Stars

Part 1, Chapter 1

The last thing Ella would see in her short and brutal life on Earth was the stars.

The sky was a deep indigo blue, inky streaks of black running across it. The stars stood out like lights welcoming her home. This was exactly what she thought, cliché as it seemed, even to her. They were the lanterns on her front stoop, the firelight dancing through the windows of her far away and now too close new home.

Ella could not pick out familiar constellations, having never studied them herself. Instead, she found a unicorn, a strawberry, and her cat Echo, who had yet to die but seemed on the edge. Ella had never thought she'd die before Echo.

She blinked slowly as the inky darkness slipped across the stars, obscuring them, until only one was left. It was both the point of the strawberry and the tip of Echo's tail. It did not shine brightly, but rather through a haze. Then the blackness covered that star too, but Ella thought it had a texture to it, like feathers dipped in pitch. The knife under her ribs twitched.

"Echo," she mouthed, unable to spare any breath for speech. Then she was lifted up, and falling down. Her consciousness drifted away, piece by piece, and Ella left this world.

"What does she know?" Iana whispered as she hovered over the girl who was lying, eyes closed, on the emerald grass of the planet Azidength.

"What can she know?"

"She whispered your name as she drifted Echo! I know it, you know it. Soon, the council will too."

"It could be a coincidence," Echo reasoned, his dark wings flapping lazily as he kept himself aloft.

"A coincidence? You can't really believe that. She said your name. And you were the one to retrieve her! With everything else going on, no one is going to overlook that." Iana's voice softened. "I just don't want to see you hurt."

"If she's connected and I'm connected, my dad will kill me. Even if I don't know anything about it." Echo's voice was quiet. "But let's just say she is. How?"

Iana stared at him, eyes wide with shock at the ease with which Echo discussed his death. She shrugged. "I don't know."
"That's what I thought."

Iana glared at him.

"Look," Echo said abruptly, urgently, his stare fixed on the girl on the ground twenty feet below.
"She's waking."

"That's called breathing. They do that, you know."

Echo looked put out. "I know that. She was breathing before. But this, this is different. I can see her consciousness coming back."

Iana looked at the hope and longing on his face, and spoke gently. "I'm sorry Echo. But with a wound like that, her chance of recovery is very slim. Even all our best care—"

"She moved again."

Iana glanced, agitated, back at the girl on the ground. "Echo, grow up." Her voice held none of its earlier softness. "She's going to die." Then very quietly, as if she didn't want him to hear, she added, "and I don't want to lose you."

"You won't ever lose me," he whispered.

Iana's eyes were full of pain and something else—release. "Haven't I already?"

Echo stared at her. "No. No you haven't."

Some of the tension left Iana's shoulders. "Okay," she whispered, brushing his wing with her own.