Work Text:
It was a rare night, when the two largest moons had waned almost entirely from the sky. For the children of Hopeland Orphanage, atop the bluffs overlooking the sand sea, it was the darkest night most of them had ever seen. Despite the still star-strewn sky, the usual soft purple shapes of the dunes in the distance were swallowed by darkness. The world may as well have ended beyond the short reach of their fingertips outside the window, or where the trailing wisps of their breath faded away in the cold night air. It was far too dark and strange a night for any of them to be asleep.
It was the perfect night for scary stories.
Isaiah started with the story of La Llorona, whispered as the children huddled around their bunks. The window, left open in their excitement, whisked cold fingers along the backs of their necks as he described her cries, echoing along the sand dunes as she searched endlessly for the one within which she had smothered her children.
Miss Soledad summoned La Llorona frequently, as a vengeful presence against ungrateful children, so the young residents of Hopeland tightened together and peeked over their shoulders.
Louis tried to tell the story of a man who hid under beds and licked people’s hands, but was shouted down by the other children with wisdom such as: “He ain’t even a burglar?” and “I’d shoot him!” and “I’d shoot him, too!”
Adriana brought back the chill in the room with the legends of monsters too terrible to name, formed by greedy folks who consume so much that they start to eat other people. The children of Hopeland Orphanage, who were all living at an orphanage for a reason, thought of creatures they themselves had met and shivered.
The youngest or most frightened children had at this point already gone back to their bunks, to press their hands over their ears and squeeze their eyes shut. Those remaining clustered tighter together, their young voices hushed to avoid alerting their guardians…or anything else.
Jaime looks at them all, and it seems as though he meets each of their eyes in the gloom. He claims he knows a legend better than all the rest. The scariest one there is, because…it’s completely real.
The children gasp, and then shush one another. Kokoro shoves David to quiet him, and he shoves her back so she bangs her arm loudly against the leg of one of the beds.
Everyone freezes like rabbits, glances around for the sound of adult footsteps, and then regathers for the story.
Where it starts is not a story at all. It’s something they’ve all seen. They walk past them every time they go into town, tacked up two or three to a notice board or right on to a wall. Those big old Wanted posters.
“Everybody wishes they got sixty billion double dollars,” Jaime whispers, and the orphans of Hopeland all see stars. “That’s ‘cause they know no one’ll ever catch ‘im.”
They all know that tortured mothers and greedy fathers can turn into monsters. But this is a monster that can turn into the shape of a man.
He could look like any of us, so he could always be hiding among us, the storyteller says, and again it seems as though each listener meets his eyes in the dark. Each of them once again notices the deepened darkness, the shapes of their friends melded into the blocky shadows of the beds and cabinets. Did they really know who they were crouched next to, right now?
He normally wandered the desert, like La Llorona always crossing the dunes, so you never knew where he’d show up next. They say he drinks blood, to keep him alive in the desert, and when he gets thirsty again he finds a new town.
Usually, you see him coming, because he’s a long tall man in a big red coat. He is the Slender Man, and his long coattails can turn into a hundred grasping arms. He has the glowing eyes of a Predator to sense heat, so he can still find you in the dark.
The children are a burning corona of life in the center of this dark room in an old drafty building where all the adults are asleep. They huddle ever tighter. An older brother holds his younger brother in a comforting headlock, so he can hover in the halfway feeling of being too scared to listen but compelled to stay.
This tall man all in red, with his hunting eyes and his thousand arms, don’t move exactly right and can move way too fast. Before your eyes can blink he’s drawn his gun and fired.
And he never, ever misses.
Then he’s got you, he crossed the distance in a second, and he’s grabbing you to drink up all your blood. He drinks up another, then another, then another. Everyone in this tiny little town. But he’s still thirsty.
He goes crazy looking for blood. He goes into a frenzy searching for more, after everyone who lived there is dead. He tears up every floorboard, he digs up every plot of land, he shoots apart every hillside with his great big gun,
And when he’s done and there’s nothing left, he calms back down
and pats his full tummy,
and smiles,
and sets back off to do it again.
And, you know, there’s only so many towns on this big desert planet. The deserts are big, but we all know how often people die. So, eventually, you know
he’ll come here.
Maybe he won’t make it over this way in this lifetime, maybe the military police or someone’ll be able to catch him (even though we all know that won’t happen) or maybe…
He’s on his way here right now. And there is nowhere in this dark and drafty building, where he can see your heart beating through the walls, that you can hide.
