Lily blinked and it was night time. The lights were off, and the light of the moon showed through the sliding glass doors on the far wall. They didn’t seem to be shattered. That was good. Star was nosing at her leg and whining. Lily let out a low groan, and sat the rest of the way up. She’d been slumped against the kitchen cabinets for who knows how long. Her head was pounding. A cold sweat covered her body. She felt like she was going to puke. She couldn’t think through the feeling of cotton on the inside of her skull.

“Ugh. I-I’m alive. Star. Star. I’m okay. Well, not okay. I’m here. It’s okay. Good boy.”

She reached out and patted Star with her good hand. Her arm felt like it was made of lead.

“Oh god. This is really not good. I’m alive though. I’m here. How do I recover from this?”

Before anything else, Lily needed water. She tried to think about how to get some in her current state. She wasn’t sure she could stand. She didn’t want to risk passing out again.

Where had she left the water? Bottles of water…? Oh. She remembered seeing a few in the fridge. They weren’t any she had brought, but that would do. If she couldn’t reach them the only other thing she could think of was Star’s bowl, and Lily would rather not if she could avoid it.

She slid herself carefully to the fridge. Star was still trying to help, but being a puppy he was more obstructive than anything. Running around her in circles and whining. But, somehow she appreciated not being alone, even if it wasn’t helpful. Carefully using her good hand she opened the fridge. The air felt so cold on her clammy skin, but she grabbed three bottles of water before closing it. She also noticed that her makeshift bandage was absolutely soaked with blood, but tried not to think about it right now.

She carefully placed a bottle between her thighs and opened it with her good hand. It splashed her a little, but she got it. Her instincts were to down the water bottle right away, but she knew that if she ended up throwing it up she’d have bigger problems. So, she carefully sipped at it. Then she turned her attention to Star.

“Good boy. Hey. Hey. It’s alright. Stop whining. I’m fine, see? Just a little severe blood loss. You’re good. How did you know the spell was going to do that?”

Did dogs just have a naturally better magic sense? Or, was it due to the anomaly from where she found him? Questions for later. For now, she just wanted to reassure him, and figure out what else she needed to do to recover. She shuffled around until she could reach her phone in her pocket, and she opened google. Time to do some research. When she recovered from this she was definitely going to do a lot of first aid prep.

Google had been less than helpful. The top answers told her to go to a hospital and get a blood transfusion. Well, that wasn’t going to happen. Results other than that mostly told her to drink plenty of water, eat what she could, and it would take several weeks for her to be back to 100%. But, it did seem likely that even if she was dealing with some light anemia for a few weeks it would only take a little while for her to be functional at all again.

That was good. She couldn’t afford to be unable to do anything at all for a few weeks. She would have to take it easier than she had been lately for a bit though. She had gotten through two of the three bottles of water already, and was feeling a little better.

She had also dragged herself halfway to the couch by inching along whenever she felt like she could. So, now that her phone was off she was sitting in the middle of her living room. The big sliding glass door was directly in front of her. She could see some chickens sleeping outside in the moonlight, and the ocean.

But with all the lights off and only this very clear view of the water and sky, the blackness of the night sky was unnerving. Still, tonight she had no choice but to sit here for a while. So, it was as good a time as any.

She looked to the sky. Pitch blackness. The stars really were gone. It wasn’t an illusion, or anything like that. She had kept hoping, in some naive part of her heart, that it would turn out that way. But, no. They were gone.

She didn’t think that she just couldn’t see them either. Somehow, she was certain. They were gone. Just, gone. Like they’d never been there. She was on her single lonely planet in an empty universe. The sun, the moon, and the earth. The earth with only her on it.

She pushed down the rising panic. No. She was confronting reality now. Panic and madness could wait. If she was going to blip out of existence like everything else she probably would have by now, and there was nothing she could do anyway.

This was like a special hell designed just for her. A girl terrified of wide open empty spaces. Well, and other people. So she supposed maybe she had traded one for the other. Still. The thought that there was just nothing in the entire universe other than her was beyond scary. Her mind couldn’t wrap around how tiny it made her feel.

