by T.A. Barron
Kate felt a surge of sympathy for him. How could he have known the rings would fail? He never wanted her to come along in the first place: That was her own idea. He wasn’t to blame for that. All he had ever wanted was to stop the Sun from destroying itself—and life on Earth in the process.
She moved to his side and touched his arm. “It’s not your fault. It’s not anyone’s fault, really.” She laid her head against his white lab coat. “Until this second I never really believed—down inside, I mean—that the Sun would die, and the Earth would die, and we would die. I guess I always thought you’d find an answer somehow. Oh, Grandfather! Now I’m so scared.”
Two bushy eyebrows lifted hesitantly, as if to say: “So am I.”
Wordlessly, they gazed across the starscape of Trethoniel, watching the shifting, seamless sea of colors. Bursts of bright light and floating crystals seemed to dance around them in an elegant minuet. Stellar winds buffeted them, tousling Grandfather’s white hair.
Gently, he put his hand upon Kate’s shoulder. Despite everything, the two lost voyagers felt nudged by a growing awareness of the immense beauty surrounding them.
“Whatever happens,” said Kate softly, “I’m glad I got to see this.” She looked up at Grandfather. “And if something bad has to happen to us, I’d rather it happen while we’re together.”
“So would I, Kaitlyn.” He stroked her braid tenderly. “I just didn’t think it would happen like this. Or so soon! I suppose this is just a lesson in how small and unimportant we are in the grand scheme of things.”
“But you’re always telling me how every living thing is important.”
“Right you are,” replied the old man. “Thank you for reminding me. Every piece of the universe, even the tiniest little snow crystal, matters somehow. We can’t forget that. I have a place in the Pattern, and you do, too. An important place.”
Kate frowned. “I still have trouble swallowing all that.”
“Why?”
“I just don’t—I just don’t feel like I matter much to the universe, that’s all. Morpheus tried to tell me the same thing. I know I matter to you, and to Mom and Dad, and maybe to Ariella—but that’s different. Why do I really matter to anything else?”
Grandfather shrugged despondently. “I suppose—”
A violent jolt interrupted him.
“Hey!” shrieked Kate. “The crystal! It’s moving!”
“My God!”
XII
The Voice
As they held each other tightly, the mirrorlike crystal on which they stood began to buzz with vibrations. Slowly, its once-defined edges became silvery blurs and began to curl upward around them.
With every passing second, the vibrating grew more intense, until they could barely stand upright. The sea of floating crystals was now just a blur.
“We’re trapped!” screamed Kate, as the rim of the crystal closed around them.
“Dear God!” exclaimed Grandfather.
The vibrations increased to the point where Grandfather and Kate toppled over in a pile. As the crystalline mass extended itself, the hollow in the middle where they stood began to deepen, like a bowl. At the same time, the crystal grew more and more clear, until finally it was perfectly transparent. Eventually, the edges joined above them in a seamless unity.
Suddenly, the vibrations ceased.
Slowly, cautiously, they regained their feet.
“It’s a globe,” said Kate, incredulous. “A big globe.”
Indeed, they found themselves standing inside a large, transparent sphere. The great sea of mist around them whistled ominously.
“I’m scared,” said Kate.
Then came the Voice.
From all around them, made from the deepest tones in the universe, came a bass-bass voice. It sounded as if someone had begun to play a titanic cello, whose strings were as long as a galaxy, and whose reverberations rolled out of a bottomless black hole.
“You need not fear.” The words echoed across the starscape. “I am the Voice of Trethoniel.”
Trying to regain his composure, Grandfather stood erect and tall in the middle of the great globe. He bowed slowly and respectfully.
Kate glanced at him worriedly. How could they be sure this was really the voice of the star? How could they know it was not really The Darkness or some other nightmarish creature?
“I am glad you have arrived. I am glad you have come to me,” rumbled the Voice like a thundering storm.
