Post by Aegle Verdant on Oct 26, 2019 22:26:08 GMT -5
"What are they?"
The yard stretched out before them. It rolled, a white blanket of fresh fallen snow, all the way from the sharp cut stone of the porch to the very base of the black ring wall that surrounded the whole village. Vulcan, seated with his back to the open door, ostensibly examining a small circuit board, kept one eye on Aegle at all times
"What're what?" She was sitting on the edge of the porch, feet dangling, the braces she wore on her legs clinking quietly on the stone lip, "The stars?" Vulcan's eyes narrowed slightly, and he followed her gaze up to the sable sky and the hundreds of thousands of lights that pricked it; A sprawling tapestry of light, woven of deep blues and a strange, rippling, green iridescence
"They're stars." He ventured after a moment, giving the obvious answer out of habit, in spite of Aegle's known tendency to greatly over-complicate simple questions. Sure enough, his little sister turned and lanced Vulcan with a piercing stare, her emerald eyes radiant in the pale oval of her face. She did it so quickly that her plaited tail, which had been slung over one shoulder, whipped around to fall across the other.
"What are stars though?" She asked him pointedly. Vulcan blew out a sigh, and set aside the little device he'd been fiddling with, but which he hadn't really been paying attention to. He came forward on his chair, arms braced across his knees, and craned his head all the way back, till all he could see was the dotted expanse of the heavens over head.
"Well," Affecting the a knowing air, full of worldliness inherited from their father but which he, a boy on the cusp of manhood, had yet to wholly grow into, "no one knows for sure..."
After a few moments, his gaze slid slyly down, to catch Aegle frowning impatiently at him. Some of the world-weariness on his face slipped, revealing a tight little grin beneath. He held his little sister's impatient stare for as long as he could stand without bursting out laughing.
"Buuut," Repressing a chuckle, Vulcan dragged out the word, to Aegle's apparent approval, "We think they might be suns."
"Suns?" Aegle echoed, her expectant impatience melting away, to be replaced by open surprise. She flung her gaze skyward again, whipping her braid so hard that it struck her in the cheek, "All of 'em?"
"S'what we think." Vulcan agreed sagely, following his sister's gaze back up to the night sky.
"Woah..."
"Yeah," Vulcan agreed, "Woah."
The sat like that for a few moments, Aegle wondering at the enormity of such information, and trying to reframe the biggest thing she knew of to fit the thousand tiny bright dots overhead. Vulcan, meanwhile, reflected on facts long ago committed to memory but which he'd never quite considered in anything more than a purely academic context.
When he finally judged his introspection to have been sufficiently reverent, Vulcan turned his attention back to his set-aside gadget.
"Hang on..." Aegle said, just as he was about to take it up again. She turned slightly at the edge of the porch. She wore a pensive expression, mouth partways open, eyes thoughtfully narrowed, as she tried to find the right way to articulate the thought that had just popped into her head. A common enough expression for her, and one worn without self consciousness. Vulcan let his hand settle back down and waited with expectant calm for her to continue.
"If they're all suns, yeah," Aegle ventured finally, her eyes refocusing from the middle-distance they'd been staring into, to seek out Vulcan's own mossy gaze, "Why's the night so dark?"
She looked past him, up to the hundreds of tiny pinpricks that lit the heavens above his head.
"S'so many of 'em, Why isn't it bright all the time?"
Vulcan stared back at her, watching as she went back to scouring the heavens, practically able to hear the gears grinding in her head as she tried to work out the little conundrum she'd just made for herself. Blinking, he looked up again, back to the stars.
"Well," He said, with almost the same indulgently bored tone as before, "Y'know how when y'shine a torch on a wall, from real close up, how it makes that nice, bright circle?"
Her attention snatched back from the heavens, Aegle took a moment to imagine what Vulcan was describing, then gave a hesitant nod.
"And y'know how that circle gets bigger and dimmer as you move back?"
Another pause, followed by another hesitant nod.
"Now imagine it's not a wall, but something small, yeah? Like a marble..."
"Or a bunny!"
Vulcan paused, some shadow of his grin sneaking into his studiously academic expression, "If y'like... Well, that bunny isn't getting all the light y'shining at it. A lot of the light is shining past it, lighting up the things around the bunny, but not the bunny itself."
Aegle's brow furrowed and she imagined a little brown rabbit in a pool of expanding and dimming light, and tried to connect that idea to what Vulcan was attempting to explain. If she thought of the light as being made of snow flakes, with them drifting further and further apart the further away she moved, it made a little more sense...
