—MARCUS AURELIUS
ORION
Ionce swore I’d fight an ocean for her.
The instant my arms closed around Collins, I knew I’d fight the dark, violent waters of the tide to carry her ashore.
The wind whips around me, rising into a roaring chorus as waves crash furiously against the jagged cliffside below. Even as the rain breaks and the sky clears, the misty air remains charged with a storm.
I hold the brass object between my thumb and forefinger, feel the balanced weight of it. Its sudden appearance in my observatory stirs an unease, an implication that makes me question my own mind.
There’s a cost to loving anything too fiercely. That only after losing what we love most can we truly realize its value.
It’s a cruel paradox.
With an aching breath, I lift my gaze toward the horizon.
Out there in the vast ocean is my violence. I recognized its fury before the ripples could reach me, before the vibrations could be felt. Like gravitational waves passing silently through one another, we were never supposed to collide.
That’s the law of physics.
And yet, near the shadow of the horizon, laws are bent, warped. Altered.
My thoughts rage like the restless sea stretched endless before me, cast in tossing black waters that absorb the fading light. Two worlds layered one on top of the other.
In the distance, that faint seam of horizon threads the space where the ocean touches sky, blurring the boundary between the two.
Overhead, first contact is being made as the moon kisses the disk of the sun, initiating the countdown to occultation.
The waves push and pull against the shoreline as I stand fixed on the rocky ledge, the towering spires of Stonehurst looming from behind. I clench the brass in my hand, my fingers as numb with cold as my body with indecision.
Soon, a blazing corona will circle a black sun, the moment of totality eclipsing the beach.
And me.
Right here, trapped in this space between, I feel that push and pull on a cellular level as gravity mercilessly dominates my atoms. An inevitability that has tormented me since she first entered my orbit.
As crosses form on the shallow waters, the tide displays the mark of danger. Rip currents strong enough to swallow us whole are building. The gravitational pull churns the tide higher, pulling harder at the ocean.
I recognize the pattern because the science of what I do depends on it. Inherently, we are designed to recognize these patterns. It’s coded in our DNA. To escape predation, to identify danger.
I should have recognized the danger in her.
My gaze tracks over the pier, where blood pools dark on the weathered wood. Salt water surges up, splashing between the planks to wash the evidence of her violence away, yet the stain remains.
Fuck, all this time, I’ve been fixated on the wrong celestial event. It was never the sun going dark—it was her. With every escaping second, the eclipse was taking place within Collins, the shadow slowly devouring her light. I sensed the fury there, the violence, that undercurrent of turmoil simmering just beneath her surface. Until finally spilling free, bloodying the waters.
Her totality is here.
With fire lashing my sternum, I remove the star-taker from my pocket and fit the piece into place, and her melodic tune sings through me, an intoxicating, haunting refrain.
Nothing is as perfectly measured as the symmetry of a reverberating tune. A sound caught forever in motion, like a melody pulled into a riptide, eternally echoing deep under the surface where no one can hear.
Yet I hear it.
Her echoes that come to me as harmony, the staccato cadence of her pulse, a tender, melancholic rhythm of heartbeats that I could always hear.
Raising the sighting vane, I look across the churning waves and align the astrolabe. Sunlight filters through the aperture, striking my palm as I confirm the measurements—the exact position of Ophiuchus.
