“Hey, wake up! Wake up!”, a silvery voice was calling from the darkness. 

The man opened his eyes and looked around.  Although he was dressed in a formal dark robe worn by Japanese academics in the Asuka-era, both his hair and clothing were tattered and drenched. 

“Hey, your stars will wait forever but this won’t!” the same voice was urging. 

The man looked up to a young girl with deep amber eyes, ringed with charcoal to form perfect almond shapes. A piece of thin golden headwear with arrowhead and bee carvings common to the people of Anatolia and the Hittite empire crowned her equally golden hair, trimmed at shoulder length. 

She was nudging her perfectly chiseled chin into the distance in which they could observe flickering lights of all colours and strengths, slowly rising and disappearing one by one out of their sight. Each of these lights were a life. Lives which had been called an end to, and were returning to where they came from. 

He recognised one of them, a small wavering dot, shining in a dim green tone. 

“We missed it. He must have passed in his sleep”, the girl whispered. 

The man nodded. There was no reason to whisper here. Nobody could hear them here, cut off from the rest of the universe. Yet somehow, no matter how many times they witnessed the passing of a life they had been following, this moment made them solemn. 

With a final flicker, the light disappeared. 

“The life ended, and we are still here”, he turned to the girl. “I’ve won the bet, and hence we are no longer dating.”

The girl half laughed in response. 

“That makes you my ex, exex, exexex and my exexexex….ha…haha…” 

“If I may remind you. My culture does not compliment the tradition of courting fifteen-year-olds.”

“If I may remind you. I was technically born two thousand years before you.”

She might have shrugged her shoulders if she had had the means to do so but peculiarly, this girl was lacking her entire body from her neck downwards, leaving just her beautiful head floating in the darkness. In fact, the man who retained a complete but dripping body was also sitting cross-legged in mid-air. 

It had been exactly 1267 years ago that, as the royal observatory gained political influence in the imperial capital of Asuka, the astronomy scholar and advisor Soujirou had been framed of fraud and expelled from his post. In the heat of despair, he had leapt to his death in the city’s waterways. 

Yet, fate played games. Or perhaps, the universe had simply forgotten to check the records. 

After sinking to the depths, Soujirou had found himself simply wading the skies, which had led him to meet Hati, the one other soul befallen by the same fate. 

Hati was an Egyptian,  sold to the Hittite empire in the fifteenth century BC for her light complexion, not uncommon in Egypt but high in demand further East. Being a cheap alternative to European slaves, she had been lucky to be adopted by a merchant who wanted a child, rather than a slave. 

“Hey”, the vibrant yet incredibly old voice pulled him back to the present. Though under these circumstances, time and place were as fleeting as the lights of life they saw each second.

“Hey, gloomy star watcher, it’s your turn to choose the next bet.”

“ah…mmm…. It’s my turn to bet on us being collected isn’t it… Why don’t we move further north this time.”

“Ooh, we’re over Russia now, we might get shot down!”

“I have heard that joke exactly the same number of times as the years I have known you. Let’s go a bit further.”

“Okay. One, you should show some gratitude I only say it once a year and two, there are literally no humans out here, only ice”

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“No, follow me, look there”

The man was now perched on a branch, the girl’s head hovering next to his. Below them, on the shores of a frozen lake in Siberia, a hunter was skinning a weasel, a four- or five-year-old girl watching curiously over his hands. 

“That one” 

“Which one?”

“You know”

“She’s so young! You’re just trying to improve your chances of winning”, the beautiful face pouted. 

He shrugged. “How many years did you have left when you were five?”

Hati had died due to illness at this tender age of fifteen, the day before meeting her suitor. Her remorse had continued into her afterlife, making her insist on dating the only other human with whom she could converse - if they could still be called humans.

“It’s fine”, she said. “I bet when that girl’s life ends, we will still be here.”

“Okay, I bet we will be called to where the other lights go, before the girl’s life ends.”

“And if I win, you become my boyfriend.”

“As usual, that is distasteful modern tongue. I would prefer you called me your suitor.”

“This is why nerds are a bore.”

“Another loathsome modern expression. Please. Refer to me as being academic.”

And so, as their idle conversation idled on, they watched the sun go down, reflecting orange against all the millions of crystals of the snow swept planes of Siberia. Then they looked on silently as night fell and a Eurasian Eagle-Owl landed on the next tree. 

Days and nights came and went as they stayed on the branch until one day, the snow began to melt and the days rapidly grew longer preparing for a short yet beautiful summer. 

Then it was winter again. Then it was summer. 

As the fifth summer came by, the hunter’s daughter noticed that there was one tree on the lake’s shore under which more flowers grew. Here she caught a few more weasels than elsewhere on her father’s hunting ground. The next winter, she noticed one branch in the tree which the snow did not settle on. She gave the tree a name and called it a friend.

As the years passed by, the girl stopped visiting the tree as frequently. Having neither mother nor siblings, she followed her father into the wilderness, away from the village, returning weeks later with a sleigh piled high with meat and pelts. 

At twelve, her father gave her a rifle and a pup – she trained the pup well and at fifteen, shot her first brown bear. For the first time in a year and a half, she visited the tree to show the pelt. It was magnificent – large, thick, even and smooth – it would sell for enough money to survive six weeks. She thought she heard the tree whisper to her – “well done, we’re proud of you” – but it was just the wind. 

Shortly after this, her father slipped and fell from an icy cliff, breaking both legs and injuring his back. He would never venture far out again. From the next season, the girl was no longer the hunter's daughter. She was an independent, fully fledged hunter. Her father asked her if she would not prefer to marry and settle in the village, but she chose the mountains. As other girls her age started families, she waited out storms in the cranny of a cliffside, tracked an arctic fox for weeks in the coldest season, to obtain the finest of pelts. 

When her father died, she buried him beneath the tree by the lake and sold the small house on the outskirt of the settlement. It was not even worth a third of the bear pelts she made her living on. The people respected her as they did all hunters who took to the wilderness, yet still kept their distance. She lived with the nature, not with humans. 

“You know” Hati said to Soujirou, one winter day after a storm had cleared. “I think you chose a good life”

“Really”

“It’s a nice view”

“I know”

“And… I’ve never felt so noticed in someone’s life before. Her final day deserves a beautiful sky like this.”

That day, the hunter they had watched since she could barely walk had taken shelter from the storm in a hibernating bear’s den, following both common belief and her own experience that bears did not attack those who entered their den. But one exception was enough. She had been forty-six, lived longer than most traditional trackers. An end befitting of a hunter. 

Out here, miles apart from any civilisation, the observers had a clear view of a single soul, so bright it was visible against the crisp blue sky. It was the sharpest, whitest, and strongest light they had seen in all their long lives. 

“And we are still here, looking at this lake”, the Egyptian girl said. 

“You win the bet”

“And now finally, we are an item again”

The man simply nodded with a straight face, as they both stared out onto the frozen lake, the same lake they had first met the hunter and his daughter. 

“Hey, when was the last time you called my name?” she asked. 

“Must have been about a hundred years ago… remember that time you were so immersed in watching Edison build a lamp that you didn’t hear me talking to you?”

“I remember, it was also the last time I called yours”, the girl smiled reminiscently.

“Soujirou, will you do me a favour and say it for me again?”

After a short pause, the honey coloured eyes locking with his black ones, the man raised his hands, as if to cup the girl’s head, despite this not being possible. 

“Hati”, he said with a gentle smile. “There will be plenty of opportunities for me to say your name, even without you worrying about it. After all, we are spending eternity together.”

“It’s time for our next bet”

* * *