her wrist like a bracelet. She lifted her long flat head up toward Nadia’s and flicked her tongue out to touch her skin. Nadia laughed and watched her little red eyes as Zeri moved her head around, smelling the air with her tongue.

Nadia looked out to where the crests of sand touched the sky. In the dark it looked like waves on a vast lake. She looked down at the quiet pond. If she looked at it long enough she could see it, the ancient lake. Its calm shimmering waters reflected the huge bright stars. Its surface rippled with the little expanding circles gently crossing it, caused by the little spiders that walked across its surface, and the stars rippled with it.

The little ferns around the pond were colossal plants around the edge of the giant lake. The spiders were huge beasts of ancient times. Enormous snakes crawled across the land then too, and the dragons who ruled Zenaran long before humans would fly through the sky. They could probably fly up so high they could touch the stars.

The reflection in the water was distorted. There were so many ripples now. A noise ruined the silence of the desert night, a low vibration like the voice of some great beast.

Then there were very bright stars rising over the horizon. They broke formation and moved faster than the others, rushing ahead, straight at her. They were too bright, like the sun--she squinted her eyes to look as they came closer. Their light reached down to the ground and lit up huge circles in the sand.

They were getting bigger. They weren’t flying up with the stars, they were falling to Zenaran, faster and faster, and the noise got louder and louder. Zeri quickly crawled back into her shirt. Nadia covered her ears, but it still hurt when they flew over her. A wind followed, stirring up the still sand.

Once they all flew over Nadia and her rock and her pond, she crept around the edge of the rock to watch them descend over the village. Smaller starchildren broke away and fell from them, and once they hit the ground, thunder sounded, with bright flashes casting long shadows of the houses across the desert. Smoke was rising in the bright light of the circling stars.

There was gunfire. She saw the flashes from the village and from the sky. The stars stopped falling and waited above. They were attached to huge tubes of metal, monstrous things that stole the stars from the sky and dropped them on the village. Their long metal arms reached down to the ground. She could hear the screams, and hid behind her rock.

The shooting and screaming and the horrible low roar of the sky creatures went on. Nadia couldn’t think, her vision was blurry, and she couldn’t move. Then she wasn’t alone, two men came from behind the rock. They had guns with long blades, long brown coats, and ghostly pale faces.

They shouted at each other in words she didn’t understand. Then one pointed his gun at her. She shut her eyes, hopelessly lost in the chaos and the noise. When she opened them, that man was lying still on the ground a few Length away, and a little red water snake was burrowing back under the sand next to him. Many others moved across the sand, twisting their bodies in rippling waves to rush across the sand so fast. The other man was running away.

Zeri poked her head out. She and Nadia watched the water snakes crawl back under the sand. They didn’t bother her. She couldn’t get up, she couldn’t look up. The sound and the flashing light wouldn’t stop, it never would stop.