The Shadow Behind the Stars

by Rebecca Hahn

She would tell us we were to blame.

  We would nod. We would let her words sink into us, let their barbs pierce our organs, their poisons slide through our veins. We would feel her pain for the rest of our forever. This was the fulfillment of the prophecy we had made every time we had tossed the bones. We had thought it had nothing to do with Aglaia, but it did. The pattern was wrong. Fish flew; seas boiled. The world could not be the way it was.

  We waited, knowing there was nothing to be done. There was never anything to be done.

  I envied mortals, that week the child lived. I envied the way you think that you have a choice in how you live, which path you walk toward death. It is an illusion, but it is a happy illusion. I envied you your blindness, and I wished more than I had ever wished for anything that my sight might be taken away as well.

  I did not want to know anymore. I did not want to hear this story; I did not want to accept this fate.

  My sisters and I were nothing, that week, but women waiting. We sat, we looked at one another, and we waited.

  And then she came to us.

  She did not come cloaked this time. She had no need to hide her movements; everyone in this city was her friend, and she rode up with the prince’s house guard to the door of the inn. She left them there and followed Hesper up the stairs to our room, hair unbound and tangled over her shoulders, shadows under her eyes, her baby moaning quietly in her arms.

  “His name is Taddeo,” our girl told us. Hesper closed the door and hovered behind her, watching us anxiously.

  The tip of a nose poked out of the blankets. We could not help it; we went over to him, and we peered in. So scrunchy, so small, so helpless. Serena’s hat was pulled snug over his head. “Taddeo,” said Xinot. “A brave little boy.”

  “I call him Tad,” said Aglaia, “and he is brave, but he is not strong enough to win out against this thing.”

  We did not look at her, only at him, only at his sweet mouth, his soft skin.

  She said, putting her face close to the baby, near our ears, “Show me his thread.”

  We shook our heads.

  “Yes,” she said. “You will. Show me my son’s thread.”

  Serena went over to one of my packs; she rummaged a bit. We do not lie about such things, yet the thread she brought over to Aglaia was long and strong and bright.

  Aglaia blinked. We held our breaths. “No,” she said. “That’s not his thread. That’s mine.”

  So Xinot reached into her pocket, not the left one where she kept her fish bones and her blades, but the other one, the one I’d never seen her use before, and she drew out little Tad’s thread. It shone there on her palm.

  Aglaia stared. She was not surprised. She did not cry; she didn’t even blame us for it. “I see,” she said. “Yes. That one is his.”

  She lifted her child to her face. She kissed his forehead, and he wriggled his nose, but weakly. He was pale, even paler against the bright colors of his hat. We had not seen his eyes.

  “Would you like to hold him?” she said, offering him to Serena.

  Oh, what a question. Serena opened her arms for the baby.

  It was so fast. Our girl must have planned this out; she must have readied herself for it, because she did not hesitate or fumble. As Taddeo settled into Serena’s hold, Aglaia snatched her long thread from my sister’s fingers and slid her other hand into Xinot’s left pocket, grabbing the deadly shears.

  She backed away from us. Hesper, still watching wide-eyed near the door, stepped to the side. Xinot lunged for the scissors. I dove for the thread. Before either of us could reach her, Aglaia drew her fingers along her life, held it tight, and snapped the blades closed.

  Her childhood, her last few years tumbled to the floor among the dust.

  We stopped, arms out. Taddeo whimpered.

  Aglaia reached for the baby’s snippet, and Xinot let her take it. She held one end to the other—Tad’s death to the beginning of the rest of her life. The threads sparkled, separate, unconnected.

  She tied them together. They untwisted themselves the next moment.

  She put the ends in her mouth—we gasped, sure of disaster—and then she held them together, pressing, hoping they’d stick.

  “Chloe,” she said, looking up at me as they each coiled into one palm again.

  I said, not recognizing my own voice, “What is it, Aglaia?”

  But I knew, of course.

