Claudia fell through darkness. She fell through vast oceans filled with glowing, ethereal beings. She fell beyond the reach of their tendrils as they brushed the edges of her dislocated lights. She fell through lakes of light, fire which did not burn. She fell through pockets of frigid air and great caverns of ice.

At last she fell into a wide open space, a spherical cavern broader than the horizon of the world above.

Suspended in this space, like a moon within the inky cosmos, lay an enormous tangle of leaves and twisting vines. It looked almost like a tree, though one curled impossibly over and upon itself, boughs and roots knotted together like the legs of a dead spider. A rainbow of colours winked between the vines, and great winged, snaking creatures of light encircled it in lazy, floating spirals.

They glittered in the dark of the encompassing space, a burning carnival of strange life casting rippling glimmers across the obsidian walls of the cavern. Small clouds of hazy mist drifted in a swirling orbit, through which the swimming lights of spirit creatures ghosted like lanterns in a winter fog.

Claudia hurtled towards this strange place, a comet of streaming lights through the black.

Instead of halting, as Claudia expected, upon impact with leafy vines, her path merely slowed as her lights spilled through small gaps and hollows, melting between the twisting joins of root and stem.

Pressed at last through and beyond the vines, Claudia’s lights pattered like glittering rain, pooling in the hollows at the base of an impossibly large tree trunk.

She felt... small. Scattered. Confused. She couldn’t quite recall where she had come from, where she was going, why she had come to rest here in this cradle of mossy roots.

The world around her was cool, misty, soothing. Above and behind her, the rough-barked trunk of the vast tree stretched on and on, up almost beyond the range of Claudia’s sight. The distant forms of leaves and branching boughs smeared together, like paint laid roughly to page.

Before her, wild flowers bloomed across the soft slopes of earthy fields, away into the far distance where the curve of roots and vines erupted to enclose this small world, themselves pocked with the glow of lichen, caps, and blooms. The blossoms swayed, glowing with their own sparkling light, illuminating everything in perpetual dusk.

There were certainly worse places to rest, Claudia mused as her mind drifted, and she lost the will for thought.

Claudia woke to the gentle hum of a young girl. Had she been dreaming? Had she even been truly asleep? Claudia wasn’t sure.

The girl’s hair was a luminous cloud of pale pink and sunrise lights. She held flowers in her hand.

“New lights!” the girl exclaimed. “Oh, they are so very pretty.” The girl began to plant her flowers, touching the stems to the earth where the flowers took root and began to bloom. Dusting her hands together, the girl approached Claudia where she rested still in the shadow of lichen-speckled roots.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

“What do we have now...” the girl whispered as she tenderly brushed her hand through Claudia’s colours. The touch fizzed and crackled, snapping with power through Claudia’s lights. She tried to shrink back, but could not move.

“Oh, no need for fear, fallen star, I mean no harm. You’ll see.” With glee, the girl continued probing. “Curious, yes. And passionate. Playful... Your spirits are so fresh, so bright. You must have been so very young. I’m sorry.”

Claudia thought it strange that a child who seemed no older than eight would lament Claudia’s own youth.

“You are scattered... Of course, yes, you are now, divested of your heart as you were by Asphodel. Did you see him? Yes, a glimpse when you fell... He is strangely mercenary for a poet. Did you ever meet Aster? I do miss him so...”

The girl chattered idle nonsense as she rifled through Claudia’s essences, like a child through a toybox.

“But no, you do not have the feel of him about you... Nor Hellebore, which is for the best, truly. Betrayer. Poisoner. Jailer. And yet she dares cloak herself in daisies... They all call themselves after flowers, you see. I suppose it’s charming. I watch them in my dreams, though they do not see me. I send my dreams to them, yet they do not heed...”

The girl sighed, though her demeanour brightened as she touched a golden fleck, her attention on Claudia once more.

“Scattered, scattered... So scattered to the breeze of your own whimsy... a child of ideas, following your many desires, so very many interests. Yes, your spirits are exquisite. So alive with passion. But there is pain... so much doubt and shame...”

Claudia recoiled as the strange girl’s touch brushed against a pale lavender light.

Claudia was suddenly consumed by a memory. She was young. Six years old. Claudia had snuck into Francine’s room and had stolen away a copper crucible for her own childish games, a play-act of alchemy. Francine had been furious when Claudia returned it filled with burnt flowers, melted wax, and hard pebbles that had scratched the crucible’s gleaming surface. Claudia hadn’t understood what she had done wrong, and had hidden in the garden for hours after.

The memory faded, and Claudia once more gazed on the strange girl before her, an ageless sort of intelligence gleaming in her storm-grey eyes.

“You craved the purpose of your sister, yet the freedom of your own destiny. You were caught, suspended in the web of your own doubt, unable to commit to either path... Even now, this causes you grief.” The girl rested on her haunches, hands on her knees, as she regarded Claudia with a cold sort of thoughtfulness.

“So uncertain, always so very unsure, yet certainty you crave. I can give you this. Yes, and I shall.” The girl nodded and reached forth to pluck away the lavender light. Claudia felt a hollow sort of lightness then, where the colour had been. A relief. A fear. Claudia sensed that something precious had been taken from her.

The girl cradled the liquid fragment of light to her chest and hummed. The light shifted, changing. The belled shape of a foxglove emerged, and the girl placed it in the ground beside her.

“There! Isn’t that so much better!”

Claudia watched as the foxglove settled into the soil, blooming with a forlorn sort of light. The girl reached forward again, plucking more lights.

No! Claudia’s lights flared in protest. Those are my colours, my memories... Mother... Father... Francine!... mine... She wanted to scream in the face of this strange, powerful child. But she had no voice.

“Hush now, fallen starbeam, soon your pains will all be gone. I’ll keep you safe here in my garden, and you’ll bloom forever in the shape of stars… It has been so very long since I’ve seen true stars… Oh this, now this one I may just add to the scales of my youngest dragon...”

No... Claudia could do nothing as her lights were wrought to blooms, further scattered to the strange girl’s own whims.

Claudia dreamed of flowers. Immortal fields of pansies and carnations, hyacinths and poppies, lilies, lavender, marigolds, and moonflowers. She swayed with them in the breezeless air and slept.