Chapter Text
The first wave of invaders wore plain white masks on their faces, shield-sized masks over their arms, and white plate armor with each plate patterned with a stain like a face. They swarmed the Firmament, the dome-shaped barrier between the lands of Western Faery and the skies above.
Princess Irene exited her palace to meet them and, with an imperious wave of her hand, cocooned them in tapestries of light so like the landscapes of North-East-Southern Faery that the soldiers hesitated in their confusion.
Their captain shouted, “Do not be deceived! We remain on the Firmament! Plunge your shields into the ground to rend the weave, as we’ve planned, and the princess will be unable to warn the King of our invasion.”
At that, the princess drew her gun and fired through the eyeholes of their masks. When the entire contubernium lay dead, she reloaded her gun and whistled for the lightning horse. Ey whisked her on eir back to the edge of the settlement of her principality, then reared up and neighed with apprehension. The princess beheld what had given her mighty warsteed pause: the spherical spacecrafts of what must have been myriad legions of stars.
She dismounted and turned the lightning horse away, and reached for the weave of voices that the Firmament granted all its denizens for one another as well as themselves for the land below. Irene discovered, to her dismay, that the lines of the weave lay silent and sundered.
Another tapestry of light, this time one of camouflage, she conjured and went forth by foot in search of one other fae.
The stars who lived upon the Firmament that were not soldiers, begged and wept as their masked brethren lashed them together and hauled them up the ramps and into the spacecrafts. Alas, it was only that which the seeing eye could witness that Irene could fool. She cast more illusions where she passed, to try to save the unmasked stars. The masked stars called out to one another, “We cannot proceed to recapture them all!” “This is the princess’ magic!” “Our contubernium has failed!” And they felt for their vanished spacecrafts, calling, “Here to the third!” “Here to the seventh!” And so on.
Irene herself only had so few bullets for so many soldiers, and the civilian stars had never learned to fight. Before, the stars would only alight upon the Firmament during the new moon, and would only capture stars who wished to return to the halls of the sky.
A pair of masked stars passed Irene, and one said to the other: “The twelfth caught one that insisted she wasn’t a star—that she’d been born in the West—but she had white hair and everything.”
Irene listened intently.
The other soldier stiffened and pulled away. “Have they been interbreeding? We can’t take them back home if they have.”
“Perish the thought! Her mind’s just been addled. They’ll say anything they think will convince us to let them stay…”
The other soldier seethed with relief and wondered, “Why would they want to stay here?”
The first soldier shrugged a shoulder and said, simply, “They’re wrong. That’s why we’re here, to fix it.”
Irene jogged through the settlement, listening for a call, “To the twelfth!” And, once she caught the call, she entered the spacecraft unseen.
The fae Lily Bell was easily lost in the serried pattern of faces framed by white hair, bodies all shackled to the inside of the spacecraft by the masked guard. Irene searched the crowd for her—shot the guard dead for bumping against her and then purposely trying to get in her way—the gunshot panicked the prisoners—
“Be still, all of you!” A familiar voice rang out. “It’s our princess in disguise!”
The prisoners seemed to calm, or panic in a different way, as Irene doffed her camouflage and knelt down to free Lily Bell.
“Us, too! Us, too!” They cried. An elderly star beside Lily Bell added, “They will keep us all in rooms of starfire and thorn if you let this ship return with us!”
Irene found herself unable even to reassure them that she would free them from their prisons once she had gathered an army—but she could not save them all now.
Before the stars knew that they would be so forsaken, Lily Bell screamed, “Behind you!”
The gunshot and shouting had drawn attention from outside. A masked star flew in from the entrance and flung a loop of rope around Irene before the princess could draw her gun. Irene twisted around to take one last, intent look at Lily Bell, and wrestled against the rope—seemingly for her gun holster, but Lily Bell saw Irene’s hand dip into the pocket next to it. Out flung something like a coin onto the ground. The masked star pulled Irene away and confiscated her gun, at which point Irene quit struggling. The other masked stars entered the hold and gathered around the body of the guard.
“To the first with that one,” one of the masked stars said of Irene. “We haven’t done half of what we set out to do. The King of the West will want to retaliate, and a valuable hostage will buy us more time.”
Unnoticed by the masked stars, Lily Bell clutched at the coin-sized saucer that had fallen from the princess’ pocket. This was the key to the West from the Firmament, she knew. She imagined that Irene’s expression had meant, ‘When you get the chance, fall home.’
The spacecrafts drifted into the halls of the sky, and masked stars herded the civilians into holding cells. The word carried through the susurrus of those imprisoned in the twelfth sphere: Lily Bell of the West remains among us.
One of their wardens came with a lash of sunbursts, demanding to know which one of them was not a star. A pair of quarreling stars each accused the other of being Lily Bell, and the warden hauled both of them away—ignoring Lily Bell herself, no matter how vehemently she cried that she was herself.
The eldest star to settle upon the Firmament, whose name was Sorrow, warned Lily Bell that the scavenging of aberrant stars would be worse than starfire and thorn for those who were not stars at all.
