can we pretend that airplanes in the night sky are like shooting stars,
I could really use a wish right now;

Once, she had been alone on purpose, and hated it.

She hadn’t known yet how to shield herself from the emotions that rolled off them in waves, overwhelmed by their anger and their sorrow. It was not a power she had been born with, and certainly not one she had asked for. It hadn’t occurred to her to ask her mother for help—her mother, that angel-beauty with the wicked morals that Evenstar never could make sense of. It didn’t matter that Ryatah could have taught her how to close herself off, to only let in what she wanted to get in. 

Self-imposed exile had been the easier (weaker)  option, hiding where their emotions could not find her.

But the lands are not as they had once been, and soon the solitude had not been a choice. No longer did she have to go to the far shores or the depths of the forest to evade the masses; they did not exist. And she finds that she misses it—misses their medley of emotion, being pulled by the tide of their despair and buoyed by their joy.

She is alone now, and still she hates it.

She stands now in a quiet meadow, beneath the hush of night. There is the soft rustling of a cold wind through dying leaves, the empty knocking of bare limbs against one another, but otherwise it is silent. It had been a relatively mild winter, and though there was no snow on the ground the grass had a dull, tired look to it, as if it had given up and would instead sleep until spring. She could not say that she blamed it. 

Something about the cold seemed to make the stars shine brighter, she thought, as she looked up at them through the soft plumes of her breath in the air. It was a cloudless sky, and the night seemed to stretch on for infinity, glittering black, with the starlight blinking like a thousand suns. She watches, confused and transfixed, as starlight seems to stream towards her, the ribbons of it braiding together in their descent until they collide with her skin. For a moment, her body flashes white-hot, eliciting a soft gasp of surprise.

She cannot explain it, but she can feel them, the stars that now burned inside of her chest. They hum like electricity, threading themselves through her veins much like the empathy had. Hesitantly, she reaches for that thread of power, letting it flare and staring in wonder at the silver starlight that creates a shield around her.

I'm praying that this stairway leads somewhere like Heaven's door,
and when you get there don't look down