It would have been much easier if Ophireon could come up out of the void and use his authority as the supreme god, the king of kings, to bend the nations of the world to his will. It was a shame, then, that Ophireon couldn’t leave the void, couldn’t come back to the world that he had so painstakingly built. And it was doubly a shame that the bulk of the plan that Annie and Ophireon had devised relied on convincing the nations of the world the lend them aid.

Which meant that Annie had to take up the brunt of the work. Which meant that a kid who was barely twelve years old had to somehow figure out a way to convince all the nations that the Dragon was eating the universe and the world was ending and they had to set aside all their differences and cooperate.

After she had her talk with the Moon and fundamentally changed the nature of reality and her own mortal soul (just the thought of the numbers in her soul gave Annie the shivers), Annie climbed down the mountain with only slightly less difficulty than she’d had coming up. She’d thought that, at least in theory, going down would be much easier than going up. But the steps were so steep and narrow that she was afraid that if she just tried to jump down, then she might go tumbling all the way down the mountainside. And so she just sat down at the edge of each step and scooched on her butt off of it onto the next step.

About halfway down the mountain, Annie saw a group of people pointing and looking at her.

This was Step 1 of the plan.

Annie slowly made her way towards the group of people, inching down rough and craggy stairs. All of the people waiting on the cliffside were dressed for the cold, bundled in thick layers. A small golden pin adorned each of their chests, marking them as members of the Royal Academy of Celestial Study.

Astronomers.

.

.

.

Once upon a time, before the stars had taken their places in the night sky, they floated in the Western Ocean. The Western Ocean was so deep it almost reached the celestial bedrock at the bottom of the void. And so even though the stars were incomprehensibly vast, the Western Ocean was larger by orders of magnitude. The stars floated in its depths, swirling with the tides.

When Ophireon’s first daughter was born (his first child who was not a stone or a mountain or a cloud, that is), he named her Asteria. Ophireon shaped her out of clay that he retrieved from the bottom of the Western Ocean, earth that was infused with the star-water of the ocean that glittered with constellations. And so when Asteria was born, her skin was brown like the clay she had been shaped out of, but with freckles of starlight.

Asteria took after her father in that she was a creator and an artist. In that time before time, Asteria looked towards the night sky, so empty of color. The heavens were her canvas, a vast blackness that could be painted with whatever she wished.

And so Asteria made paints and dyes from the plants that dotted the earth and with a brush, she painted broad strokes of indigo and violet and milky white across the sky. And when she was done with that, she plucked stars from the Western Ocean and scattered them across her canvas.

“Look, Dad! That one I made looks like a bird, doesn’t it?” Asteria pointed at a collection of stars that she thrown into the heavens.

Ophireon squinted with his eyeless sockets and tried to connect the dots, “Sorry, which one?”

“That one right there!” Asteria pointed again, more emphatically.

Ophireon nodded and pretended to see it, “Ah yes, that one. It looks great, Asteria.”

If you come across this story on Amazon, it's taken without permission from the author. Report it.

“Thanks!” Asteria beamed.

And then Asteria, who took after her father more than either of them realized, dipped her fingers into her soul and gave part of her essence to the night sky. The night jolted with electricity and the stars came to life. Each and every star quivered with Asteria’s creative lifeblood. This is why sometimes the stars seem to slowly shift positions. Glacially, their excited quivering pushes them out of their fixed spots.

The night is alive. Asteria made it so.

One thousand years later, Ophireon distantly watched the Dragon devour the pieces of his daughter’s creation and all he could do was silently mourn.

.

.

.

“Who are you?” one of the astronomers asked Annie. He had wild grey hair and an equally wild and grey beard, and he wore thick glasses which magnified his eyes and made him look perpetually surprised.

“My name’s Anesidora,” Annie grinned at him, “But you can just call me Annie. I’m here to save the world. Will you help me?”

“What?”

“Okay, so if you look to the western part of the heavens at nighttime when the stars are out, you can see some of them are starting to disappear.”

“We have indeed noticed that,” the astronomer replied, bewildered. Unless you had the most powerful telescope in the world (which they did) or you were literally standing in the void (which wasn’t possible, as far as they knew), then you wouldn’t be able to see those few distant stars way on the western side of heavens that were beginning to vanish.

“They’re disappearing because the Dragon is eating them.”

Silence.

“Not just any old dragon. The Dragon. Capital D. Eschaton incarnate.”

“That sounds… highly improbable.”

“It’s a big monster with scales as black as the night, so it’s kind of mostly invisible. It’s got these super big wings that stretch from the bottom of the void to the top of the heavens. But if you look real careful with that big telescope of yours, you can probably see its one eye. You might've mistaken it for another star or something. The eye's orange-ish red and evil-looking and it’s crying liquid fire,” Annie rattled off the Dragon’s appearance absent-mindedly.

“That sounds… even less probable.”

“You guys literally just watched me talk to a mountain and make steps build themselves from the side of a cliff,” Annie huffed, “I’m not messing around.”

The astronomers looked at each other without saying anything.

“Did you see me talk to the Moon? And then see it go up to the heavens? That’s because I asked it to,” Annie tried again to convince them, “I’ve talked to Ophireon himself. He told the Moon and all the rocks and mountains in the world to help me out. We need to stop the Dragon. So look, you can either listen to me right now or tonight, you can go back to your fancy little lab and take a look in the night sky for yourself. Whatever you decide, you guys gotta hurry your nerdy butts up.”

The astronomers looked at each other once more. Then the one that had first spoken, the one with wild grey hair, said, “We’ll take a look tonight.”

.

.

.

What did it mean to look up at the stars?

When the astronomers chose the great mountain at the very eastern tip of the world to build their observatory, they had done it with pragmatism in mind. It was the highest place in the world, and so it was naturally a good vantage point from which to observe the heavens.

But climbing up to that mountain, the astronomers couldn’t help but notice that it became steadily colder the further up they went. Even though at the base of the mountain, it might have been a hot and humid summer day, their observatory was surrounded by snow and ice.

Then they looked up.

The heavens and the multicolored night sky and the stars were all so far away. Looking up was a fundamentally human experience. Wondering at the impossible distance of the stars and the comets humbled even the most haughty. And if climbing up the mountain was any indication, the higher up you went the colder you went. The summit of the heavens, then, must have been an inhumanly frigid place. So cold that nothing could possibly live. The home of the stars was a place of infinite chill. The night sky was built on a scale so large that humanity might as well not have existed.

Looking up to the sky brought humans back down to earth.

But those were ordinary people. Astronomers saw something else. Where ordinary people saw cosmic indifference, astronomers saw hope and endless potential. They built their telescopes and their silly little machines and worked little bits of mechanical magic to study space because they saw humanity's future in the stars.

Maybe not their children. Maybe not their children’s children. Maybe not for a hundred generations. But one day, they saw their descendants scaling the heavens. The night sky was art, painted by the goddess Asteria at the very beginning of creation. One day, their children’s children’s children’s children would be able to walk in that grand divine art gallery and shiver at the incomparable beauty of the night.

And then the astronomers' telescopes followed where Annie’s fingers were pointing and they watched in horror as the Dragon chomped on the western part of the sky.

“Will you help me now?” Annie crossed her arms.