Page 33 of The City of Stardust

IF THERE ISa god they worshipped, it was her.

They say she was born of the stars. That she was so beautiful it hurt to look at her, and prolonged exposure could permanently blind you. That she was powerful and true, wielding retribution and mercy like dual swords of divine justice.

From the stars she brought reveurite, element of the gods. She taught a gifted few to work it, manipulating it on their anvils with tools of palladium and cobalt. Around their forges, a city sprang up. They carved reveurite doors across worlds, and invited others with the talent of wielding god-metal to join them. Whitewashed buildings appeared overnight as travellers set down their bags to stay, building on top of ancient foundations so that from a distance, the city looked like a tiered wedding cake. The forges blossomed, and at night, their fires burned like stars.

The dream catcher looked on in satisfaction, her plan at work just as it should be: a city of dreamers—pruned and nurtured, and occasionally weeded of threats, but one that thrived under her careful touch.

And then, something happened that wasnotpart of her plan.

She fell in love.

He holds no name, no face, blinding or otherwise. Some say he was mortal; others insist he, too, was kin to stars. Most agree he had a way with his hands, a craftsman’s care that drew her to him. Although he didn’t know it, he held her heart on a string, and shefound herself attuned to every tug that dragged him away, every slackening that meant he was near.

Eventually, she visited him at his forge. For a while she watched him work, with no more than an indifferent gaze. But as time went on, she showed him the deeper secrets of reveurite crafting, which had passed amongst her kind and no further until now. How to create galaxies in glass bottles, or jewelled music boxes that would play the siren call of the stars. How to forge blades of reveurite that never dulled or broke, no matter the strain. How to unlock the doors to other worlds, with elaborate keys that glittered on their chains. And all the while, his heart felt hers, an insistent pull.

They say his hands were still covered in reveurite when he could resist no longer and grasped her waist, her thighs, so there were imprints of his fingers forever tattooed on her skin. They say he pulled her into the forge with him, and they made love amongst the flames like ethereal creatures of old. Or—if he is mortal in this version—they say he led her towards his bed, with its hand-stitched sheets and soft pillows, and made her feel human as she’d never felt before, and never would again. That he smiled at her with his eyes crinkled around the edges, a lifetime of wear and tear she would never know.

In the forge, or in his bed, she whispered,This will be our knowledge alone to bear.

As time passed, they married in secret, dipping their hands in reveurite dust to place the delicate tattoos of fidelity and love on the soft curve of their shoulders. And for a year and a day, they lived like this. Hot and dizzy with passion at the moon’s apex, leaving them scorched and smouldering during the day. Their marriage bore a child, with clever hands and curious eyes, and the song of the stars thrumming in their heart.

But nothing lasts forever.

There is a day, an argument, a reckoning. Maybe he grew older, and saw how she could not. Or maybe the dream catcher, with her fatal foresight, saw the end of everything, and wished to preserve him as he was. Maybe he wished for a child who wouldn’t carry thelegacy of a god. Maybe there was infidelity on her side, on his. Maybe a curse from the stars themselves.

Maybe many things.

But a year and a day after their secret marriage, a fury grew within the dream catcher until it could be contained no longer. And she ripped their world apart. Streets buckled, houses reduced to ruins. Lives obliterated in an instant, as the city rent in two.

Those who could escape through the doors did so, their gifts scattered like ash over thousands of worlds. And they forgot their skills, or failed to pass them on, generations of history lost in a moment.

Dream catcher. Star swallower. City destroyer.

Some say she lost her mind, in the end—that in her despair, she returned to the stars, her tears the constellations. Others say she is still trapped in the city, her voice vanished from a millennia of screaming. But most believe she roams countless worlds, immortal and invulnerable, a solitary wraith with vengeance for a heart.

Yet another version of the story suggests that the man, too, wanders the earth, made immortal through her wrath, if he was ever mortal to begin with. And it is he whom she searches for, her heart still attached to his. Whether to ease the pull of the thread, or to sever it altogether, no one can say.

CHAPTER

Seventeen

ARMED WITH Astolen notebook and stubborn hope, Violet Everly is on a quest.

It helps to think of it that way. After all, a quest is a kind of adventure, isn’t it? And a quest always ends in thefinding: the grail, the sword, the key. The woman who vanished into thin air over a decade ago, leaving a target on her daughter’s back.

This is what she tells herself in dingy train stations, on dark streets, under bus shelters dripping with rain. With the battered notebook to guide her, she moves from country to country like her passport’s burning a hole in her pocket, eating away at generational Everly wealth with every ticket stub. In Rome, she learns that her mother was reserved and travel-worn. In Accra, the contact, an old friend of Gabriel’s, recognises her bracelets. In Mumbai, a teenager steals out of his house in the middle of the night to hand her a new list of names and addresses to try.You look just like her, she’s told, over and over again. But other times, she arrives to empty houses, shuttered apartments, or people who refuse to let her in.

“No bloody Everlys here, thanks!” a man in Melbourne shouts through his letterbox. “Tell Marianne to go fuck herself.”

Sometimes, she pauses on a quiet road or in the middle of a crowd, caught by certain details. A familiar laugh. A dark-haired man framed in a shop window, the glass warping her vision. Or it’s the sound of a key turning in a lock, and a person disappearing from the crowd.

Every time she tells herself it’s not worth looking, that it washimwho abandonedher, at a monster’s behest.There are days where sheresists and spends hours afterwards wondering if she shouldn’t have; there are days where she caves and turns around, only to feel foolish when she locks eyes with a stranger. But still, she senses it: a prickle between her shoulder blades, a mirrored step in time with her own. The unsettling sensation of being watched.

A year quickly trickles away. To six months, then three.

Ambrose leaves her long, panicked voicemails, begging her to come home, to go with his original plan and vanish into some safe house. She ignores them, the way she ignores Gabriel’s curt text messages telling her that she’s a bloody fool. If she’s ever swayed to consider replying, all she has to do is remember the way they’d looked at her when she’d asked about Fidelis, the lies stacked upon lies until it was a wonder that she’d ever believed any of it.

But she had, fully and terribly. And she can never forgive them for it.

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