There were compensations, Remi found, to the cold and snowy wasteland that was the People's territory in Eun-Bac. She was no fan of snow by any means, and she had issues with anyplace where the air itself could freeze you to death. Still, one thing she noticed when Alisaie took her new wife out for a combination night watch / stargazing session - the combination of clean cold air, altitude and lack of any significant light from a habitation meant that Remi, normally a city-dweller, saw more of the stars than she ever had before. There were sources of warmth enough, too - furs spread on the ground for them to sit on, and furs to cover them (though Alisaie, enjoying her predominant immunity to the cold from whatever training she'd undergone with the People, didn't need them), and a very large white moose at their back as a sort of warm backrest ... and, for Remi, a warm white-gold wing adding to the layers of shield against the cold. With no background chatter from their campsite for the night, and the moon and stars as a surprisingly sufficient source of light, they could be assured of seeing trouble coming with plenty of warning, and could afford to relax a bit, and watch the stars.
Eventually, Remi broke the silence. She spoke quietly, almost regretful of the dent she put in the silence ... but nights like this, with the stars like diamond dust above them, sometimes needed accompaniment. And quite apart from loving to listen to her wife talk, she did like stories, and there were compensations to marrying a well-travelled bard. "Do you know any stories about the stars? Why they're there?"
Alisaie thought about it for a moment. "A few, yeah. Some call them Sune's Tears; she wept for joy at the beauty of the material plane, and added to it that way. The Morskoy say that one time, when Fharlaghn the Happy Wanderer courted the Ocean Lady, to spare some seafarer Talos' wrath, their pillow talk was all about how unfair it was that land travellers had landmarks aplenty to guide their way, but those on the sea had none. So together they petitioned Pelor, and he gave them little snippets of his light, and together they drew patterns with them in the sky - guideposts for the wise. That's why if you look, you can see pictures in them. This time of year, up here, you can see the Great Dragon, watching the north, and the Lone Wolf on the hunt." She sketched out their outlines, playing connect-the-dots with the pinpricks of light.
Remi nodded. "Airship captains say something like that. They just say that Pelor put them there himself. You know. Justice and all, since land travellers have landmarks and airship pilots don't as much. Probably Tritherion got involved." This, Remi reflected, blushing a little, was why she was not the bard of the pairing. "They never said why the stars move with the seasons, though."
"Well, the Morskoy and the People say that Auril mistakes them for shards of her own ice, and pulls them towards herself in wintertime. But Chauntea wants every little tiny piece of Pelor's light in her season, so she sneaks up behind Auril and quietly tugs them back around towards herself. That's why they cycle with the seasons." Alisaie grinned a little. "And sometimes, they say, Auril shows off with them, turning their light into something Chauntea could never produce. She makes the sky light up with rainbows at night. You'll see when we get further north."
Remi nodded, making a noise of approval as she looked forward to that, and tried to imagine it. She was fairly sure her imagination wouldn't do it justice, but she reasoned that anyone who had seen the lights of Egref would come closer than most. That brought another thought and she frowned, hesitant to ask the question but knowing it would nag at her if she didn't at least ask. "Do you know what they say about the stars in Egref? If they can even see them with all the lights there."
"They do, but ... well, it's Egref. It's weird." With a slightly dubious purse of her lips, Alisaie said, "They think that plane shifts are just really long teleports, sometimes. That the different planes are just so far away that we couldn't get there even in a god's lifetime. And that they have their own sun-gods, or whatever makes suns in worlds that have no sun-gods, but those suns shine so bright, and light travels so far and so fast, that they shine on us here, after travelling for years and years. That we could be looking at the suns of other planes when we look at the stars."
"So ... one of those could be Barnabus' sun?" Remi eyed the stars with a sort of dubious wariness.
Alisaie shrugged with the shoulder that Remi wasn't leaning against. "Maybe, but I have a feeling it would take one of those Egref natural philosophers a long time to figure out which one. So probably best to keep it to the stories about the gods. He might not have gods in his world, but he knows we do, and it'll save him a lot of sleepless nights stargazing."
"Well, stargazing has a lot to recommend it under the right circumstances," Remi said, nuzzling Alisaie's neck with the top of her head a bit and eliciting a giggle from Alisaie. "But you're right." Then another thought occurred, and Remi frowned again. "Wait. In Egref, they think that plane shifts are just ... teleporting really far away. So ... how do they explain the ... weak places Beth told us about when we went to the Shadowfell after you? You got plane-shifted; we just walked into a 'thin spot' through a wood elf graveyard."
"That's a way longer story that involves words like 'wrinkles in space' and 'wormholes' and 'postgraduate courses in string theory' and then I start wondering how careful the Kobrea-Val mushroom-wranglers are when they pick eating-mushrooms, y'know? And that's leaving aside how whatever that Archfey did to take away his way home didn't stop him using the more ... y'know, usual teleports."
Remi, whose train of thought probably would have stopped there next without Alisaie's help, winced. "Yeah, thank the gods for that."
Alisaie tilted her head just far enough to kiss Remi on the temple. "Probably better to leave it to the people who breathe weird fumes for a living."
Happily taking Alisaie's advice on who to leave with metaphysical questions about lights in the sky, Remi snuggled a bit closer to Alisaie, as much for companionship as warmth. "Well, they are pretty. Probably better to look at than to poke at too hard."
After another moment of companionable silence, Remi realised she wasn't quite done hearing stories yet. "So ... how did they pick the pictures they drew in the sky with stars, whoever drew them?"
Alisaie, who did love telling a good story, smiled. "Well, some say that the little bits of sparkle he gave to the Ocean Lady were pieces of souls deemed worthy of immortality. The Great Dragon, for instance, is supposed to be the soul of an silver dragon from long before the time of the Five Claws of Bahamut. He was said to have been the protector of the silver dragonborn and the people of the north, for many many years..."
Remi knew only a few of the stories Alisaie told of Ellon's constellations, mostly of Elbrus, the warrior-guardian of the night sky, and of Luan, the Archfey Lady who hung the moon in the Ocean Lady's honour. She didn't know the rest of them - of the Great Dragon; of Essya, tasked to knit bonds of friendship in her seat among the stars; of Mathan, the first Druid in his Great Bear shape; of Luko, the dire wolf that was Torm's companion when he taught the first rangers the ways of Balinor and Obad-Hai; of Sassandra, the last priestess of Llolth's old ways of order and pattern, in her spider-shape; of Erelis, the eagle who scouted for many years for the perfect place for Bahamut to drive Tiamat into Avernus; of Llwynog, the fox who allowed the Archfey a small link to the material plane in return for cleverness, and more besides.
If at least some attention needed to be paid to the world that made more physical forms of affection a bad idea, there were worse ways to spend an evening under the furs on a cold winter night than to hear the stories of the stars spun by the storyteller one happened to have married.
