As the stars blink into the deepening night and a waning moon takes the sky, he strides away from the water’s edge, fighting his glove back into place. Some part of me mourns the loss of his skin, the closeness of his almost-touch.
The law of figure-ground is what’s used to separate the object from its blurred background in order to focus on what’s vital.
My gaze falls down his striking figure set against a bruised sky of gray storm clouds and waning light, trying to keep him in focus amid the blurring backdrop, the sun slipping beneath the hazy offing.
There’s a charge to a building storm, a breath held, pressure mounting. Waiting for the crack where the taut thread snaps.
Before I meet him at the bike, I scoop a handful of sand with the fragments of shell, letting the coarse grains sift through my fingers like escaping time. Its passage marked by the scars it leaves behind.
Time is cruel. But memory can be crueler.
And by his own science, in the only tense that matters—the now—Orion is ruled by obsession. Even as he fights that darker pull, the monster will always win.
I’ve witnessed that fallout.
There’s no amount of time that will lessen the desire for vengeance. Revenge lives in my blood—the very blood that flows wrong, through the hardened ventricle of a bad heart.
If I lose that heart to Orion, the wound will be deep, but?—
It’s black and bruised and callused, anyway.
The arrhythmic beat of the broken muscle drowns out any guilt over what I’m about to do. Soon, Orion will leave Stonehurst. His research unguarded.
By the time he returns, I’ll be gone.
The largest void in the known universe is the Boötes Void. 330 million light-years of near-total emptiness. The Great Nothing. A cosmic anomaly so immense, it defies logic. Where there should be galaxies by the thousands, there are but a sparse few, scattered like dying embers across a limitless dark. A cold reminder that the universe itself holds the power of erasure—that oblivion is not merely a concept, but a place, a void.
—DR. ORION NIGHT, ASTROPHYSICS LECTURE
16
Dark Skies
Stars, hide your fires; Let not light see my black and deep desires.
—MACBETH
ORION
If you knew the exact time of your death, how would you spend your last moments?
Would the answer change if you were given months? Weeks? Days?
Hours—?
Would you savor the time left, cherishing the light that remains, or try to defy that dark fate?
For everything beautiful in the universe, there exists a terrifying symmetry. What is luminous and breathtakingly full of wonder is mirrored by its opposite. Shadows that are desolate and horrifying, brimming with destruction and decay.
I’ve been riding inland for almost two hours, battered by wind.The salty coastal air has thinned to the crisp scent of leaves and earthy soil.
If I keep riding, just keep going, could I outrun our dark fate?
I push my Triumph past a sane speed, the roar of the engine failing to drown out the storm inside my head, shadows coiling tighter to mock my defiance.
The road narrows as I take a sharp curve, winding through forests dense with amber and gold. Those hidden hues of her eyes.
The sky grows darker.