“Do you think he’s coming here tonight?” Daniela whispers into the circle, and a zip of fear jumps down each spine.
Jaime, with a flair for the theatrical, asks, “Did you hear that?”
Another draft comes through the conveniently forgotten open window. Surely this monster man, el ciclón, el diablo rojo, is climbing in right behind it, his too-long fingers curling slowly over the sill…
The little brother bursts into tears and clings to his brother’s side. His wet amber eyes glint strangely in the darkness–his old earth ancestor’s expensive genetic mutation still breeding true. It’s a rare one, though not so rare as mutations like blue hair. His older brother, who does not even slightly resemble him, tousles his hair.
“That’s enough,” he tells the rest of the children with oldest-sibling authority. “No more scary stories. Time to sleep.”
The other children groan but no one argues. There is an unspoken relief in getting to walk away, although many of them curl up extra tightly under their blankets with their ears pricked.
The older brother closes and latches the window and, once all the others have scrambled back into bed, climbs into his little brother’s bunk. He calls his brother “crybaby” with a snort, but lets him bury his head against his shirt.
As the other children drop off to sleep in the darkened room, he holds his little brother and thinks. He has seen the posters in town many times before. He has stared at that picture—of a smiling man with weird hair—and imagined all the things he could do with the reward money.
First thing he’d do is rebuild the orphanage bigger and better than ever. They could make it a huge beautiful castle of a building, with no more drafty windows or creaky floors…He could never again have to spy Miss Melanie from around hidden corners, hunched over a stack of bills on the kitchen table or sighing at the depleted pantry.
He falls asleep like that, scrunching his nose against the tickle of his brother’s hair, imagining himself as a powerful hunter. Cruising over the dune sea on a fast bike, the only one strong enough to take down el Diablo…
***
The suns blaze hot over the city of December. But the children in the school courtyard below take no notice, even as their faces shine with sweat. To the endless dismay of their parents, their starched uniforms start each morning crisp and end each afternoon wilted. But why would the children care about such things? It’s recess: time to escape the stuffy classrooms for a while and play.
Two girls swing a jump rope for a third, and a fourth waits impatiently for it to be her turn. She shifts from foot to foot, brushing her black bangs from her forehead though they continually fall back into place. She doesn’t sing along with their jumping rhyme, even though it would be sportsmanlike for her to do so. She’s smaller than all her other classmates and has to jump extra high to clear the rope, so she runs out of breath fast.
“Daddy makes the wine and
Mommy brews the mead!
And don’t forget the whiskey
for Vash the Stampede!”
Chima, spinning the rope on one end, lets her arm fall and the jumper in the middle nearly tangles her feet as the rope goes unexpectedly limp. Rather than complain about her tired arm, which will get her berated by the other girls, she asks “Why does a monster need whiskey, anyway?”
“If he comes around, you gotta leave it out on your porch for him. That way he leaves your house alone,” Shiori, holding the other end of the rope, states confidently.
“Why wouldn’t he just break in, if he knows you got whiskey?” Dolores asks in between catching her breath.
“If he knows you have whiskey,” the girl on the sidelines corrects, and gets a stink-eye in return.
“My ma says all alcohol is poison,” says Chima. “You’re supposed to leave out cookies and milk for him. And if you’re good he might leave something for you!”
“That’s Saint Claus,” Dolores says with derision. “Not Vash the Stampede.”
“Ugh, they both wear red!” She stomps her foot in frustration at these two mythical figures both wearing the same color.
“Yeah, but Vash the Stampede is real,” says the small girl on the sidelines.
Two of the three others turn to gape at her in shock. “Saint Claus ain’t real?” Dolores asks, eyes wide.
“Saints are real,” Shiori says, still holding the limp end of the jump rope. “We learn about them in church.”
“Even if he was real a long time ago, he’d be dead now,” the girl states with authority. Which makes Dolores’s wide eyes immediately fill with tears.
“Not true!” she wails. “I don’t want Saint Claus to be dead!”
The plastic end of the jump rope clatters to the ground as Shiori extends a comforting arm around Dolores. She glares at the small dark-haired girl on the sidelines for upsetting her friend.
“Way to go, Meryl,” Chima sneers. “Why’d you make Dolores cry?”
