THE OMEN GIRL | Wattys 2020 Winner

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But right now, alone with my star, with Esp's Omens scrabbling outside the tent, I can do nothing but beg. No one knows exactly how a star chooses. No one knows exactly what a star wants.

Please. Please.

Lightning like taser-fire sears through me. Oh.

The star cracks into light. Its heat punctures through me, bruises me open, and my teeth rings and I think, ah, this is what being shot feels like. I am going to die. But I still can't let go. I can't let go.

Power from the star courses. My body begins to hum. Lights breathe from within to without my flesh, and jagged lines like porcelain-cracks scrawl and glow against my veins.

The cord tightens around my arm. Abruptly, through my dying, I understand only one desire: to fly.

I strain onto the anchor. My stain is boiling and bubbling over my back, but it does not spread, not yet. I do not burst into flames. Not yet.

Then slowly, surely, the anchor begins to lift. I am flying. I have Joined.

I have passed.

Relief blows through me. I've passed. I did it. And I did not have to die.

(My stomach rolls because Lumi had to, and it was my fault. All my fault.)

A voice blooms in my head.

Who are you? What have you done?

I husk out. The star is speaking to me. And it knows.

We see you. We're with you. There is no hiding from us.

Golden flames unfurl like wings. I am engulfed.

In my panic, I pull up, and up. Yet somehow, I do not burn to death. Somehow, I am still alive. The flames lick over my skin, and it hurts like dying, but I do not die.

People are noticing. They've turned away from the noise outside the tent and are pointing at me. They gasp and cry out. Many shield their eyes against the burn of the star's brightness, and I imagine I must look like some bird of white-fire, rising high and higher above the crowd.

The altar is several meters below me now. I wrench against the star and its cord, but it does not let me go. In my head, it continues to speak. The words overlap one over the other, asking the same questions again and again: Who are you? What have you done?

Who are you.

What have you done.

I can't stop. The star won't let me free. It will eat me up from the inside-out and then I will fall to my death.

Dimly, I realize I've lifted out of the smoke hole. I have flown up and out of the tent. There is no stopping it. Jamming thick through my veins is the singular desire to fly.

Afternoon light blinds, then passes, and then the noise of the crowds wash over me. I see men and women and children gawking up at me. I see overturned stands and Omens on all fours, and guardians surrounding them. Below me the festival and all its colours sprawl. Before me the white wall of the temple looms.

I crane my neck at the height of it, at the impossible height of it. Trees burst from the top of the wall because a garden is walled inside. Then there, an absurd distance above me and halfway up the wall, is the gap, the gap I saw before.

There is a hole in the wall where the garden decided it did not want to be inside anymore. Branches twine through it. Vines and moss stain the stones green.

It taunts. It is my only hope.

My chest is heaving from the weight and heat of the ichor within me, one that sinks heavy and heavier the higher I pull; flying is a weight that cements over the bones. But I will have to endure. If I want to live, I must. The star continues to rise us up, up, and I do not look down. I cling against the anchor, just as my eyes cling to that break in the wall.

By the time I near the gap, my arms are numb and quaking. My palm has blistered and popped from the fire of the star. Every breath I pull into my lungs is like pulling in salt, scrapping my airways raw. I taste blood.

This close, I can see that the gap is big enough for a kid like me, maybe two. It's now or never.

My body lifts to the same height as the hole and, with a scream, I wrench my body hard to the side. I yank the anchor off-course and veer it against the break in the wall, and metal crashes against stone. Flesh crashes against bark.

The star lets me go. Heat drains from me. The drag of a strange kind of gravity, the gravity of stars, sighs out of me. I am myself again.

I roll and sprawl onto the arm of some ancient branch, and am cradled by moss and vine and stone. Dimly, I realize my veil is no longer on me. I lost it somewhere along the way. Part of the anchor teeters precarious by the edge of the hole – the rest of it must've broken off and fallen. The star, knocked out of the engine, shudders out light, then shutters dark. It is asleep.

I am no longer in pain. I am no longer in danger of dying. And so with a sigh, with a shudder like the star, I also give to sleep.

#

Someone below me says, "You're not a bird."

I startle. I twist to see a boy in grey, halfway up the tree, looking up and smiling up. He's a lanky, big-eared thing with buzz for hair. It's Naqi. That's right. I'm in the temple. He's an acolyte of the temple.

My vision blurs again.

"Not a bird," he repeats, awed, and his voice sounds far far away.

He sees something in my face that has him frowning and saying, "Sorry. Came up here to feed the birds, not a girl. Are you okay? You don't look so good."

It's the last thing I hear. The world swims, and then all is dark again.