Page 50 of The City of Stardust

A breeze ripples through the air, and the rustle of decaying furniture sounds like laughter. Every hair on the back of her neck lifts.

She backs away into the kitchen, and trips over the mouldy rug, sprawling on the floor. Wincing, she eases herself up—and notices a trapdoor, scored deep into the floorboards. The sensible part of her is urging her to get out of the house as fast as possible. Sheshouldleave. She’s obviously not going to find anything useful here.

But she’s certain she’s not alone. She holds her breath—and another, almost invisible breath whispers through the entire house.

So she tugs on the large ring pull, dragging the trapdoor open. A gust of something dry and rotten wafts upwards, and she nearly gags. A ladder snakes downwards into the darkness. Casting her phone’s light, she sees packed earth, not more floorboards.

Something groans within, sounding terribly human. Someone trapped?

“I’m coming down,” she says.

The only response is another groan, more concrete this time. She swings herself over the edge, testing her weight on the ladder. But it’s iron, and seems to hold. Carefully, she pockets her penknife and descends, feeling her way down until her feet hit the ground. The smell down here is worse, the unmistakeable reek of an unwashed body, and she takes shallow sips of air through her mouth.

“I’m here—the door was open—let me help.”

She sweeps her light over the room, and the figure screams, a harsh cry that resonates through her skull. Violet screams, too, and backs up against the wall. She drops her phone and briefly, the entire room is aglow in white light, revealing the source of her sudden terror.

The creature is chained to the other side of the wall, naked and cringing away from the light. His enormous black wings lie on either side of him, torn and scarred, in a gruesome masquerade of a puppet with strings cut loose. Black ichor oozes from wounds. Dark strands of hair are plastered over a face that might once have been beautiful, godly, even—but is so sunken that it’s impossible to tell. Silver eyes glimmer wetly in the light, and his mouth is open in an “oh” of pain, sharp teeth glinting like spearheads. The rest of him, though, looks human enough. Like a man, if every bone was broken and reset anew, if muscles and sinew withered away to the skeleton underneath.

He screams again. It’s a language that Violet’s never heard, like shards of glass shattering over and over, but words form inside her head, breeching her thoughts.

It hurts us! We cannot bear it!

Trembling, Violet picks up her phone and covers the light with herhand, so that it no longer blazes across the room. The creature sighs, his breath coppery with blood.

Ahhhh…he breathes.

Violet knows the world is wilder and more extraordinary than she could ever conceive. But the scholars are human, whereas this—thiscreature—is emphatically not. Johannes’ warning echoes in her head.

This is too much. She needs to leave.

She inches towards the ladder, hoping he won’t notice her movement. Praying his chains are stronger than they look. Then the creature speaks again, a jangling melody that runs unbidden through her mind like music.

We have been waiting for you, O star-child. We saw this day when we were but a chemical dance of light, when the world was dark and infinite and O so ripe for taking.

“What are you?” she chokes out.

What are we?The tone is amused, in a self-deprecating way.Once we were inconceivable, immortal, invulnerable. Once we called the stars kin, the sky home. We are astral.

Astral. A god of Fidelis. It’s impossible. And yet here he is, so obviously a creature of elsewhere. She thinks back to the cards the asteria flashed at her: astrals of lovers and betrayers, of the lost. Devastation. But he looks like none of the cards she’d flipped over.

The map led here. Not to an object, but agod.

Then her thoughts catch up to his earlier words. “You knew I was coming.”

Like mother, like daughter. History calls to itself yet again.

“My mother was here?”

O yes. She was clever with her offering.The astral’s eyes lock on her shrewdly.We sense no gift from you.

Johannes didn’t mention anything about a gift. And everything in her backpack is worthless to anyone else.

“I have nothing to give,” she says helplessly.

You have brought yourself. We would take but a morsel,he croons.A finger, a thumb.His chains groan under his weight as he inches forward.A hand would be a most excellent gift.

She recoils, shaking her head.

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