a mass of innumerable stars planted together - Spark

[Giver]

Time is a funny thing.
It had, after all, released him.

Or, it had tried to. But some things are harder to disentangle from – ask the fly in the web, or the fish on a hook; ask the princess in her tower, or the comet in his orbit. Alight and Giver, too, have their before and after, are just reaching their fork. (Giver can see it, but… time is a funny thing. Some places obey not its law but handless clocks of their own, like deep space or the iron core of a planet; some souls ride grains of sand down the sides of the glass universe, and accept that they are falling, while others cling to the outer-edges, like tree frogs, resisting the cruelty of that momentum.)

Time.

Alight is morning – dawn. She always has been. Bird-chorus and the slow meander of sunlight, in slanted shafts, across her face. A sunrise that does not end but stretches into oblivion; an eternal fire dancing on the thin sliver of darkness left clung to the horizon like an oil spill.
She is the universe, halted.
A pocketwatch with the cogs slipped out of place.

An anti-star, a never-night. One that would separate him forever and ever from his kin, if it could. If she could, she would. She would put a stop to the physics, the rotation, and keep him chained to her…
—yes, like a pendant of cosmic fossil, around her neck. Her stalwart toy soldier.

She would miss his lightshow, sure. (It had so made her laugh when they were young.) But he had begun to steal away at night, years ago, when he had first realized that those formations held knowledge that he was so eager to gain access to… And if he thought she had not noticed. Well, how foolish.

Their separation would not be gentle one, no matter how kind he tried to make it.
And he would. Because he loves her.

“Good. that’s good,” he swallows and does not recognize the gash of black against the horizon, anymore, but tries to keep to her. The more he turns from it, the more he thinks he can hear it, the low and ominous hum of something spectacularly large, approaching unbearably quickly from light years away. It had taken so much from him – sucked up and reconstituted the atmospheres of not just him, but so many others – that he does not doubt it is a harbinger. “I’m no worse for wear. I’m fine,” he lies, but it is a lie designed to be pretty. “You found your family?”

She can see that he is without his company.
There is some warmth, still, when she leans against him, to replace the utter cold left by their jilting. Around them, the dust is settling and behind all of that, the sun begins to dip into the gathering swells of pink and mauve, orange, like a fire being ebbed away. As day fades away, the shadow that comes reveals the infinitesimal glow that emanates from his body – from his mantle of skin, the core of his heart. He had not seen it before, as he chased wildly after the figments of her. Does not even see it even now, as his eyes are fixed on the black of her ears and forehead. It came at first like a stir in his gut as something sunk itself, stubbornly, into his sides, so steadfast that it had withstood the threshold of the Mountain.

Something ancient and cosmic, and every night it grows, feeding off the idol moon, until he is its mirror on earth.
Waiting patiently for the stars to reignite.

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