The crescent moons of Cestus VI rested above the darkened peaks of the distant mountain range. The night was clear and cool. A gentle breeze rushed in off the back of the sea, bringing with it a slight chill that made the hairs on my forearm stand to attention.

"It's cold, we should go back," I told my brother as we headed down through the dunes toward the shoreline. It was low tide and we'd been waiting for what seemed like an age for just the right conditions.

Paden was undeterred by the drop in temperature. "Come on, we'll be fine. Hurry or we'll miss it."

He was older than me by two years. For as far back as I could remember, we had lived on Cestus VI. But Paden had memories of another world, a planet of the Inner Realm, that had been home for a short period of time when he was very young. Before I was born. Paden was only ten but he sometimes acted like someone far older, which was one of the reasons he was often given extra responsibility to look after me.

Our mother called it 'an old head on young shoulders' which to my mind conjured gruesome images of old ladies heads atop the bodies of young children.

I had a tendency to take things literally at times.

We reached the rock pools and I followed Paden's lead, hopping from the edge of one black pool of ice-cold water to the other. At the last hurdle, just as I slipped, Paden reached out and took my hand in his. He helped me across to the wet sand on the other side.

"There you go. Told you we'd make it."

"Almost didn't," I answered him back. The surf broke over the sand fifty meters away. There was no risk of it coming in behind us.

My brother rolled his eyes. "Complaining about something that doesn't need complaining about. Like always. Have you looked up yet?"

I hadn't.

I turned my attention to the sky above. The stars had begun to appear in the blue-black firmament, unhindered by so much as a single cloud. A nearby gas giant, its swirling surface dominated by mammoth storms that were blue and red in color, lumbered up from below the horizon to take its place amongst the stars. Paden had described the illuminations to me, but stood on that desolate beach in the dead of night, I realized nothing could have prepared me for such a sight.

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It began as one meteor streaking across the sky, then another. Soon the meteors numbered in their hundreds, then their thousands. All colliding with the atmosphere of Cestus VI and burning up within seconds.

The celestial vision set the horizon ablaze. I felt the chill recede and my breath catch as I took in the shimmering spectacle. Beside me, Paden was just as mesmerized, the light from the blazing meteor shower playing on his features. Our world, Cestus VI, known for its stark landscapes, was momentarily transformed into a tableau of otherworldly beauty.

The iridescent display was mirrored in the rock pools, creating an uncanny tableau of the universe. From my position on the sand, I felt as if I were floating.

Paden, seeing my awestruck face, merely smiled, content in our shared experience. For a moment, under such cosmic beauty, the freezing temperatures didn't matter anymore because I felt warmly embraced by the universe. The cacophony of light up and down was unbelievable in its intensity. So much so that I couldn't tear my eyes away from it.

"Hey, who's that?" Paden asked, looking back the way we'd come.

I managed to quickly look, too.

There was a man further up the beach, at the point we'd exited the sand dunes. He was stood with his arms at his sides, head tilted up as he watched the light show. It was difficult to see who it could be, due to the lack of light and the distance at which he stood apart from us. But his presence there clearly had Paden rattled.

"It's the middle of the night. What's he doing out here?" my brother asked.

I went back to watching the illuminations. I shrugged. "Same thing we are, I guess."

"He's waving us over."

"What?"

"The man over there."

"It's probably someone from town, sent to get us," I said dismissively.

Paden weighed his options. Go to the man, or ignore him in the hope he'd move on. It was possible he was there to tell us something important. Paden decided that the best course of action was to walk back over the rock pools and ask the man what it was he wanted. "I'll be gone for a moment. I need to see what he wants. Don't go anywhere. Do you understand? Stay where you are. Right here."

"Okay, okay, I got it," I said impatiently.

I was too engrossed in what was going on simultaneously above me and in the reflective surfaces of the rock pools, to pay full attention to anything else.

Years later, I would wish that I'd been more attentive in that moment. I'd wish that I'd taken a moment to see my brother's face lit by the shimmering light of the falling meteors. But I was eight years old and at a point in my life when I had not known fear, had not known danger. I had had no concept of loss. Not then.

"Be right back," Paden said, setting off across the rock pools.

I watched him go for a moment, then returned to watching the sky in awe and wonder.

When I looked back across the rock pools, both Paden and the stranger were gone . . .