trees, climbing over slippery mossed boulders and snagging her ankles in the dense foliage. She crossed a creek and trailed the magic up an incline, pushing her way through branches all the way.
Fifteen minutes outside of camp, she came to a clearing at the top of a hill. Sora commanded the magic to sharpen her vision.
Everything came into focus. Straight through the trees, the Imperial City stood proudly—the Citadel’s dark, forbidding walls guarding the bottom, and Rose Palace presiding above, its crystal walls gleaming brightly under the moon.
So brightly, it was as if it were a sign from Luna herself.
Sora gasped and stared with her mouth open. Adrenaline cartwheeled through her veins, the same wondrous, satisfied feeling she got whenever she came up with a new scheme. A grin spread across her face. She knew what she needed to do.
“Thank you, little magic particles. You really did show me the way.”
There was a very slight noise behind her, imperceptible to anyone but those with the most sensitive of taiga ears. Sora whipped around, throwing stars already between her fingers.
Hana emerged from the trees, hands up. “It’s just me,” she said. “I saw you leave camp, and I was curious. I’m sorry if I’m interrupting.”
Sora shook her head and put her throwing stars back in the band across her chest. “You’re not. I wanted to see the stars.” It was the first excuse that came into her head. So many countless nights she’d spent with Daemon on the rooftops at the Citadel, just contemplating the sky.
She suddenly wondered what he was doing now. Was he above the dormitory, stretching his arm up as he often did, reaching for the stars that always seemed to have a pull on him?
“Ah,” Hana said. “You had to get out from under the trees to see.”
Sora nodded.
Her sister walked up to the crest of the hill and stood beside her.
“Do you remember the myth you used to tell me when I was little?” Hana pointed at a rabbit constellation.
“The one about the god of night’s children?”
“Yeah.”
“That was your favorite.”
Hana continued looking at the stars. Next to the rabbit, there was a giraffe, and at the top of the giraffe’s head sat a monkey. There was a whole menagerie of animals. “Do you think . . .” she hesitated. Then she fiddled with her hair and said, “Do you think you could tell the story to me now?”
The smile that spread across Sora’s face was so bright, it outshone the moon. “I’d love to.”
They found a patch of moss, as thick and soft as a blanket, and lay beside each other. As their breaths slowed and their chests rose and fell in sync, Sora called to the ryuu particles around them, asking them to illustrate the story she was about to tell. They swirled around her eagerly, then floated above Hana’s head, mimicking the nightscape of stars.
Sora started the fable as their mother had written it, still pristine in her memory as if she had recited it to her little sister only yesterday.
Millions of miles in the sky, the gods look upon us from the heavens. To mortals, Celestae is perfect, a paradise no soul would ever want to leave.
But gods, like humans, sometimes grow tired of what they already have. The god of night, in particular, loved descending from the sky. He was very handsome. His face was composed of sharp angles, like the lines of constellations. His eyes smoldered like nebulas, mysterious and multicolored. And light followed wherever he went, like a comet trailing its king. One look from him sent mortal women tumbling head over heels, irretrievably in love.
Over the millennia, he fathered many children. But being a god, he was not accustomed to sharing. Instead, he took all his offspring from his mortal lovers so that his children could live with him in Celestae.
One day, a woman named Tomi refused the god of the night his child. She held their son close to her breast and would not relinquish him to live in the sky.
“Why do you do this?” the god of night had asked. “Our son is a demigod. He belongs in Celestae, where he can drink of sweet nectar and frolic in fields made of dreams. He will live a good life. He will live forever. This is the way it has always been for my children.”
Tears ran down Tomi’s face as she stroked her baby’s fat cheek. “I love you, my lord. But I love my baby even more.