“We are glad to be here,” Grandfather replied, with more than a touch of fear in his voice. “I am Doctor Miles Prancer of the planet Earth, and this is my granddaughter Kaitlyn.”
“You have come just in time,” reverberated the reply.
“Yes,” answered Grandfather. “How did you know? Our Sun is on the edge of—”
“No!” bellowed the Voice. “I speak not of your Sun. You have come just in time to save another star.”
“Another star?” Grandfather’s brow furrowed. “What star is that?”
The winds swept around the globe before the Voice spoke again, answering the question with a single word: “Trethoniel.”
“Help Trethoniel?” cried Kate. “Are you really in danger? Is it because of The Darkness?”
“Patience, young one,” commanded the Voice. “At the appropriate time, everything will be explained to you. If Trethoniel can be rescued from its current danger, it may even be possible to save that insignificant star you call the Sun. A strong Trethoniel can do many things. First, however, you must prove your worth by helping me.”
“It may be insignificant to you,” protested Kate, “but it’s the only Sun we have. And we don’t have much time!”
“You have time enough to help Trethoniel. My need is far greater than yours.”
“But—”
“Quiet, Kate!” said Grandfather, squeezing her hand. “How can we help you, Great Star?”
“Soon enough, I shall explain. All you need to know is that the music of Trethoniel is in grave danger.”
What kind of danger? wondered Kate. From The Darkness? From the same disease that had stricken the Sun? She had hoped that Trethoniel would harbor the solution to their problems. Why then did this voice make her feel so afraid?
She turned anxiously to Grandfather. He stood in rapt attention, lost in thought. His face showed great anticipation, as if a long-awaited dream had finally come true.
A deep, full laughter rolled through the mists like a tsunami. “The young one does not yet believe I am Trethoniel.”
Grandfather looked at Kate with surprise. She squeezed his hand fearfully.
The Voice came again, but more gently this time. “Very good. Such independence is one reason your little species has survived as long as it has, despite its other qualities.” Then it grew serious, almost threatening. “But I am what I say I am. I do not have time to explain myself to small minds. And I hold you both as mere specks of dust in a bubble of my own creation.”
“Kate,” whispered Grandfather urgently. “Don’t upset the star. It may be quick to anger, and its anger could be terrible. Remember that without our butterflies we have no escape!”
“But—” Kate objected faintly. “I was just feeling—”
“Feeling what?”
She looked into Grandfather’s eyes. “I don’t know exactly. Afraid, I guess.”
Grandfather pulled her nearer. “Don’t worry, Kaitlyn. I’ll do what is best for us. You know I will.”
He turned to the swirling mist. “She is only a child,” he apologized. “She means no harm to Trethoniel.”
They waited for a reply, but no reply came. Instead, a strange tenseness filled the air, a tenseness which brewed and bubbled until it felt like struggle, and pain. Then came a faint sound, or combination of sounds, welling up in the distance. A healing, joyous sound, like the celebration of birds at dawn’s first light. Could it be? Yes! It was the music!
Then suddenly, without warning, the fair melody faded away
. Deep in her chest, Kate felt again the touch of deadly coldness. She gasped. It was as if The Darkness had just flown past, brushing her heart with its poisonous tail.
“The music!” she cried. “Bring it back!”
“I am trying,” declared the Voice, its unfathomably deep tones weighed down by an ancient sadness, too old and too immense to be comprehended by younger beings. “I am trying to save the music from total destruction.”
The lovely sounds had vanished completely. All that remained was the empty whistling of the winds.
“How can we be of service to you?” Grandfather called into the starscape.
“I shall explain soon enough,” bellowed the Voice. “But first, I wish to show you some of my greatest marvels. I wish to show you the beauty that gives birth to the music you have heard.”
Grandfather’s eyes flamed brightly. “We would be honored to see any marvels you care to show us.”
“But we have no butterflies,” objected Kate meekly. “How will we—”
“You will need no butterflies,” boomed the reply. “I shall carry you, and you shall see some of my finest treasures. And perhaps you who are so young and full of doubt will eventually come to show me your trust.”