“I wasn’t trying to!” she protests, hands clenching into fists at her sides.
“You’re wrong, anyway,” Shiori cuts in. “Saint Claus could be alive still, ‘cause Vash the Stampede’s been alive forever and he’s still here.”
“That don’t count, ‘cause monsters can live forever,” Dolores glumly announces down to her shoes.
“Monsters aren’t real,” Meryl states, like if she says it firmly enough she can even convince herself. “My papa says he’s just a bandit, or maybe a bunch who all take turns wearing a red coat.”
“Jocelyn in grade six says he’s a real sneaky monster called a Big Foot,” Chima muses, thoughtfully tapping her lower lip. “She said they had ‘em back on the earth-planet, too.”
“That’s stupid.” Shiori tosses her head, her arm still around Dolores. “We’ve all seen the posters, and he ain’t a foot.”
“Isn’t,” corrects Meryl, unable to help herself, and earns herself another dirty glare.
“It’s just what she said!”
“Yeah, but everyone knows Jocelyn’s a liar! She lied about her brother getting attacked by wams, but really he held up that store and got shot.”
Unwilling to be drawn off-topic, Meryl reasserts, “Well, I still say Vash the Stampede is a bunch of bandits, and these rhymes are dumb superstition.” She’d learned the word “superstition” earlier this week in a book, and it feels very mature and academic in her mouth.
But the other girls don’t seem to think so. “If you think it’s so dumb then you don’t have to play with us!” Dolores crosses her arms over her chest.
“Yeah, we only need three for jump rope anyway,” Shiori says dismissively.
Meryl glances to Chima, to see if she will intervene, but is met with a stony frown. “Fine. I didn’t want to play, anyway!”
“Good!”
“Good!” Meryl stomps away, hands still in fists at her sides, unsure exactly where she went wrong but knowing she will not be invited back to play during recess tomorrow.
There is a flash of red in the corner of her eye, and for a moment her heart leaps into her throat and the horrible burn of rejection in her chest is drowned out by the thrill of fear.
But it’s just the edges of an awning flapping in the dry wind. One of their teachers sits under its shade, fanning herself with a clipboard as she surveys the courtyard. Of course Vash the Stampede isn’t here. Even if he was real, December is a big city and everyone knows he only shows up in little towns out in the wastes.
Well, every time except one. There are more verses to the rhyme. How does it go…?
You best not make him angry
And you best not make him cry
Or he’ll eat up everything you love
Like May, June, July!
***
Everyone’s always saying she’s spoilt, but she doesn’t feel spoilt at all. Being the youngest kid is the worst, actually, because all her big siblings are busy all day working the farm and she isn’t allowed to help! They tell her to “go play” in that distracted way as they grab their tools and hats, but it’s boring to play alone. And at the end of the day when they all come back in for supper, they’re too tired to want to play with her anyway.
Ma and Pa and Gramps all say she’ll grow up big and strong if she eats her greens, so she chomps down as much greens as she can every supper even though they don’t taste very good.
She won’t be the littlest forever. Someday she’ll be the biggest.
But in the meantime, she has to fill long days mostly alone. She glares especially at her youngest big sister as she stomps out the house past the first field. Little-big-sister Frida is a hazy smudge in the heat—a backstabber who had her birthday last month and turned old enough to start working with the rest of them.
Ma’d said she was going all the way out to the fourth field today, to “test the soil’s pee-ache,” which sounds gross. But cleaning the tomas stables is gross too, and it has to happen anyway. Biggest-big-brother says there’s no good or bad jobs on a farm: just jobs that gotta get done.
So she walks past the distant blobby shapes of her family members in the first three fields to go find her ma. She knows, in a child’s shrewd intuitive way, that Ma is the weak link to go to for affection. As the absolute baby of all twelve children, she is forever the cutest and available to be doted upon. She absolutely can and does use this to her advantage.
She finds her ma and middle-big-brother Isaac crouched in the fallow plot fiddling with stuff in the dirt. “…still more acidic than I’d hoped—” she hears Ma say as she gets close.
“Ma!” she shouts and the two of them lurch up in surprise, which is funny. She laughs. “Got you!”
“Babygirl, what are you doin’ out here?” Ma asks, her hand over her heart.
“I’m bored,” she whines. “I wanna help.”
“Go help Pa,” Isaac says with a roll of his eyes, and anger and hurt spark up in her chest like flint on steel.
