THE LAST STARKEEPER

Chapter 1: The Falling

She fell for seven days.

This was not a metaphor either. Nyra, last daughter of the Star Council, fell from the Upper Celestium through seventeen layers of atmosphere, trailing light the way a comet trails ice, and she fell for exactly seven days because that was how long it took her fractured star-form to slow itself enough to survive the impact.

She hit the earth in a field of winter wheat somewhere in the mortal realm below the sky-boundary, and she lay there for a long time in the crater she had made, staring up at the sky she had fallen from, and she thought: I should be dead.

She was not dead.

She was, however, missing her wings.

This was the most pressing of several serious problems. The wings of an Aetheri were not decorative — they were functional architecture, the physical mechanism through which a celestial being processed starlight into power. Without them, Nyra was approximately as dangerous as a candle. A very old candle, nearly burned down, in a strong wind.

She sat up. The wheat around her crater was scorched gold, and the sky above was the deep, indifferent blue of a mortal afternoon, and somewhere nearby a river was making the sound of something that had never once considered the possibility of war.

She had fallen. She had survived. The Celestium was burning behind her — she could feel it even here, the distant catastrophe of a sky at war, the trembling of stars being extinguished one by one like the gods of her people were simply blowing out lamps.

She pressed her hand to her sternum, where her core light lived. It was dim. Wrong. A heartbeat that should have been a sunrise reduced to the glow of an ember.

Get up, she told herself.

Getting up took most of what remained of her strength.

Find shelter.

She walked. The wheat parted around her, and the river got louder, and the sky stayed blue and said nothing.

She did not know, walking through that field with her wingless back and her dimming core and seven days of falling in her bones, that the river led to a bridge. She did not know that on that bridge, at the precise moment she arrived at it, a mortal man was standing at the railing, looking up at the sky with an expression that had no name in any language she spoke.

She did not know any of that. She only knew the river.

But she found out.