  She said, “Help me,” and she held out the threads. There was no anger, no bitterness in her face. There was only a deep, trembling sea and a thing I could not bear—an unquenched spark of hope. Looking at her, I knew finally the truth I had been ignoring, the thing I had not allowed myself to say, to think. Aglaia was not my acquaintance; she was not my comrade. It was much more terrible than that. For months and months now, I had loved this girl, with as hard and fiery a love as I kept for our waves, our stars, our glorious threads.

  I had told my sisters about the baby because I loved her. I had searched out the oracle in her cave because I loved her, and I had followed her all this way because I could not bear to let her go when there was maybe something I could still do for her.

  I had given myself so many other reasons—protecting my sisters, anger at a false prophecy, answering the pull of the darkness. I hadn’t believed in this love, so I’d been able to think that nothing had changed, that I was the same uncaring Chloe, whose only passions were her work, and the glances of handsome men, and the smell of the sea wind. Who would rather kill a thousand mortals than betray her calling.

  Then this moment came, when she was asking me for help again, as she had done so many times before, and she was looking at me as though we were friends. And her little Tad was barely breathing in Serena’s arms, and Aglaia’s hands were stretched out, offering her chance at happiness, her escape from a lifetime of pain to me.

  I don’t know if my sisters would have stopped me. Serena was holding Tad; she could not keep me back. Xinot might have. I heard her starting to growl a warning as I snatched the threads from Aglaia’s hands. But I didn’t wait long enough to find out what dire consequences this might bring. As Aglaia had snapped her thread before we could blink, so I took Tad’s snippet and the longer half of his mother’s coil in one quick motion, and I twisted them together, end to end.

  Tad’s was so short, I used a good length of Aglaia’s to make up for it. I wound it around and around her baby’s thread. I reached for the power fizzling along each minute strand. As I do when I shape and spin, I fell into our glory, and I told it what to do. My fingers buzzed; the power swept round me like a cloak billowing with wind. I said a word I didn’t know I knew. It echoed, even in our small inn room. It boomed, and something burst into flames—my mind, my hands, the threads back in our house at the edge of the sea. Yes, as the snippet and the long golden length grew warm in my hands, and two turned into one, I thought I felt a great fire burning, all our work going up in a blaze.

  Then something screamed—the darkness, I suppose, as I wrenched its patterns out of place, as I tied a knot and sealed it, as I pulled the new thread tight, and it held.

  What I make, what I twist and tie, stays made.

  The fire faded; the thread cooled. Aglaia’s life, nearly done, piled on the floor. Tad’s, long and golden, pooled and shimmered in my hands.

  Aglaia held out her arms for her child. The darkness’s scream was rising into a shriek. As the girl went over to our bed and lay down on it, already breathing shallower, sweating and shivering, Taddeo opened his eyes.

  Oh, Aglaia. Clever girl, with such clear sight. She knew exactly how far she’d lived; she knew how much life she had to give.

  The boy’s eyes were a dark, deep green, the color of the sea before a storm. I wanted suddenly to be standing out on our empty rocks, overlooking the endless waves. Tad held out a tiny hand, and Aglaia fit her pinkie into the folds of his palm.

  “Thank you,” she whispered, kissing his face, once and again and again. “Chloe, thank you.”r />
  Hesper appeared at the head of the bed; she sat by the pillow, smoothing Aglaia’s hair from her face.

  “This is our mystery,” she said to us, as Aglaia smiled softly, as her eyes began to close. “This is what you cannot touch, not even you, old one.”

  “No,” said Xinot. “We cannot.”

  We ignored the way the world was shuddering beneath our feet. We paid our darkness’s panicked demands no attention, not as Hesper murmured a good-bye song, not as Aglaia faded, and then faded even more.

  She was leaving us. As Serena’s children had left her, as Monster had left, Aglaia was taking a path we could never follow her down.

  She breathed. She cradled her son’s small head. Hesper whispered something in her ear, and the thread she had dropped to the floor sparked and shimmered, and fizzled into the dark.

  She was gone.