Later, an unmasked warden—a star named Sham—approached the prisoners and asked, in a conspiratorial whisper, after whichever one was Lily Bell.
“They took her away already,” Sorrow lied, and their fellow prisoner stars murmured in support of it.
“That isn’t true. The warden discovered their true names,” Sham said.
“In that case,” Sorrow said, “I am Lily Bell.”
“Lies again,” said another star, whose name was Complacency but she wanted to change it, “I am Lily Bell.”
“Lily Bell is my name,” insisted a large star named Guile.
Sham sighed and made a gesture of surrender. “I was only curious! I’m not important enough to be told to hunt her down, and nobody would listen to me if I found her.”
Lily Bell leaned out against the bars and asked Sham, “What is your purpose here, then?”
With a scratch of the head, Sham replied, “It’s not on purpose, per se, I’m trained and ordered and obey…I’m even a little sorry it must be this way…” And with a pull of a lever, walls fell outside the bars that began to siphon starfire with such a force that Complacency unraveled before Lily Bell’s eyes.
Lily Bell would have screamed, but the absence was so keen that it ate at the surface of her skin like burns, and tore at her body like teeth, and she knew it waited for her breath. With no escape but death, the imprisoned stars began to panic, and those who were in Lily Bell’s comity but a moment before then became a crushing jostle of bodies—turning on each other, with fangs and desperate thirst.
Meanwhile, the masked stars kept Irene in a room of white fire without thorn, tethered in place by precious fibers that shone and glinted in the blazing heat. This passed for civility among the stars.
She could overhear the apprehensive conversations of her captors. The legions that had prepared for an attack had been given new orders to capture any stars they could find, now that Irene’s mirages had faded and could not protect them. None of the civilian stars upon the Firmament had escaped into the West—they could not even find records of warning the West, in the little they could access from the weave—yet the King had amassed her armies.
Irene’s captors had spied from above, tried to make sense of what they had seen: a vast bird of fire clapped armor of the strangest manufacture upon the Clarene’s body, and she ascended to the Firmament with an explosion of golden fire. As this figure rocketed upwards, she shed her cloven feet and then her knees and then her legs. Two faery queens flew beside her: the Dierne, and the Azure Laetha. They surpassed the Firmament, leaving no room for entry behind them, and they were fast and fearlessly approaching the halls of the stars. How had they been warned? How could they have been warned?
The Lightning Horse, thought Irene with smug relief. The air around her rippled with a blue hue—she felt the exhaustion of her power, but only with that coolness could she almost bear the imprisonment. When the masked stars approached her with questions—how she had warned them, how strong were the armies of the West, if the Clarene approached to parley then how could they bribe or threaten her—Irene would not answer even if she could.
Later, Irene’s interrogators returned with a simple white mask. The one who bore it then twirled the mask around so that the inside faced Irene, and then she could see the thorns. She tried to twist away from it as they approached.
“Say no, and we shall desist,” said Irene’s captor. She shook her head no but couldn’t form the words, and she began to struggle and scream as the hands of the stars grasped her head and turned her face forward.
Say the word, they said. This is the way it’s done, is it not? We have given you the chance to say no.
“That is a wise choice,” another masked star replied, even though Irene had made no such thing as a choice. The star continued, “You shall sing the songs of the spheres, as we all do, and that shall be your voice.”
Irene’s shouts became muffled as the mask covered her face, the thorns inside lancing through to her mind. She only thought the blue aurora had been exhaustive. The mask hungered for her life, her heart, her name. The substance of the mask shone with rainbows as it fed and came to life, blurring all the colors into a stark and blazing white.
The vacuum began to ease from the survivors of the twelfth ship, and Sham faded into their view.
“You should be proud of yourselves,” their torturer said of them, the survivors: Lily Bell, Sorrow, and Guile. “This ordeal proved you to be the truest of stars.”
Lily Bell trembled as she stood from the cell block, and she struck the stardust from her hands. Who did the stardust used to be? She tried not to think about it. “Your ordeal was ill-designed. I am no star at all.”
Sham gasped in wonder, for her voice carried the songs of the spheres with a dissonance with which no true star would speak. “You’re Lily Bell of the West! Why do you look normal?” By this, the star meant, ‘why do you appear like a star?’ “How could you have survived the vacuum?”
Sorrow rasped, “What nerve to ask.”
“The Firmament served as my quarantine,” Lily Bell explained, ignoring the eldest star. “That which make the race of the stars is an illness in the West, for the star named Jealousy fed on all light and life in my homeland. That was how he survived, and how I survived just now.” She leaned against the prison bars. “But that’s not your curiosity, is it?”
Guile, who barely had enough life to stand or speak, whispered, “Lily, what are you doing?”
Though her insides twisted at the unspoken answer and her skin flinched at the proximity, Lily Bell reached out to pull Sham to her for a kiss. When they parted, and Lily Bell judged the look on Sham’s face as one who had mistaken desperation for passion, she said: “Free me from this prison and I will lead you to the West.”
Sham paused and glanced behind her, at the ground. “If I leave, they’ll send someone else to do the same to your fellows.”
