My bonfire was pathetic.
A few sticks of wind-dried scrub, barely thicker than my fingers, leaning against each other over a nest of dead moss that had taken four attempts to light. The flame it produced was small, orange and deeply unconvincing - the kind of fire that's mostly a symbolic gesture toward warmth that the actual temperature of the air ignored entirely.
I didn't care. The fire wasn't just for heat. Yes, it warmed my fingertips, barely. But it was for company.
The ledge jutted out from the peak's eastern face, a flat shelf of dark stone roughly ten meters wide and twice as long, dusted with snow that the wind hadn't managed to scour away. Behind me, the peak continued upward for another fifty meters or so - bare rock, ice-crusted, the final stretch of Karith's summit that we hadn't bothered climbing because the mission was finished and nobody wanted to spend another hour ascending for the sake of standing on a slightly higher piece of stone.
The Abyssal Nyx was dead. Three straight days of tracking through the cloud layer, two days of waiting on the ridge, and six minutes of actual combat that had cost us a broken collarbone, a fractured wrist, and enough Eon expenditure to leave the entire squad depleted for a few really long days. Standard Phalanx arithmetic - days of preparation measured against minutes of violence, the exchange rate always unfavorable.
The others were in the small camp below the ridge, around a hundred meters or so down, sleeping in the hollowed-out snow shelters we'd carved into the mountainside. I should have been with them. My body wanted to be with them - every muscle, every joint, every bruised and battered piece of me wanted horizontal, warm, and unconscious.
But the sky was out.
I sat on the ledge with my legs hanging over the edge, boots dangling above thousands of meters of empty air, and looked up.
The night sky spread above me without boundary or interruption, and I understood, sitting there, why humanity had spent its entire existence underneath the clouds without going mad from the loss. You couldn't miss what you'd never seen. You couldn't grieve the absence of something you didn't know existed. The grey ceiling was just the world - the way things were, the way they'd always been, the only sky anyone remembered.
But this... This was the real one.
Black. Deep. Depthless, actually, stretching in every direction with a vastness that made the word "big" feel like an insult. And scattered across it - millions of points of light. White, mostly, though some held colour if you looked long enough - faint blues, pale reds, the occasional warm yellow that pulsed at a frequency too slow to be sure you weren't imagining it. They filled the sky from horizon to horizon, dense in some regions and sparse in others, clustered into formations that curved and branched like rivers seen from very far above.
And they were moving.
Not all of them. The fixed points stayed fixed - steady, permanent, anchored to positions that didn't shift no matter how long I watched. But threading between them, falling across them, streaking through the dark spaces that separated them - shooting points. Dozens of them. Not the rare, blink-and-miss-it flickers I sometimes saw. Dozens, constantly, a slow and steady rain of light that crossed the sky in bright arcs and sometimes burned out before reaching the horizon.
Some were fast - thin white lines that appeared and vanished in less than a second, barely long enough to register. Others were slow - long, graceful curves that dragged tails of fading light behind them as they descended, holding their brightness for three or four seconds before dimming into nothing. At any given moment, looking at any given section of sky, there were three or four in motion simultaneously. A constant, gentle, unhurried shower of falling light.
And beneath the stars and between the shooting arcs, something else. Faint. Easy to miss if you weren't looking for it, easy to mistake for an afterimage or a trick of exhausted eyes. Eon manifestations - wild ones, untethered, the ambient energy of the world made briefly visible at an altitude where the cloud layer no longer filtered it. Small flares that bloomed in the distance and faded within seconds, like matches struck and shaken out. Threads of light that ran across the sky in straight or curving lines, holding for a moment before dissolving. Irregular shapes - formless, shifting, the kind of thing that existed at the very edge of perception and disappeared when you tried to look at it directly.
They were coloured, technically. Blue, and crimson and gold and faint violet. But at this distance and this intensity, the colours were so washed and pale that they almost looked white - the ghost of colour rather than the thing itself, a memory of vibrancy diluted by scale and distance into something barely distinguishable from the starlight it moved through.
I sat in the snow and watched.
The bonfire crackled. The flame dipped and recovered and dipped again, fighting the thin air for oxygen. My breath came out in tiny cloud bursts that froze in the air, turning into microscoping snowflakes made from myown breath, reflected the firelight and the starlight in equal measure, and for a long time that was the only movement on the ledge - my breathing and the fire and the sky, doing what they did, asking nothing.
It was the most peaceful I had ever been.
Twenty years old, that's how old I was at the time. Bruised, exhausted, underfed, sitting on a frozen ledge four thousand meters above a world I'd spent my life defending without ever seeing it properly. And for the first time in as long as I could remember, my mind was quiet. No mission briefing running in the background. No threat assessment, no tactical evaluation, no mental inventory of injuries, resources and contingencies. Just the sky, the snow and the small, stubborn fire, existing together without fixed purpose.
I don't know how long I sat there before I heard her.
