II
Adlartok
Heiðrún
Heiðrún stared at her book. She rolled a pencil between her fingers. It remains the darkest of moments, she wrote. A solar system of creatures died that night, the force of their sun’s destruction as if an indelible echo, carving a scar across each and every sky. There exists now, in the space where its planets had once hung, nothing but a single crack. She turned away from the memory. She blinked, her hair colour changing with her emotions, from pitch black to pale grey. Recalling those words now, the sorrow felt somehow greater, especially after what she had done, how she had done it. Heiðrún was alone. She was sat on a small beach, and nestled there amongst the rocks she felt as if a ghost amid the desolate landscape. A line of cliffs towered behind her. An ocean lapped at the sand beyond her feet. Ice slushed the water’s surface, its cold blanketing the horizon. Snow fell, further paling her now ashen hair, each strand reflecting a different shade of silver. Frost crusted her toes. How long could she sit here, in her human form, waiting? Banishing such thoughts, she tried again, writing faster this time. During the implosion, the energy of that solar system’s sun fused with the souls of its creatures, all of whom were once so tightly woven to their worlds’ terrains. Waves of debris were blown out into the Cosmos, and yet deep inside the blast many of those souls stayed, their spirits somehow massing, clustering within the collapsing
clouds of gas and dust. Locked into a fiery orbit, these anomalies spent aeons circling the heat of the blast, before being scattered into space. Their own energies fading, many fell cold. They exist now, as waning orbs, stellar remnants spinning aimlessly from universe to universe, the brutalities of their past fallen harmless at last.
Her arm tingled. She prodded at it, skin warm, fingers disturbing the flesh beneath, tracing out the contours of her bones. Adopting her human form was never easy. She rarely settled for this long. Their skin was as cursed as it was uncomfortable. With each passing second her core called again for the stars. She was the spiritual manifestation of sunlight, a norn of the nornir, and yet bound to her own fate still she waited, still she watched… still that incubation shell remained. She had planted it safely, nested it within a mound of fallen boulders. She peered anxiously. Smooth and grey and solid as any of the other rocks, it lay quiet, as of yet unmoving, utterly indistinguishable. This child would bring some redemption. She would be okay on her own, or at least, until her conscious began subverting instinct. Heiðrún gnawed at her lip — she should not be here when the child emerges. Soon she would leave, find another cove. Soon, but not yet. She sighed, turning once more to her book. Not all of those planets cooled. Somehow, a few of the souls from that lost solar system endured. These souls developed extraordinarily large spheres, spheres whose heat never faded, whose light still to this day shines out from within the dark.