  Her eyes were closed—no more clear sight, no more pain. Only her beauty was left now, and that would go soon enough.

  Our girl. We had followed her all the way to this, the only real end.

  I had only just found my heart, and I had shattered it instantly. I had only just realized my love for this girl, and now she would never open her eyes; she would never again speak to me. The sea that had been on my friend’s face was inside me now, breaking and breaking, in wave after endless wave. And I could do nothing to stop the break, and I could only feel my heart’s shattered pieces, burning and tearing so much there was nothing whole left of me.

  I stood with my sisters beside the bed, shattered, breaking. We looked down at the boy that she had died to save. He was blinking up at us. There was color already on his cheeks.

  In my hand, his thread was flashing bright red and sharp yellow. He had reached the place where his snippet met what was left of Aglaia’s life.

  I don’t need to tell you that we had no idea what was going to happen now. Of course we had never done such a thing as this. I did not know if it was even possible, to give away an unused life.

  Taddeo was opening and closing his mouth, making little sounds. Hesper reached over to touch his head, but then pulled back and drew away from the bed.

  “He’s burning,” she said, and there was fear on her face.

  The baby’s skin was glowing now, a bright, shining pink. He lifted his hands, spreading his fingers wide and then scrunching them tight. He kicked his feet.

  I held my palms out flat, and the thread writhed on them.

  And then Tad started to grow.

  It was only a little stretching, a bit of rounding out, at first. He was a baby, still, but healthy, and his eyes opened wide and he smiled, cooing. His hair grew longer, yellow like his mother’s, wavy like his father’s. He began to cry as teeth edged into his mouth, and he wailed, shaking his arms as they grew.

  He quieted, and he blinked at us.

  “Is it over?” Hesper said.

  We shook our heads. The thread was shooting off green sparks; it was only beginning.

  “His clothes,” Serena breathed. She rushed over to the bed and grabbed her hat from the boy’s head. With one fluid twist, she threw his blanket to the floor. She moved her clever fingers, unfastening this, tugging at that, and as she drew off his shirt and slipped the cloth from his bottom, he started to blur around the edges, and we heard a high, keening noise.

  Serena stepped back hurriedly.

  The threads that I spin are essentially all the same width. Time does not speed or slow for you mortals, not objectively. But I had needed to wrap so much of Aglaia’s thread around the end of Tad’s that where the two met, there was a knot many times the size of a normal thread. Tad had reached that knot, and time was moving much faster for him than usual.

  We could not help him. We were afraid of trying to touch him, even; we only stood watching, the four of us, and we hoped.

  He was shifting quickly now, his skin, his bones extending through months and then years. All around him was a fuzziness, a mist of muted color. We could see a brightness at the center, where the boy transformed.

  It seemed to take forever; for him it did. For us, it really wasn’t more than a few minutes before the mist faded away and the keening ended, leaving the hollow sobbing of a frightened child.

  We went over next to the bed and looked down at him. I closed my eyes as the room spun around. I had done this, the thing that would topple us all. I had taken the world as it was and turned it into what I thought it should be.

  Aglaia’s son was a baby no longer. He had grown five, nearly six years. He curled up under her chin, in the curve of her arm, and he was so big he was almost sliding off the bed.

  After a moment Hesper said slowly, as though she couldn’t quite believe she was speaking, “I have an old tunic from when I first brought my lad in off the streets. He’ll need it.” She paused. “Won’t he?”

  I couldn’t think to reply. Serena was kneeling by the bed, stroking the child’s hair as he cried. Xinot said, “Yes. You should fetch that,” and Hesper slid away, out of the room.

  “He’s so old,” I said. “How can he already be so old?”

  Xinot said, “How can he still be alive?”

  I looked at her. There had been no accusation in her words, only wonder. Whether or not she would have stopped me from tying the threads, she did not blame me for this. I watched her watching Serena and Tad, and there was a fire in her like the fire that had burned as I twisted the ends together, and I thought too that whether or not she would have stopped me, she had not wanted to.