Kate flushed with embarrassment. “I didn’t mean to—”
A sudden jolt cut her short.
“The globe! It’s moving!”
Grandfather reached for her arm and steadied her. “Stay close to me, Kaitlyn. I know you have your doubts … and so do I. But we’re now at the mercy of this star, and I don’t want to upset it. It could even be Trethoniel’s energy that’s keeping us alive as heartlight, now that our rings have failed. I’m afraid we must do as it says.”
“But, Grandfather—”
“No, Kate. If you don’t trust the star, then at least trust me. I’ve made some bad mistakes, but I still know what is best for us.” His eyes held hers for several seconds.
At last she lowered her gaze. “I don’t know why I’m being so difficult. Maybe it was getting swallowed by The Darkness that did it. That whole experience still feels so … so … close. I’m sorry. Of course I trust you.”
Grandfather’s expression softened. “And I trust you. Your instincts aren’t all wrong. I’m not completely comfortable with our host, either. But I know enough to be sure this is the only chance we may still have to find a way to help the Sun. And right now, we have no choice.”
XIII
Trethoniel
Standing inside the great globe as if it were an ark, the two travelers began to sail into the billowing mists. Crystals, some gargantuan and some as small as stardust, floated past on all sides. Some of them, symmetrical and shimmering, reminded Kate of Ariella. Clouds of heated dust swirled about them, aglow with all the colors of the universe.
A gaseous shape in the distance caught her eye. It was a strange, slender cloud with dozens of long tendrils extending from its sides. As they drew nearer, she discerned that the tendrils themselves branched into smaller tendrils, and from them spouted still smaller tendrils, like thousands of misty fingers reaching out from the main stem. The entire form seemed to be dancing—bending and swaying to a rhythm older than time.
“It looks like a tree!”
Grandfather, who was studying the cloudlike being carefully, nodded in agreement.
Then the form began to metamorphose. Ever so subtly, beginning on the outermost branches, the twigs of the cloud tree began to brighten. As if a swarm of fireflies had alighted upon the misty fingers, the tip of every twig started to glow with a warm, white light. Gradually, the light seeped into the larger branches, then into the trunk, then down to the roots, until finally the whole tree radiated like a miniature star, sparkling silently in space.
Kate reached for Grandfather’s hand, which had simultaneously reached out for hers. Together, they watched the glowing cloud tree dance before them.
“That is one of my oldest and finest creations,” boomed the Voice, jarring them out of their reverie.
“How old is it?” asked Grandfather.
“It is nearly as old as I am, and that is more than eight billion of your Earth years.”
Kate had never found it easy to comprehend such numbers. Eight billion years! And she used to think Grandfather was old.
“I resent that thought,” he replied, his eyes aglow with humor. “Compared to this star, I feel like a young bobbin.”
“That’s the whole point! If Trethoniel is over eight billion years old, that means it’s more than a hundred times … a hundred times … a hundred times a hundred times as old as you.”
“You are beginning to understand, young one,” boomed the Voice. “Even your rudimentary brain power has led you to the correct conclusion.”
Kate stiffened. “I may not be a genius, but at least I don’t pretend to know everything.”
“Nothing in the universe is hidden from me,” replied the Voice in an imperial tone. “Nothing in the universe is beyond my knowledge.”
“Nothing at all?” asked Grandfather, an edge of sadness in his voice.
The Voice did not respond for several seconds. At last, its deep tones resonated from above and below the great globe. “You are correct, Doctor Miles Prancer of the planet Earth. Young as you are, you are wiser than I had thought. Only one thing in the entire universe is still beyond my understanding. Only one thing is still beyond my power.”
“What? What is it?” asked Kate.
“In time, even you shall understand,” replied the Voice.