Maybe it was the blood loss, she felt too tired right now to fully panic. So, she just thought about it. Star being here helped too. She was running her good hand through his fur. He seemed to have tired himself out fussing over her all day, and now that she was seeming alive he was passed out against her thigh.

The stars were gone. What did that mean? Physics wasn’t falling apart. She wasn’t sure what would happen normally if all the stars disappeared, but she was pretty sure it would be… something. Her uneducated guess was that without the gravity of the entire universe pulling all the matter here in every different direction her little single world solar system would be collapsing in on itself. She didn’t know enough about astronomy and physics to really know for sure.

That wasn’t happening. That meant that there was a different prevailing rule. She didn’t like considering this option, but what about god? Vanishing everyone but her, granting her hints about how to survive, erasing the stars themselves, and spawning in a boat when she needed it? God playing a cosmic game of Humans & Houses with her as a player character? She almost laughed at that.

No. She didn’t think so. Not really. What would be the purpose? To make her suffer? Because he/she/it loved her and wanted to focus? No. Nothing really seemed to fit. It felt too arbitrary to be a god. It didn’t really feel like a natural process either. It was too targeted for that. No matter what natural process existed, singling her out among all the universe was too unlikely.

Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

So, by process of elimination… Her prevailing theory was that someone was doing this? That didn’t quite add up either. Although it seemed more likely than the other two options. A god choosing her for this seemed unlikely. After all, if you created all of creation, why her? It came down to the same issue as the natural idea. But, if you thought about it as a person unaffiliated with the universe at large choosing to fuck with her… Well, that sounded like something a person would do. People were awful like that.

Still, she felt like she was jumping to conclusions. If a person was doing this to her specifically, why? Also, wouldn’t they have helped when she nearly killed herself just earlier today?

Maybe they had. She was unconscious for a long time. A paranoid voice in the back of her head whispered to her.

No. No no no. Down that train of thought lay madness. She couldn’t think like that, or she’d really lose it. Seeing her mysterious influencer around every strange event and corner she couldn’t see around.

Someone was helping her, sometimes. She was pretty sure of that at this point. But, ascribing everything that had happened to them just seemed wrong. It also didn’t really add up. Why would someone like that help her but just a little bit? Why would they leave the message ‘Beloved Lily’? Why would they call her beautiful and other sweet things through phone messages?

No, if someone like that were powerful enough to erase the stars themselves, she felt like they would have done more to help her.

So, maybe two people? She felt like she was onto something. But she didn’t really have evidence for even one person. Not really. But, she would be looking for ways to test her theory moving forward. She would try her hardest to disprove this idea, and if it held up to scrutiny she would have more evidence to work with. Okay. For now, the one who had erased everyone and all the stars was Entity A. The one who had been helping her was Entity B. Simple enough, right?

In the meantime what about the stars? Well. It was scary, but there was nothing Lily could really do about it. So… She guessed she would just try not to think too hard about it. Like she had been.

“Hah. I really am a very simple person. Just don’t think about it. Yeah Lily, that’s healthy. I’m sure that will be good for you long term.”

Star stirred a little bit at the sound of her voice. She reached over and petted him.

“Okay little buddy. We’re moving to the couch. I think I can make it.”

She had finished her third bottle of water, and was feeling a fair bit better. Not good by any stretch of the imagination, but she was no longer concerned that she was going to pass out and die. So, that was something.

Lily managed to stand up and take the ten or so steps to the couch before plopping down on it. A bit of fluff huffed into the air when she threw herself onto it. Oh yeah. The couch was sliced up.

She took a moment to examine the damage closely for the first time. It really was like one giant horizontal slice had been taken out of the couch. It was on the height level of the coffee table, so just above the cushions. It must have exploded out from the paper itself.