  Her head was also tilted, though, listening, and her legs were braced against the floor, and I knew that she could feel it, the way the ground was buckling. This was much worse than when she had almost sliced a thread at the wrong point. This was far beyond Serena’s tense silence when she had mourned her children. We would not get away from this by running, or with a reprimand.

  We had done it—I had done it, the thing that would tear everything apart. For a girl to die before her time was one thing. Aglaia’s death was wrong; it made the darkness shudder, but it was not unheard of, for a mortal to leave her thread too soon.

  For a baby to be given a whole long life, when he hadn’t any to start with, for a week-old child to grow five years in two minutes, was something else.

  I lifted my chin; Xinot nodded, sharp. Then we each took one of Serena’s arms, and we pulled her from the bed to stand. I caught her eye, and I knew that she was with us too, in this thing—that she wouldn’t have tried to stop me, not even knowing the end. Xinot reached around and grabbed my other hand, and we leaned into one another.

  At last we closed our eyes, and the darkness was waiting for us.

  It wanted to know what we could possibly be thinking. Its web was unraveling fast, and we were at fault, we who were pledged to keep it safe.

  We did not make excuses; there were none. We did not say, A life for a life; we know that’s not a fair trade.

  The darkness said, in its wordless way, that it had never lied to us. We knew what it was. We knew its rules; we had known them since the beginning.

  We know, we said. We have chosen this knowing.

  It told us that the boy could not live. If he lived, everything would end.

  It was angry at us. It was furious, and the heat of it poured through us, as it had after Monster died. It was showing us just exactly what we had put at risk: the beautiful tangle of fate that we had always loved.

  Here was what it could not realize, though, what I never would have believed even if I had read this fortune a thousand times: It was too late for us. We had made our choice—to love a mortal more than anything, more than our darkness. We would end the world for the sake of this girl, as she had ended her life for the sake of her son.

  Was it betrayal? Oh, yes, I knew it was.

  But I did not care. I loved her, and as our magic raged, I could feel my heart breaking still, and I could feel my anger growing too, at all Aglaia had endured, at all she’d given up.

  The clou
ds were gathering fast outside our window, much faster than clouds should gather. There were ominous lights in the sky—not lightning flashes, but burning pits of fire, where no fire should be. The people were beginning to come out into the streets, to understand that the world was at an end.

  We had predicted this, after all. Rain of fire. An end to all patterns.

  The darkness told us, and it was as though it was granting us a gift, that there was one thing we could do to save it, still.

  We didn’t ask what that was; we already knew. We always know.

  We would not do it.

  It shrieked at us that everything would end!

  We knew. We would not do it.

  It reminded us, and there was a desperate edge to it, that we were sworn, that this was what we were, its keepers, its protectors. We couldn’t let it die.

  We opened our eyes. We stepped back from one another and dropped our hands. We were not listening anymore.

  The boy was crying, and the people were screaming. Hesper came rushing up with her lad’s old tunic; she went over to the window and threw the shutters wide, holding tight to the sill as the deep tremors we had been feeling began to shake the surface of the world.

  “What is it?” she cried. “What’s happening?”

  The world is ending, we said.

  She looked at us with horror. “Is it your fault?”

  Yes, we said.

  She screamed, and we almost couldn’t hear her over the crashing, over the running and yelling and thunder, “You have to make it stop!”

  We only looked at her. Serena went back to the bed, back to soothing Aglaia’s son.

  “Can’t you make it stop?” cried our innkeeper.

  We can, Xinot and I said. But we won’t.

  “You must!”

  It was terrible, but it was thrilling, to stand beside my sister as the city crumbled and to do nothing—just to stand and let it fall. We said, rejoicing in it, We won’t.

  Hesper watched as we knelt beside Serena. I touched Aglaia’s cooling hand; we would be joining her soon enough. Xinot hummed a tune of cataclysms, of breaking points, of beautiful horrors.

  I had never known an end could be beautiful like this. It was, though. All of us together would fall into the void. All of us together would go to a place we could not imagine; together we would finally die.