Kate turned to Grandfather for an explanation when, suddenly, the globe began to rotate. Slowly it spun around until they were no longer facing the illuminated tree. Then, gradually, the misty curtain before them parted, revealing Trethoniel’s nebula stretching far out into the galaxy. Intertwined like the threads of a timeless tapestry, the colored clouds undulated gracefully in the stellar winds. Every so often, the light from Trethoniel would catch a floating crystal and it would explode with a dazzling burst of light, shining like a jewel in the tapestry.
Kate was reminded of Morpheus and Orpheus. What had actually happened to them? Were they gone forever? But no answer came to her questions.
“Beautiful,” sighed Grandfather, still captivated by the glorious vista.
“Yes, it is beautiful,” declared the Voice. “On the day I was first flung to this far corner of the universe, I was nothing more than a ball of gathering gases. When all around me was empty and dark, when not a single neighboring star could be seen, I began to weave my cape of colored clouds. For many star-lives, I have spun endless crystals and painted the moving mist, even as I manufactured more light than can ever be measured. I have labored, long beyond my destined time, to create the most beautiful star in the universe.”
“And you have succeeded,” Grandfather added.
“No!” boomed the Voice, with such force that it shook the globe and almost knocked them off their feet. “I have not succeeded. All my labors may still amount to nothing. Nothing at all!”
A long pause was filled only with the wailing of the winds.
“Come. I will show you more.”
The great globe glided forward into the curling mists. Behind them, the glowing cloud tree reached out its longest branch, as if it were trying to deliver a message to them before they departed. Gracefully it stretched, unfurling like a fiddlehead fern in the spring sunshine, until it was about to touch the surface of the globe.
With a sudden jolt, the globe accelerated its flight. The misty finger reached out to its maximum length, but fell a few inches short of its mark. As the unknowing voyagers vanished into the billowing clouds, the illuminated tree seemed to shrug sadly and recoiled its branch. Slowly, twig by twig, the luminous form went dark, until at last its light was completely gone.
“We’re descending,” Grandfather declared. “We must be approaching the surface of the star.”
Just then a gigantic tower of flame, white at the center and red along the edges, arched a
bove them in a burst of brilliance reaching thousands of miles into space. The atmosphere sizzled and sparked. It felt as if they had just flown into a celestial furnace. For an instant, the swirling clouds turned into scarlet flames, licking at the great globe and its passengers. Then, like a collapsing building, the titanic tower of flame fell back to the star. It washed over them in an avalanche of fire.
“Whew!” said Kate as the flames disintegrated and were replaced by deep red clouds. “I thought the desert on Nel Sauria was hot. This is definitely no place to have a real body. Even inside a globe. If we were made of skin and bones there’d be nothing left now but two lumps of charcoal!”
“Not even that,” corrected Grandfather. “It’s hard to believe, but we are only at the edge of the corona, Trethoniel’s outer atmosphere. Compared to what it’s like down inside the core, an eruptive prominence like that is barely lukewarm. The pressure in there is something like five hundred billion times the pressure on the Earth’s surface, and the temperature is close to seventy million degrees Fahrenheit.”
“That’s what I call hot,” agreed Kate. “It makes even a healthy Sun seem pretty feeble.”
Grandfather nodded, as the globe drew closer to the turbulent, bubbling surface of the star. Bridges of superheated plasma, arching along the lines of magnetic fields, spanned gigantic cones of ejecting gas. Rumbling like countless engines, huge convection cells—seething pots of ionized gases—percolated with energy from deep within the star’s core. The face of Trethoniel looked like one gigantic firestorm, continuously flaming, churning, and erupting.
“Look!” cried Kate. “What’s that?”
They trained their vision on a great pillar of yellow-red flames that rose like the stalk of a fiery flower from the stormy surface. Upward it climbed, until finally it opened into a wide bowl, large enough to contain a planet the size of Jupiter.
As the globe approached the midsection of the gigantic flaming stalk, it veered to the side and began to spiral higher and higher. At last, they had climbed to an altitude where they could see the thick folds of red and yellow petals that lined the underside of the great bowl, shielding its contents from the stormy surface of the star.