Sorrow and Guile could barely move themselves. Lily Bell replied, “We stole life from each other, or tried. I want nothing to do with them. Only one with the power to destroy me can protect me—I only want the strong in my life.”
Sham shrugged and smiled, almost preening at the compliment, although Lily Bell’s argument sounded too reasonable and obvious to the star to take excessive pride in it: mere validation would do.
And so it went, that Lily Bell escaped from the prison of the stars and fell upon the Firmament—with the star named Sham, and the key to the West.
The Dierne, the Azure Laetha, and the Clarene hovered in an area of the sky that the Dierne promised would be neutral territory. At last, an envoy of the stars began to drift down a distant path to meet them.
“Masked,” the Clarene muttered, disapprovingly. “Who told them they were allowed to wear masks?”
Azure Laetha moved forward and spoke to the envoy. “Is this truly a safe space to parlay?”
“That must go without question,” replied the envoy.
The Dierne laughed without humor. “You violated the terms of agreement concerning the Firmament! Excuse us, then, for coming to this neutral space fully armed and with all the powers of the West awaiting our signal to attack.”
The envoy said, “The West is an ephemeral mote of aberrance in a grand cosmos that is ordered as it should be, and has been for all time. We care nothing of your power.”
“Then you know nothing of our power,” Azure said. “If you never cared to find out, then you should have left us alone. I warn you—should the Firebird rise, you won’t even have the barrier of the Sundering to protect you. The lights of our cities will wash away your constellations, and none will miss your names.”
The envoy remained silent for a long while, before speaking. “The constellations were families we only longed to keep complete. A grand cosmos, ordered as it should be. We feel the loss of the fallen, but relinquish that which we have lost all the same. Your Firmament was an opportunity—”
“A compromise!” The Dierne interrupted. “You’ve overstepped your bounds!”
“Barely any of the stars of your Firmament consented to return, why? You have poisoned them against their own home. This offense we could not bear.”
Azure Laetha lifted her chin. “Each one of them had the right to say no.”
“That is the selfish way of the West. Your definition of compromise and boundaries are too convenient for you. Only the stars know the true form of the solidarity you so often speak, and can only speak, of.”
Before the Dierne could argue, the Clarene spoke: “You forced away two of our people who were not stars. Lily Bell keeps a heart of the West within her.” She paused before adding, “The Firmament was the principality of Irene, she of the rainbows, of peace and quiet, of soothe and song—my first beloved.”
At the mention of Irene’s name, the body of the masked envoy began to jerk and writhe, as if to ward off something within. Azure and the Dierne readied their weapons.
“Irene is a terrible cook,” the Clarene added. “She would rather eat sandwich ingredients separately than ever again risk the consequences of assembling one. Irene could burn soup. I thought that was adorable. I can’t tell you why. Irene watches too much television and has developed an alcohol habit that I worry about. It’s as though she seeks refuge from the world in them, when I created the world itself as a refuge. Irene doesn’t invite herself to parties anymore, but she used to, and—in the old world—she would be easy to forgive for the way she danced and sang, because that was the way of it. We left that world for a reason.”
Azure muttered to the Dierne, “I thought they agreed to part when they relieved your duties to the principality. Why all this sentimentality?”
The Dierne shrugged and peered, sighting down the barrel as the envoy spoke again.
“Which stars…save me…would you…” the envoy stilled and straightened, and calmly finished: “…trade for them?”
The younger gods exchanged glances of wary apprehension. The Clarene appeared unfazed as she said, “No trade. Neither belongs in your sky.”
With a gloved hand, the envoy pointed at the Dierne, then the hand balled into a fist and the envoy struck themselves in the face before pointing at the Dierne again. “Return,” the envoy commanded, before bringing both hands to the edges of the mask, fingers scrambling at the edges. The envoy’s voice slurred, growling dangerously: “Return Pal…lierne…Dallis…return…help…must return…to us…”
At last, the envoy wrenched their own mask free, revealing a face of deep open wounds that was Irene’s. The Clarene moved forward to hold the princess as she cast aside the mask of thorn and white fire. The god-king pressed her lips to the wounds until they healed and tears washed the blood from Irene’s face.
But the princess continued to cry out and make gestures of urgency until Azure unrolled a substitute interweave from her sleeve.
In this manner, she was able to warn the others of the knowledge she had stolen (or whatever it should be called, when the myriad minds of the stars had been forced upon her.) A star named Sham had fallen, accompanied by a prisoner from the Firmament that was not a star. It must have been Lily Bell, Irene knew, and also knew that Lily Bell possessed the key to the West.
The Clarene interrupted Irene’s profuse apologies with, “Good. Now we can all go home.”
And the Dierne objected. “The stars from the Firmament aren’t home. I came here to fight for them, too!”
“With whose armies?” The Clarene asked.
And Azure Laetha answered, “Holy Mother, the Firebird is with the Dierne.”
“This is mutiny,” the Clarene said, but did not appear to Irene to truly be outraged. In any case, the King returned home with the princess.