Vulcan continued, "The Sun is so close to us that we get a lot of light from it. So much that it makes the sky blue and the ground warm. The stars are a lot further away, yeah? So we don't get as much light from them. Just a tiny bit from each one."
Aegle was nodding slowly. She had drawn back so far by this point, that only one or two snowflakes were settling on her imaginary bunny, where before it had been enough to bury the little creature.
She looked up at the sky again, imagining all those stars, as those snow flakes, falling on the back of their fuzzy little world.
"How far away?" She asked after a moment. Vulcan pulled his hand back in, once more aborted on its course to resume his homework.
"Hard t'say," He said, before indicating a bigger, redder star that hung just over the ring wall's edge, "That's the Huntsman's Star, and we reckon it's the closest. If you could move as fast as light does, it'd take y'four years or more to reach it."
Goosebumps and an uncomprehending shudder rushed through Aegle. She'd known for some time that light wasn't actually immediate, just really really fast, and she could not imagine it taking light four years to do anything.
Even trying to imagine how big a distance that would require made her head spin. Raising her hand from out of the protective cocoon of the dust treated blanket, Aegle folded a trembling thumb over the Huntsman's Star, and watched it wink in and out of sight with the trembling of her hand. With an effort of will, she steadied her hand and eased her thumb down, till it was just beneath the red dot, catching that single crimson snowflake on the very tip.
She blinked hard, feeling dizzy, and swayed where she sat, the prickle of gooseflesh on her arms bursting into a cold tingling all across her body. The trembling returned and her hand sagged, dragged down by some unseen weight. The tremors grew worse, and she hastily coiled her fingers into a fist, tucking her hand out of sight before Vulcan could notice.
"Y'alright?" He asked, his pretense of calm curiosity belying a brittle glass edge. It was a tone she'd heard more and more in recent months. More and more since the doctor, and braces for her legs. It made her feel guilty, like she'd done something wrong. Like somehow, her weakness had let Vulcan down.
"M'fine," Aegle said, "S'just cold, y'know?"
Aegle peered up at the bruised red glow, where the Huntsman's star smoldered behind the clouds, like a wisp of cloth laid over a burning coal. Four years to reach that star, traveling as fast as light did. Even now, nearly a decade later, she couldn't fathom such a distance. Such an expanse of space. The years which had followed had brought perspective. Her world had expanded and contracted, had grown beyond the small fort where she'd been born, then shrunk down to a room scarcely larger than her room at Haven. She'd understood how big Solitas was, guessed how big the world must be beyond it, and had thereby stepped further and further away from comprehending the awesome vastness that stood beyond even the world's rigid delineations. She could not imagine leaving Remnant, to get so far as the Moon's shattered remains, let alone reaching out to the stars.
It made her feel small. Aegle had always been small, even before the sickness stunted her growth. Yet, even at her smallest, she could not recall truly comprehending her insignificance. She wondered if, even now, she had the barest idea of just how insignificant she was.
"Sixteen and Five." Aegle counted out loud, in a small voice, as the Huntsman's star came out from behind its veil of cloud. She'd left the others some ten minutes ago, with assurances that she'd be back in no more than an hour, and to send someone looking if she wasn't. Not that she could have gone very far. Night had fallen a couple of hours earlier and, while the sky was clear, the ground was treacherous and dotted with shadowy pools. Her's had been a straight route, up past the hotsprings which Solomon and Qiu'li had found, sticking to the trail best lit by the stars and the moon's shattered face.
She wasn't sure why she'd come up here, though she suspected part of the reason was the need to get away from the others. So much of her daily routine revolved around solo rituals, exercising and ablutions and maintenance on her brace, and she'd felt increasingly penned in by the others. Though maybe it was simply because their presence reminded her that they'd come all the way out her on her say so. Like the Huntsman's star, their constant deference made her feel small too, in its reminded of how vast a space stood between her and where she ought to be.
That must have been it, Aegle decided. She'd come up here to be alone. Because the others were making her feel uncomfortable, claustrophobic. Yet, even as she assured herself of her reasons, Aegle could not help but wonder if she was merely giving some justification to a decision that had, at the time it was made, no justification at all. Had she really come up here to be alone, or had she done it simply to do it, and was now trying to invent some plausible explanation for her actions?
"Does it matter?"
So little did, after all. As if in answer, a soft breeze stirred up the fallen leaves about her feet, and whistled through the half naked boughs of the trees lining the clearing's edge.
'Twenty and One.'
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Carmim Clover