“Maybe Eleanor needs help with the tomases,” Ma says in a distracted voice. She has turned back to the tool that measures the stupid dirt’s stupid pee-ache.
She scuffs her foot against the ground for a moment, sighing loudly, but they don’t take the bait. So she stomps off, away from the fields and the tomas pens, and glances back after a moment to see if they have turned to watch her departure. They have not. She finds rocks to kick all the way out past the end of the field.
It’s a big maze of boulders out here, which is why the last field ends where it does. No way you could plant crops here, but it’s a fun place to climb around: full of mysterious shadows, clusters of worm eggs, and tiny lizards that scamper away almost too fast to see.
She tosses some pebbles at the rock faces, just to hear the sharp cracking sounds they make as they hit and the clatter as they fall back to the ground. As the last one drops, she hears the distant pop pop pop of gunfire.
The sound of gunfire is nothing new to her. Even she, the youngest, knows how to handle a gun. “You learned to shoot before you learned to walk,” Ma always says, sometimes like it’s a joke and sometimes like she’s tired. It’s probably Benjamin at target practice, or Gramps shooting at a bigger worm that got too close. So she ignores it, and wanders deeper into the rocks.
She tries for a while to catch one of those zippy-fast little lizards, but fails. There are some more far-off pop pops but she pays them no mind.
When the bell rings, she looks up at the sky and realizes the parent sun is near overhead. Must be lunchtime already, though the chimes ring out longer than usual. She is kinda hungry. So she gives up her lizard hunt and makes her way back towards the house.
The fields are already empty as she walks back through them. When she was playing around in the rocks she stopped being mad, but if they all started eating without her already she’ll be mad again! She can feel the almost-mad simmer in her like a pot on the stove.
She means to go right to the house, but the tomas pens are near the first field. And they’re acting different than usual. More riled-up.
She angles her way over, squinting against the suns. The tomases are pecking around near the barn doors, one of which is open a crack. And that’s weird, ‘cause Pa likes the doors shut tight during the day when the tomases are out grazing.
She’ll go close the door, she decides, so when she goes in for lunch she can tell them how helpful she was and Ma and Pa’ll be grateful.
She pushes the tomases out of her way, and they click and chortle at her in their regular friendly manner. So probably none of them got bit by a worm, which is good. Biggest-big-brother Benji says that’s usually what gets them upset.
Right near the barn doors, already squished over a bit by a tomas print, is a shoe print in the dirt. It’s huge–maybe as big as Pa’s, or even bigger. She puts her own foot next to it and marvels at the comparison. And she’s never seen a shoe pattern like that left in the dirt ‘round here. Maybe Pa got new shoes? But it wasn’t even his birthday recently.
“Pa?” She pushes open the cracked door and steps inside. A tomas tries to follow her in, but she shoves its head back and shuts the door behind herself.
Pa ain’t in the barn. Nobody is. It’s warm, and smells like tomas feathers and hay like always. Little gold flecks drift through the air where the suns sneak in.
She walks further in, looking around, not knowing what instinct guides her.
All the way back, in the darkest corner of the barn among stacked boxes and bales of hay, eyes flash at her.
Her body turns into a statue. She’s seen animal eyes flash at night, but never blue like that. Hello she tries to say, but the word turns to glue in her throat.
The eyes flash, blink, shift, and then a voice from the dark says:
“Hey, little one. What are you doing out here?”
It’s a person’s voice, a man’s voice, soft and not so scary although the surprise of it makes her jump. And she’s so sick of being the littlest and that being all anyone ever sees!
“I’m not little!” Her voice unglues so she can tell this new person off. “My name is Millicent Adelaide Thompson and you’re in our barn!”
There is another shift and the sound of rustling hay. “You’re right, I’m sorry. You have quite a name, Millicent Adelaide Thompson.”
“It’s twenty-five letters,” she says proudly. “Almost the whole alphabet.”
“That’s very impressive,” says the person in the shadows, and sounds like he means it. “I’m sorry I’m in your barn. I’ll leave soon, I promise.”
Now that she’s paying attention, there is some strain underneath that nice voice. It reminds her of the time middle-big-sister Eleanor broke her arm and talked through gritted teeth. “Are you hurt?”
Another pause and more rustling. A little laugh that’s more like a breath. “You’re very observant, Millicent.”