None of the spell circle papers were still on the table, and the table itself… It had a huge crack in it. Like someone had swung a sledgehammer down right where the paper had been. There were also a few points around the table area and even on the ceiling that looked like they’d been hit with some kind of magical shrapnel. Lily’s mental image was that the spell popped like a balloon, and the shockwave had done a lot of damage in a pretty predictable area, but the pieces of rubber went a little all over the place. She could clearly see where her hand had been, and that seemed to be what had struck her.

“Honestly, I’m just lucky it got my hand. A chest or head wound like that probably would have killed me…”

Well, with nothing else to do she turned on the TV. TV had always been a comfort for her. She liked to have something playing in the background when at all possible. It made her feel less alone. It had in her apartment, and it still did. It also kept her mind from spiraling into dark thoughts as easily, but still let her think about important directed thoughts.

Now she had more media too! So, she opened her comedy section and just put it on shuffle. Random episodes of comedy shows would play. Perfect. The Simpsons came right up. That would do.

“Okay, magical theory time.”

Star was looking at the TV with interest, and settling down onto the couch next to her.

What had happened with the spells though? Well, the basic idea seemed obvious. She had left the spell gathering mana for hours, and then it had exploded. So, mana had a point where it would just explode if gathered in enough quantity? That was one explanation. She tried to think of a few more. It was never good to only have one idea. What if it had reacted to something she did? She had put her hand into it before it had gone off. Maybe she disrupted it somehow in a way that she hadn’t the other times she’d done that?

Or, was it possible it was her spell circle? Maybe it wasn’t a matter of gathering too much mana in general. Maybe it was that her spell circle had a limit that it could take, and she had exceeded it?

She’d have to do more testing. Although, she was a little frightened. She would have to be a lot, lot more careful moving forward. On the plus side, this was a pretty easy problem to avoid. She’d done the magical equivalent of leaving her stove on. All she had to do was use the mana she gathered rather than letting it build and build and build, and she wouldn’t hit an explosion like this again as easily.

But, even if that was the case, she decided that she was going to be more careful around circles in general until she knew what she was doing. Hold on.

For a moment, Lily felt like she was having double vision. Her internal model of herself wasn’t lining up with her own actions. Why wasn’t she more afraid? Normally she wouldn’t already be thinking of trying this again, she was sure.

Hell, normally she was sure her reaction would be “Well, I’m never touching magic again!”

Why wasn’t she feeling like that? Personal growth? That didn’t really seem to fit exactly. It had only been a few days.

“Hah, emotional stretch marks.”

Her mind was starting to get a little fuzzy now that she was relaxing on a couch. She took another look at her bandaged hand. The bandage was soaked through, but… not dripping. That was a good sign. Tomorrow, when doing so wouldn't result in further injury, she would have to remove it, clean it, and redress it

But that was a problem for when she woke up. Lily yawned. She was still in a huge amount of pain. But, she’d had hours to get used to it. She was beyond tired, and was pretty sure she wouldn’t make it to the bathrooms to look around for painkillers. Hers were on the boat, and she wasn’t chancing walking down the dock and up the ramp in this state. If she fell in the water that would be it. So, there was nothing to do but try to bear it.

She had been in this position before, so it was nothing new. Toothaches where she’d been too scared to leave her apartment and go to the dentist, for one. Earlier in her life too… She remembered one distinct moment. Locked in a dark room with a broken bone for days. That was a bad memory. She pushed it away.

Star pawed at her to get her attention, snapping her out of it. She smiled down at him, and somehow felt he could tell it was fake.

“You’re a very good boy. I’m keeping you. You saved my life and have earned your place in my kingdom. You’ll be knighted soon, good Sir Star.”

She giggled to herself, and it was real this time.

“I know you don’t understand, but thank you. Thank you so much. We’re gonna have a great time together okay? I’m gonna fuck up taking care of you so badly, but I promise I’ll do my best. Is that okay?”

Star’s tail wagged happily. Lily hugged him gently with her good arm. Then she settled down to watch TV until she could fall asleep through the pain. It didn’t take long.