Chapter Text
In a panic he scrabbled back up the hill, dodging and weaving through the old ruins. Starfall had never hit the tower before, never within a hundred metres, and he'd calculated the trajectory on that assumption and waited down in the valley. He saw the smoke rising, blue and acrid, an unreal cloud in the darkness on the other side of the tower's stolid bulk, and his breath caught. If the tower got damaged, if it was shattered, he had no means --
The terror was such that he got within ten paces of the tower before he saw what was at the door.
The first time he had been staked out like a goat for starfall sat within him like a nightmare that replayed itself every time the night sky showed blue. It didn't matter that he'd walked to the stake himself, that he'd chosen this tower, when the moment came to die. That selfsame terror -- a double, triple, quadruple exposure of it -- returned every time, but he did his job. Hands shaking, soul off somewhere outside of his body and wrapped in cotton wool, but he did it.
In between starfalls, his impulse to interrogate the reasons for the phenomenon might be a fool's errand, but he was an inveterate fool. He couldn't help it; that there was sense to be laboriously distilled out of the universe was a truth he cradled in his bones. At present, the decanting of useful truths out of starfall had borne only small, bitter fruits.
His first time, he had run without meaning to. Instinct had taken over. The scar of that shattering pursuit still zigzagged the story through the landscape in the bright fresh green of a few years' regrowth. His second time, he had been determined not to let cowardice take his feet: he had curled up in a ball, covered his ears, closed his eyes, and felt only the searing crunch of his own bones and flesh before the explosion. The scar from that starfall had been different: it drew a gut-dropping straight line from the crater of his death towards the edge of the exclusion zone. Central, in one of their exceedingly rare communiques to the tower, had been harsh and beneath that harshness he had read strong alarm. Do better. Starfall almost breached. The town of Lundorebo approached near enough to see the ultrablue flaring of the beast.
It haunted him, the question of who else it had almost certainly killed. Illegal hunter after the untouched wildlife in the exclusion zone? Teens sneaking where they shouldn't for a tryst or a smoke? After that, he had always run. What logic there was to the chase he had yet to understand, but when he ran, it kept the disaster contained to himself.
It stood at the doorway to the tower, pawing at the door dumbly. The ultrablue flesh of it ate the light from the modest lamps set up at the tower's base, turning the star beast into an outline limned only just enough to give an indication of form. It was pinpricked by a double handful of cold blue brightnesses across its body, which did not seem to cast any light beyond its own outlines.
It turned, and he felt like he was looking at a hole in the world. There were eyes, and they were on him, and there was a mouth, and that mouth was opening opening -- how could he tell, the void on void? -- and then a sound, a scream or a babble, the grating, singing note of it tumbling into something like syllables.
He screamed in retort and stumbled backwards, for a moment twinning that horrid noise. One of the old cobbles of the ruins betrayed him and he went down on his ass, knocking the wind and the sound out of himself.
The starbeast's vocalization trailed off a moment later and that horrible blue mouth closed. It stood and watched him hyperventilate, impassive, its head cocked to one side. Its human-shaped, human-sized head, balanced over the drop and swoop of human shoulders, rounding downwards and carrying on as such all the way to stygian feet that met the dirt with exactly the weight and give that human toes would. The physicality of the starbeasts had never been in doubt -- physically was how they took their pound of flesh -- but the familiarity of its form made it horrible.
As it stood there, something else was creeping up his brainstem comorbid with the horror. It grew up through the fertile soil of confusion, and moved his mouth.
"You're impossible." His voice had been scraped by his scream, and he heard it rough from his throat, alien in its urgency.
He picked himself up, shaky, circling warily in a lateral creep towards the tower, keeping a radius away from it.
"But you're extant so you can't be impossible. I think." Reasoning it out loud helped in some fractional way. It was also very unlike his usual talking to himself, even if he wasn't sure the words were heard or understood by his uncanny audience, but then it had also been so long he barely remembered what talking to another thinking person felt like. His mind skipped and skidded through and between questions and ideas, not quite landing on any one of them for long enough to perch. "You're a -- is it the same as -- as your compatriots making fall as birds, as beasts?" He had reached the wall and now he pressed his hands to it, ready to sprint around the wide curve if he needed to, but the starbeast stood impassive except to put a hand on the stone near the door. "Just a -- a poetic metaphor?" He licked his lips, eyes wide, mouth dry. He swallowed, struggling to get ahold of himself though his lungs didn't seem to want to inflate and his intestines were snakes. "But you... didn't look like this... last time."
Virgo had fallen before, a century or two ago, said the journals. It had been a giant, man-formed only nominally in that it had been bipedal and had grasping hands. The report from the Watcher at the time had been dry, lacking details, as that Watcher tended to be, but it had been clear enough. A crushing death. "They would have said." Why was he still talking. "Someone would have made a note if you landed looking like this."
The vapour of the fall had ceased to rise, the air clearing on the other side of the tower as the low, steady wind shredded those strands into nothing.
The longer the moment stretched out, the more his body wanted to creep backwards. He shifted his feet, curled his own toes in the dirt, and shivered. The starfall still watched, head cocked, as his heart beat so hard it battered his ribs. The same thing that had moved his mouth, though, slithered down his spine and took control of the puppet-string nerves of his feet. He shuffled forward, one hand clinging to the tower's wall, the other held away from his body as if being ready to take a swing meant anything against starfall. That motivating energy sat at the back of his throat.
This was new. New meant different. Different could mean anything.
The starfall continued to stand placidly, watching him on the approach. It still mirrored his posture -- a detail he noticed and noted, that added an iota of fuel to the hot feeling in his chest -- he tested that by taking his hand off the tower, and watched as it did the same.