“I can ask Ma to get the first aid kit,” she offers. Her foot pivots to turn her back towards the barn doors, to run out to the house.
Hay rustles again, more sharply, from the darkness. “No! No—ah, thank you, Millicent. I know I’m not supposed to be in your barn. I don’t want to get in trouble.”
“You won’t get in trouble if you’re hurt,” she says with confidence. Displaying scraped knees or palms with the utmost pathos has always gotten her considerably more leniency from her parents.
“It’s okay, Millicent Adelaide,” the voice sighs, although it sounds less okay and more exhausted. A leg stretches out from behind the boxes, beyond the shadows. The heel of a big clunky boot drags a scuff mark in the hay on the floor. It’s a huge boot, just like the print outside, with big spiky grips on the bottom and lots and lots of buckles. That super long leg must attach to the tallest person she’s ever seen—even taller than Pa!
But he’s still in the dark shadows, although her eyes don’t usually take so long to adjust. She blinks but nothing changes. That’s a bit odd, isn’t it?
“They’ll be mad at me for a lot of things,” he continues. “Not just for hiding in here. I don’t want that.”
“Like what?” she asks, still certain she can fix whatever this whole situation is if he’ll just let her. She doesn’t realize that the hand she places on her hip is a perfect reenactment of her Ma. She also can’t resist her youthful curiosity at hearing that someone else did something bad.
“I break things, sometimes. On accident,” he says, quiet and so sad-sounding. She can’t see his face, but she can imagine the expression. She knows how it feels because of the time she spilled chocolate pudding on Frida’s most-favorite dress and stained it and felt terrible after. “People get angry at me.”
“You just have to say sorry and help clean up,” she informs him. She thinks of the cup she broke last week, and the plate the week before that. “Then they won’t be mad anymore.”
He does a tired exhale for a laugh again. “You’re also very wise,” he says. “You’ve got it all figured out.”
She does, in fact, and it’s nice of somebody to finally acknowledge it. She nods primly and, with that confidence boost, makes up her mind. “I’ma go get Ma. You wait here.”
And she turns on her heel and marches out. “No, wait!” the voice behind her yelps, but she ignores him. She is mature and responsible and knows exactly what to do if someone is injured: go get Ma.
Stepping out of the barn the suns are extra blindingly bright. The tomases have mostly wandered off again, but one sniffs at her hair as she shuts the door and she nudges it away.
She sets off with purpose towards the house and is surprised to see, as she nears the main yard, Ma and Pa throw open the back door and start running at her full-spilt. Pa has his big rifle in his hands.
Ma skids up in front of her and scoops her up like a bird snatching up a bug. She holds her tight in her arms and says all sorts of things in a rush like “oh my god, Milly, baby, are you okay, where were you, thank god—“
“Inside,” Pa says, and then they’re hustling back into the house. Her head is all a-whirl, because she doesn’t know why they’re panicking, and just the sight of her normally-calm parents in a panic is enough to start sending up boiling bubbles of worry in her too.
“Wait—“ she tries to say but they don’t seem to hear her. When Ma sets her down inside and Pa slams and bolts the door shut behind them, all her big brothers and sisters and Gramps crowd around and she forgets whatever she was meant to be focusing on.
Words fly over her head like a big buzzing cloud of worms. Everyone talks over each other at once, kind of like at supper, except no one is laughing and everyone seems upset. She manages to gather that they couldn’t find her and assumed she was hurt.
Apparently some scary man, or monster—it’s not clear from the overlapping chatter around her—got chased out of town and ran this way. When she didn’t come in at the bell they all thought she got eaten or hurt or kilt.
Oh! That reminds her. “I need the first aid kit,” she manages to pipe up in the chaos. But before she can say more, her family is fussing over her searching for blood or bite marks or any other signs of a monster attack.
“Not for me,” she tries to say. “Not for me, not for me,” until someone finally hears her.
“For who?” middle-big-brother Nathaniel asks.
“The man in the barn,” she answers, and then chaos re-erupts tenfold.
*
That night, in the bedroom she shares with her five older sisters, she listens in fascination to the things they say about the monster-man. The barn had been empty when Ma, Pa, and Benji ran out there, but they believed her because they saw the big boot prints and scuff marks for themselves. And some drops of blood and a shell casing not from Pa’s rifle. So he really had been hurt, and the longer she listened to her sisters talk the harder it was not to worry about him.
