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There were many moments among the stars, wild and exhilarating and everything he had been chasing since he first started his path to become a pilot, there were moments where he had faced the certainty of his own destruction.
None of them had ever come with pain.
It felt cold, the arrow in his back, which was so very strange. His sand had been eroded away and pooled into by the playful frigid waters of oceans, he had carried slushy pockets of glacier runoff filled with flecks of gold in his hands to spill over selkies to their delight, he had felt, often before but more this past day than ever, the gentle touch of Jack Frost whose very breath sent the Avatar of Spring to shiver. He knew the touch of cold from Emily Jane’s bitter shattered heart, no matter her attempts to point the shards away from him.
The cold had never been able to reach him, deep within his sun soaked sand, millenia of dreams under the warm skies of the equator. He was made of dreams, warm and comforting, their memories more than enough to keep the most brutal of chill from leaching into him. He could be touched by the cold, but could never be made cold himself.
This was cold.
He had never felt pain before, though he knew of the concept, knew that it caused great harm to those around him, and that he could easily inflict it if he was not careful. So he had always been careful. His people simply did not have the receptors for it, they were particles made sentient, cosmic dust and magic who traveled through space on the tail of shooting stars, steering them from destructive courses and growing stronger and stronger as they gathered the wishes of the planets they passed. Pain did not exist for specks, motes of dust did not hurt.
This hurt.
He had accepted the end of himself many times before, as he rode the backs of difficult stars and battled dream pirates intent on stealing the powers he amassed, the dreams he chose to gift. It was important, if one wanted to find their courage, to understand that a Pilot and Star could be made nonexistent. Death, as a concept, did not truly occur to his people, who were magic given agency or perhaps agency given magic. What had come first had never twisted and tormented them as it did the other beings of the universe who battled with the questions of their existence. They existed, and would continue to exist so long as there was magic and meteors with flecks of matter trailing behind. They gave themselves away in their dream sand, and rebuilt their stores anew as they traveled, the magic of ten thousand planets’ belief was enough to give life to whole constellations, and they collected such power from the billions of wishes cast upon them as they passed, and the ingredients for their sand in space was without limit.
Destruction? The shattering of his collected form? The scattering of the trillions upon trillions of particles, never knowing how much or how little he needed to be something like himself? If he worried about such things he would not have the courage to gift himself away, every planet, every satellite, every ship he passed. He broke pieces of himself, of his mind and conscious, every single grain holding some imprint, never fully knowing if he was gifting away some irreplaceable core fragment of himself he could never recover, and he without fear but in boundless love passed it on to the dreamers in need of him.
He had never feared death, a crash meant nothing to him, whether or not he survived it, but it meant everything to the ones he might crash into; so when his shooting stars came too close to a planet, or a ship, or a satellite, and he had to steer desperately away, if the choice was to crash his star into an unpopulated, nonsentient moon, or ram himself into a fearling’s ship to allow others a chance of escape, he would. He’d crashed many times, been scattered many times, somehow he had always retained enough of himself to reform, though it took its time and its toll.
He had crashed to the Earth in its formative years, wrapped himself in a desperate wish and cared nothing for himself, only his irreplaceable cargo, his prisoner, his friend. Emily Jane’s existence was something he never wanted to lose, something he could not recover from. To lose her, that was far worse than any death.
His crash had been without pain, his end without thought, only dreams.
And now, millenia later, after he had found others whose lives were just as precious, just as irreplaceable to him, after an endless sleep had given him more power and dreams then there were grains of sand to fill them, did he face that fear again.
Somehow Pitch Black had found a way to corrupt Sandy’s dreams, something the Pirates and Fearlings had never managed to do during their wars. They could only ever steal its power, devouring the magic adhering to the particles and leaving nothing but grains of rock and specs of dust behind. This… Pitch was turning the magic against itself, using none of his own energy and instead twisting Sandy’s gift into something monstrous.
Nightmare Sand.
He could feel it, this creeping cold.
Was he afraid?
The nightmares could sense it, grain by grain, at a pace he couldn’t fathom, could not follow any more than he could track the venom of a snake through the veins of an animal as it did its damage, they ate away at him. Was it his own fear? Fear of this pain? Of this sand? Or was it just Pitch’s infectious spreading influence?
He was crumbling, the structure weakening, the black spreading sand, each filled with fear as powerful as any of his dreams as they fell speck by speck, mote by mote, he couldn’t hold this form. It wouldn’t obey him, even to keep the shape of his body. Grains lost connection, detached, the magic was there, he tried to keep them together, to will it back, but they did not respond to him, refused him, falling from him lifelessly only to coalesce into the swelling formless mass of black surrounding him. Pieces of himself, every granule a water weathered fragment of something dear to him, Emily Jane’s star, filled with its treasures, the stones and bones of the ocean deep, corals and shells and rock broken down and smoothed with age and love. Every piece of him, for billions of years every piece of him was washed by the sun above and the waves below and the dreams of all who touched it.
It could not be so easily stolen.
Could it?
Something, he had to summon something of himself, some fragment of himself. His friends. The children. No, he couldn’t fall here, their belief was so fragile, already withering, children could not stay believing every minute, no one could be so devout, not even Lunar himself, they strengthed and weakened between holidays and lost teeth, they needed the dreams. Every night, and night was endless, the sun a strip of light forever chasing the dark and Sandy always following in its wake, always riding the tail of a star, Sandy had to be there for them.
He had to be.
What was he leaving the children to, to face the night without him?
Something, he fell to a knee, fighting to pull them back, but it was like catching sand in an ocean wave, grasping open handed at the water, the tide sweeping away his treasures with every churn. Just save something.
Pitch.
His laughter on the air, through the sand, and there was so much anger in him at that. Pitch knew what Sandy meant to his daughter, and that, that made him mad. He glared through the roiling mass of black to his opponent, his ancient enemy, the man he had once doomed, and saw in him that same end he had seen time again among the sky.
He could keep trying to steer this star on course, fight the fear and the spread, fight Pitch, and perhaps lose, or he could accept what was. He had decided once, in the times before he had ever met Emily Jane, when he had piloted a different star, in a fight with Dream Pirates attacking cruise ships full of his dreamers, he had made a choice. Fight, and perhaps lose, or crash, and take as many as he could with him, cripple them, and give the victims an escape.
His friends were strong. He had fought beside them for such a short period of time, but he knew them well, loved them endlessly. They would survive this.
The children, so young, so new to existence, little more than a dust cloud full of potential for the massive brilliant shining stars they would become, the systems they would create, the constellations they would form as they gathered together and grew. It would hurt them, but it would not break them, he could only hope he had given them enough light in the time he was able to help them weather this.
The more he fought, the more he struggled, the more his fear fed the sand, and the stronger Pitch would become.
All he could do was what he could.
And what he could do, was let go.
The black engulfing him instantly, his resistance gone it spread through him like water, cold and dark, but strangely it no longer hurt.
The pain was gone.
The sentience that had owned the magic, called Sandy, was gone.
There now was only magic, and fear, a trillion particles of endless dreams turned foul.
And Pitch Black
King of Nightmares
Laughed triumphant.