She aches for what she cannot define.
She aches, too, because to whom can she express the singular pang in her chest, the longing for the stars, the quiet, the standstill of time? It is impossible to know what it’s like to live there in space’s queer timelessness, to watch galaxies collapse and feel simultaneously like a god and like an infinitesimally small speck of dust.
She is a creature kept from its migration, because the home she wishes for is impossible
(Was always impossible, she wonders sometimes if it was a dream, a capsule of madness.)
She is not like her mother – she was born to the stars, but not of them; nor is she like her father, full of magic, a megalomaniac god.
All she has is a reflection of the sky in her coat, a living painting. Of course, she merely mirrors the sky, a lovely trick but ultimately a useless one.
There is a new legion of them, half-siblings scattered piecemeal with stars and colors. None of them were kept as she and brother were, in the strange timelessness, coats made to bring the stars home.
(She misses it. God, she misses it.)
She had tried to find father, while he was here, meaning to throw herself at his feet and beg to be sent back. He hadn’t loved her, had existed alongside them for only a short while (or perhaps a long one. Time does not exist in space, not like it does here, where it is heavy and ponderous across the skin.)
But he had heeded none of her cries, and she cannot find a god when the god does not want to be found.
So she remains stranded, a girl apart, once of the stars and now of the meadow. She shines a bright blue, a reflection of the sky, clouds drifting lazily over her hindquarters. She is lovely in the way things made magic are, and though her eyes may be dull, her coat is not, and she shines on.
astra inclinant, non necessitant
(the stars incline, they do not compel)