They said he was evil and a murderer and a monster. He could turn whole towns into empty craters with a snap of his fingers. He kilt with a smile on his face and laughed in the ashes. Everyone wanted him dead because he was so dangerous, and it was a miracle she wasn’t kilt, thank god she’d run right inside as soon as she saw him.
Except she hadn’t run right inside. And no one seemed to hear her real story even though she was the one who actually saw him—this monster-man named Vashastampeed (it was a good long name, to be sure, but not as long as Millicent Adelaide Thompson).
He probably was really a monster, since none of the human beans she knew looked like a big dark shadow with two glowing blue eyes and two big boots. But maybe some monsters were nice? Because he had been hurt and sad but still nice: he’d complimented her and remembered her full beautiful name and all.
And he’d said he broke things on accident. He seemed not to know the rule about helping clean up after, but maybe that wasn’t his fault if his own Ma and Pa and big siblings never taught him?
So it scared her, a bit, to think of him hurt and alone out there. Maybe hiding out in the rocks with all the tiny lizards. And maybe still hurt bad because she’d never come back with the first aid kit before her folks ran out and scared him off!
She hoped he didn’t think she told them to run him off. Was he upset with her? Out alone in the dark and cold with the lizards and blood still leaking from his skinned knees?
The thought was too awful. Right in the middle of Josephine’s story about a city getting blown to bits she started to tear up with big sniffy sobs.
Eleanor scooped her up and Frida and Annaliese and Josephine crowded around to coo at her and snip at each other for scaring her, and Becca told her it was okay, she was safe, he wasn’t going to hurt her.
I know that, she thought, hands curled into fists in the fabric of her sister’s nightshirt. But who knew better the fear and shame of causing accidents than a child, and the thought of the whole world hating him for it was too much to bear. If Ma and Pa and everyone else stopped forgiving her for spilling pudding and dropping dishes she’d probably cry and cry and never be able to stop.
Tomorrow, she decided, letting her tears and snot soak into Eleanor’s shirt as silent punishment for being a monster-hater, she’d sneak some of her breakfast away. Maybe she’d even sneak away the first aid kit, if she could manage it. And she’d check among the boulders in all the darkest shadow-spots for any that had long legs and big buckled boots.
She didn’t know then that it was a lost cause—he had hidden in the rock field until sunsdown, but by now he was long gone.
It would be twenty years before she saw him again.
***
Deep in the desert, far from even the barest glimmer of lights in the distance, a lone traveler makes camp for the night.
He drops his duffel bag with a groan and rolls out his shoulder, then crouches in the sand to dig through it. He withdraws a portable stove, some artificial kindling, the trappings of a sparse meal. He hums as he works, a habitual smile curling his lips. The song is one that very few people on the planet would recognize: all of the digital recordings were obliterated over a century and a half ago.
When he gets a little fire going, throwing some dry yucca stems and sage twigs on for fuel, the light bounces strangely off his eyes. But there is no one else around to see this, nor the way his pupils dilate almost to the furthest rim of his irises as he gazes into the night—leaving only the barest circles of an almost luminescent blue.
Nor would anyone but maybe one or two others on the surface of this planet know that, when he cocks his head and looks out into the desert night with those black-hole eyes, he is listening to the migration of a cluster of worms under the sand over five iles away.
Nearby, a single small worm zips over his head with a subsonic bzzt of acknowledgment. The inaudible rumbling pulse he sends back both does and does not originate from his physical body.
And yet, the sigh of relief he gives when he tugs off his boots would be familiar to any human being who has ever spent too long on their feet. He dumps out two impressively large piles of sand, and then drops a boot with a yelp as his little camp pot boils over.
He snatches it off the portable stove with a hissed “merde!” and then jams his burnt fingertip into his mouth.
He eats his dinner with a battered old spoon, still hunched in a childish sulk despite his towering height. For dessert, he digs a crumpled paper bag from the pocket of his coat and withdraws a single squished donut. The happy hum resumes as he eats it and licks cinnamon sugar from fingers that weren’t so badly burnt after all.
Then he tilts his head back to look up at the serene faces of the moons, the familiar constellations of the stars. The people of a long-distant planet once looked up at different celestial bodies and were inspired. They told stories that spanned generations.
He wonders, idly, what kinds of stories they’re telling now.