Page 85 of The City of Stardust

In the library, Ambrose sits her down with a stack of books and other documents besides: maps, illustrations, pages torn from diaries.

“This is everything we’ve collected over the years,” he says. “It’s not much—but then there was never much to find. Penelope has hidden her tracks well.”

Violet dives straight in.

Books have always been her escape. When she couldn’t leave the house, when no one would answer her questions, when she felt so very alone in the world. They have given her a way out before—maybe they can do it again.

She reads and reads. When it gets too dark, she turns on the oil lamps, the library bathed in a soft glow. Occasionally one of her uncles brings her a sandwich, or a cup of coffee, taking away the half-eaten meals and unfinished drinks with filmy water slopping over the side. And when it’s not food, it’s their own notes, decades of research that they’ve painstakingly put together. Her head twinges with the beginnings of a headache. She yawns and rubs her eyes, then keeps going.

In her head, she joins sentences together across books from different hands, chasing threads across history and haphazard translations. The subjects vary wildly: theology, geography, fables and folk tales from both worlds, a biography of a sixteenth-century painter, ascribbled note from a forge master. But as Violet reads on, a picture starts to build of the astrals.

In some accounts, they create humans out of clay and stardust, shattering themselves to grant the gift of talent. In others, they walk amongst mortals, bestowing mercy and punishment like a divine judiciary. Violet doesn’t recognise these unknowable, infallible beings; their abstract altruism doesn’t reckon with Tamriel’s attempt to eat her, or Erriel’s apathy to her plight.

It’s the darkest stories that fascinate her—and the ones which have been the most heavily annotated. Whispers of creatures who turned the sky black, or who stalked across worlds, devouring cities one by one. They play at being mortal, upending lives and tearing apart communities. Yet even these have a fairy-tale quality, as though the true account would be too painful to write down.

Always, at the end, the astrals return to their homelands, leaving wreckage or restoration in their wake. Butleaving, all the same. So why hasn’t Penelope?

One evening, Ambrose walks into the study as Violet paces up and down, tapping a pencil against the palm of her hand.

“Marianne used to do that, too, when she was working on a problem,” he says.

Violet immediately stops. Her fingers tighten on the pencil.

For the second day in a row, she falls asleep in one of the armchairs, curled up in a position her body will come to regret in the morning. Her dreams are fragmented and terrible: filled with blood and flames, blinding light and honey smiles. Penelope whispering in her ear,it’s almost time.Several times she wakes in the middle of the night, certain that the shadows around her are pulling her in.

On the fourth day, she reaches for her pile of documents and pulls out a hefty book. It’s not an old volume, but it wears its years badly, battered and singed black. The gilt on the book is almost gone, but Violet can still read the debossed title:An Unnatural Collectorie: Tales of the Astrals.

She cracks open the musty binding, careful of the tissue-thin scritta paper. The book is segmented into sections on each astral,with frayed ribbon and brittle notes sandwiched into the pages. There are copperplate facsimiles of each astral, in elegant art nouveau illustrations that seem to bear no resemblance to the reality that Violet has already witnessed.

Carefully, she flips to the page markedAstriade. A woman in a diaphanous dress, twin swords at each side, stares out at her. And maybe there’s something in the proud chin or the sharp nose, but it’s hard to tell. Some unfortunate reader must have accidentally nicked their thumb because there are several rusty fingerprints across the page. She turns the page and—

Once, there was a man who could make anything he desired. But he had never been loved. Until one day, a star walked into his shop and offered him an exchange.

Some of the details are familiar: the craftsman, the star, the pact. Others, though, are at odds with her childhood fairy tale. In this one, the man plunges the bridal sword into his lover’s heart on the last night, killing them both. The next story is more of the same, and yet different again. A cage of god-metal protects the man until dawn, by which time the star leaves. In yet another, the star dies with their promise unfulfilled, leaving the man to wander distraught across the world for eternity.

Just stories. And yet, there’s a familiarity between them that sets her thoughts racing.

Hours later, Violet teeters on a ladder as she unhooks the ancient family sword from its clasps on the wall and places it gingerly on the floor. She examines the crumbling relic, surrounded by reams of her own notes. For the last twenty-odd years, it’s hung in the library, a cast-off from one ancestor or another. Practically forgettable, amidst all the other curios in the Everly house.

Up close, the metal isn’t entirely smooth, with tiny hillside ridges and a greenish sheen speckling the onyx black. The leather on the grip is practically falling off, and the silver pommel is tarnished and dull. It looks like it has her whole life. But this time, she knows exactly what she is looking at: a sword with a blade of reveurite, albeit dulled and brittle.

She closes her eyes and concentrates. Places her hands on the blade and presses her fingers into the metal. Years ago, she had held a marble in her palm and wished for a miracle. And it was only when Aleksander had explained about talent and god-metal that she’d figured out that it wasn’t her hands at all that were the problem; it was simply that she lacked the correct material to work with. By then there was no reveurite to test herself upon—and even if she had possessed enough of the untampered metal, would she have dared? She knows so little about how to wield it. But now, there’s nothing left to lose.

She’s already lost everything.

Beneath her eyelids, something sparks. When she opens her eyes, the blade seems to gleam anew with gold. When she takes her hands away, there is a thumb-shaped dip in the metal, the whorls of her fingerprint mimicked exactly.

It’s hardly a marble and a galaxy, yet this is supposed to be what separates her from everyone else. What made her blood so sweet to Erriel. What condemns her to Penelope’s wrath. What she couldn’t give up, even to find her mother.

The manipulation of reveurite. God-metal. Star-metal.

The ability to walk through worlds untethered.

Astrals are not invulnerable, though they may live forever. Violet thinks of Erriel, and the reveurite shard plunging through her heart. Of Tamriel’s chains in his prison.

What better way to combat a god than a godly creation?

Despite all her promises to herself, she feels a faint flicker of hope.

---