〚FEATURED + WATTYS SHORTLIST 2021〛
Someone tried to kill him. Someone nearly succeeded.
A traitor walks among them.
The question is, who?
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"A sky full of stars and he was looking at her."
He was a man with a deep and profound love for the stars...
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THERE WAS ONCE, a sky.
The sky was magnificent- filled with twinkling, luminous stars that glimmered above the earthly inhabitants, much like sparkling jewels on inky black velvet.
The stars were often lonely, scattered across the universe like beads of a broken chain, light years away from each other. However, it didn't stop them from persisting and persevering, glowing against all odds, as they continued to sparkle for millennia, and watched the earth grow.
The angels watched the earthlings from among the stars too. More specifically, they watched the humans, for it was the humans that lived among creatures that were far more powerful than they'd ever be but still claimed dominance across the planet.
If there was one thing about the humans, however, it was that they no longer believed in the stars.
They didn't believe in the hidden wisdom of the skies, and they didn't believe that they had their own stories written in the stars and interwoven through the fabrics of space-time.
To them, the study of the skies was a mere science, and stars were but mere orbs of glowing dust and gas. In reality, they were the culmination of centuries, if not millennia of years of the work of not only gravity but also fate. They were wiser than you'd give them any credit for.
The stars had watched as the earth grew. They had watched as darkness bloomed. They had watched the plunder and flourish, the rise and fall, the evolution and extinction. They had watched as the earth continued to be littered by the ruins of empires that believed they were eternal.
For all this transpired underneath the same skies, skies that were as old as time.
And underneath those same starry skies, there stood a man.
One hand was pressed against his abdomen as he staggered, while the other was reaching into his pockets, frantically scrabbling around for something, anything, that could help him.
"C'mon," he murmured to himself through clenched teeth, hissing out a pained breath, "c'mon, c'mon, c'mon-"
When he finally felt something cool against his palm, he heaved a tiny sigh of relief. His shaking fingers pulled the phone out while trying to blink away the black spots that were threatening to obscure his vision, but just as his fingers dialed an emergency contact, the screen went black.
A tiny loading icon appeared in the middle.
Dead.
His eyes widened. "No," his fingers were shaking, but that didn't stop them from desperately trying to turn the phone back on. "Shit- no, no, no- c'mon-"
The ground underneath him began to tilt.
The waves of dizziness were becoming stronger. He was becoming weaker.
