prompted on orvcord: anna croft, an empty sky. the beginning of some weird fantasy au where there are no stars in the sky, and there haven’t been for some time. no one remembers why, but There Is A Reason For This.
They say the skies used to be full of light. Days, where you could look upward to an endless blue and a golden sun that left brilliant colors in its wake as it finished its journey across the sky. Nights, with a full pale moon and an infinity of stars overhead, shimmering like jewels. Both of them making a world so bright that one could step forward without fear, nothing at all needed to light the way.
There’s evidence of it, in pictures and paintings, in accounts and anecdotes. It was a beautiful sight, or so they say.
Anna dreams of it, now and again. In sleep, she looks toward the heavens, at clouds of stardust, at those luminous things placed such impossible distances away. When you belong a species that struggle to see even a century, those stars seem eternal. If they could look down on you, they’d only see you for a blink of an eye. But history says that they’re finite, mortal things with mortal lifespans. They, too, can die, and they do so in glory, shining so fiercely that you can see the husks of them burning thousands years after their deaths.
Anna wakes up in a world of darkness. There are still lights flickering in her vision, the echoes of a time long past, snippets of fact murmuring in her mind. A star, the nuclear fusion of hydrogen into helium. A star, a faraway celestial body often used for guidance and navigation. A star, believed to offer guidance and control the fates of humans born under them.
Stars. Stars. Stars stars stars stars.
Her shoulders are shaking. She presses the heels of her hands into her eyes, and irrationally, inexplicably, she thinks: this should not be.