"Imitation," he said. "Is that... do you know you're doing that? Is it reflex?"
He was less than six paces away frow it now. He was rarely so close to starfall, and was reaching the point of highest risk. What if it got its hands on him and...
Well, and what then? He'd die?
He grimaced deeply, and watched as the starfall's mouth twitch and pull downwards. One of the stars, high on its slim neck and underneath one ear, cast an eerie uplight on that light-eating flesh such that the expression was deeply sinister, and it startled the look off of his own face. For a moment he was uncomfortably aware of himself, of how alien he must look to the alien creature in front of him, and the curiosity that had been poisoning his self-preservation blossomed.
"You don't understand me, do you?" He crossed that breach, trembling but not stopping. His breath caught in his chest as the faint charcoal-metallic waft of starfall caught him, but by then his hand was already half up in an open-handed offer of greeting, and momentum carried him the rest of the way. Virgo's mirroring met him halfway, and he felt the cold flesh of its fingers.
Softer than he was used to, yielding, hands without callus or hangnail or natural texture. Before he could think he was grasping that hand. An absurdity of an introduction followed, his own reflex of the moment. "I'm the Watcher here. I -- I know you, sort of. You're Virgo."
When it opened its mouth and vocalized again, he jerked his hand away, ready to clap both over his ears. What came forth, though, while still not words, didn't burn his hearing. It was babble, strange and wrong, but with a cadence and a timbre closer to a human voice.
It stopped. "Good gods," he breathed, wrapping his arms around himself. The implications were beginning to sink in, and as the urgency of thinking he was imminently going to die waned, what waxed in its place was a broad and wild confusion. "What do I do with you?"
He had always, always looked to the skies for awe. They had delivered knowledge alongside: first of the stories, and then of distance and scale, and then later of the intricate and delicate mechanics thereof. Quantifiable, comprehensible incomprehensibility; numbers too large to imagine except in the abstract, which became in turn keys to the comforting knowledge of living in an orderly universe that nevertheless would always contain new puzzles to solve. He'd thought, fancifully, that there was a reason that people imagined the patterns of the stars as sketching out gods long before the physicists had used them to begin to understand the equations that defined the universe. The gods could be found in the skies and they were much more expansive, and much more orderly, than humankind had imagined in its infancy.
Of course he had always meant it only in the sense of florid metaphor, and this thing was not a god.
It sat on one of the two chairs the tower quarters were furnished with, and he across from it. He hadn't wanted to bring it indoors, but he needed things from his quarters and when he had tried to edge past it, it had let him, but then followed a step behind on the stairs. No amount of explaining or gesturing or declaring had shaken it from his tail, and he was growing tired of standing mostly naked in the cold of the tower doorway. Finally for lack of other ideas he had herded it up the tower's long staircase, walking behind it rather than have it at his own back.
It was intrusive, beyond unwelcome, having starfall in his rooms. Fear held a tight knot in his solar plexus and a broad band across the back of his neck and shoulders, made his legs fizz with the readiness to run even while he was seated.
"I shouldn't have you here," he said. The outer wall of the core tower, which formed the inner wall of the quarters built around it, sat opposite the great glass windows looking over the exclusion zone. They were as close to the glass as he could seat them, as if it would make a dram of difference if something went wrong. He still didn't know what would happen if he died next to the tower, if the explosion would render it uninhabitable, and the risk made him prickle.
On the way up the stairs it had started burbling again, and he had almost bolted out of startlement. But it was a quiet sound that time, almost like a bird, nonsense syllables that came intermittently. Psychological hailstones: the sound of them grated at his ears more because of what the action implied than how it sounded.
Now, as it stared at him in the silence after he'd spoken, it opened its mouth and babbled again.
He hissed a breath out between his own teeth, unable to help but grope for meaning. Were those beginning to sound like more words? Was there a rhythm like speech? Was he hearing what he expected to hear, or what he feared to hear, or -- worse -- what he wanted to hear?
"Stop," he told it firmly.
It burped out a syllable back. Op.
"Are you going to kill me yet?" Why would he even ask?
"You," it said, uncomprehending.
He was shaking again, he realized. Overwrought. He dragged his fingers over the rough fabric of his pants, grounding. "I wish you'd get it over with."
When all it did was babble back, he almost cried. Then he sat in silence as it watched him until the moon rose, waiting for some reaction, some sign that never came.
Finally, he stood up and led it all the way back down the stairs. It followed, and he read an imaginary contrition in its obedience, and he felt insane for that, for all of this. With night deep above them he led it a fifteen minute walk from the tower before stopping and shrugging his coat back off, his shoes, the most indispensible parts of his outfit that he would prefer to be able to retrieve later. It watched him, brushing its own shoulders as if looking for a coat of its own, and then when he moved again it followed him into a rocky dip in the woods. Once they were at the bottom he turned and faced it, took its hands with both of his.
They were cool, and solid, smooth like too-perfect skin was smooth but nothing else. The cold did not burn him, nor did the touch pain him. If he closed his eyes he could imagine this was a human, which very much worse, so he opened them again while he lifted its hands to his throat. He closed those afterimage-blue fingers around the tender flesh there. He squeezed, instructively, and waited.
When it did nothing but stare at him, he dropped the grip -- so did it -- and he all but fell to a sit on the mossy slab of stone he'd brought them to, his strings all cut. He heard it thump to ground across from him, and he did not want to see it.
He pulled his knees up to his chest, pressed his forehead to them, and tried to figure out what the hell to do. The ghost-cold of Virgo's fingers lingered against his windpipe, gentle and horrifying, for a very long time.