mindsplinters | 31 Days: Day Seven

And a little side trip to Bordertown. I think I really need to re-read these books again. I love them so. I fear if I do, though, I'll want to start an RP for them. (And I totally realize that most of you won't recognize this world or remember Emmy from a previous ficlet spurt but... It's writing!)

World: Bordertown
Characters: Emmy

You couldn't see stars like this in Town, Emmy thought as she squirmed her shoulders to achieve more comfort in the short, dewy grass beneath her. There was too much neon and smoke and ground-level distractions ran amuck. Who bothered to look upwards when there were so many interesting things in front of your nose?

Out here, though, in the wild bits around Town where magic clawed at the ground and sank roots deep before it created new things and warped old things, nothing interfered with the view. She felt surprise that she had forgotten how pure the night sky was outside of her regular life but, thinking on it, she knew it was just a matter of distance that allowed you to forget. Despite the stories and songs of her people, Emmy knew that she was not cut of the mythic cloth. She had no head for history or rhymes. Elf she was but she never claimed to be a poet. Poets required too much round-about thinking, remembering in three-sixty, so to speak.

Emmy knew realities and momentary living. She knew the smell of motor oil and the time for a proper fermentation. She knew laughter and music and the sleepy, drunken conversations that happened at 3am when they can no longer sell the brew legally and so Cheers gives it away on loan simply because the talk is too present to let go.

But she did not know stars. Or at least she never knew stars until she was out in the lawless lands beneath them, watching the distant twinkle with a quiet sense of awe filling her up from toe to top. She knew they were nothing magical - not on this side of the veil, anyway. One night, she had brought little Luz out with her for a full moon ride and had her head filled with the thermodynamics of the heavens as they flopped near a stand of twisted birch to drink from their flasks. The stars were impossibly far away and they were alive in the way that fire was and they sometimes died before anyone could realize it. We get to see light that's hundreds of millions of years old, Luz had said.

But light's light and has no age, Emmy had answered with a frown.

And that had ended the conversation as Luz read her companion properly and switched to spinning tales about her childhood out in the World. Emmy immediately forgot about the science in the fascination of the stories, only feeling embarrassment when she knew she would fail to reciprocate. She remembered little of her own childhood on the other side. The only reality she remembered properly came after the shame and after the crossing, a loose patchwork of growth amongst alleys and urchins.

She did not forget new things, though, and she remembered Luz's science as she lay on her back in the hard-scrabble field. She brought one arm up and tucked it behind her head. The other arm lifted and she pointed a finger at a particular cluster. Carefully, she traced imaginary lines between the pinprick spots of light. "Centaurus," she whispered and smiled. Her cheeks felt warm with the night air against them suddenly. Luz had given her such a strange grin when she pointed the cluster out, worse look when she explained the origin and the strange man-horse who taught the heroes gentleness and medicine.

Emmy dropped her hand to rest flat on her stomach and closed her eyes. Humans had such strange ideas. Dead stars, old light, Chiron...