Sarah was crying.

The night was buzzing around her. Between street light, the noise of cars, the distant murmur of the crowds outside of bars, it felt like everything was so vibrant, so alive around her. Like everyone knew how to handle existing, in a way that she could never quite figure out. Never having to suffer like she always did.

She had just lost her job at the local fast food dinner. In a week or two, she knew, she would lose her apartment. Her tiny, dirty studio, with a shared bathroom on the floor and its screaming neighbors. She would be homeless, broke, starving and desperate.

And she had no one to help her.

Her parents were dead, a long time ago. Her father had died in prison before she could ever remember him, and her mother had died of an overdose when she was 8. Any relative had simply rejected her, had declared not having the time or money for one more mouth to feed, and had simply left her be, at the mercy of the foster system.

She aged out of the system, dropped out of school and ended up working dead-end job, trying to keep her head out of the water. Not well, but she still tried.

It all felt like it amounted to nothing. Absolutely nothing at all. Her life was just emptiness and misery.

What was the point of living, then?

She was sitting on a bench, in a park by a busy boulevard. Any minute now, she just knew, a cop would come quick her out for loitering after dark. She needed to go to her place, maybe start packing her stuff, look into shelter or something-

And that’s when something caught her eyes.

A moth.

Maybe it was a trick brought on by the veil of her tears, but the little creature seemed so much more iridescent than any other she had ever seen. It was as if the night sky had been entrapped in its soft fluttering wings, deep ink pool that seemed to swim with dark blues and purples, delicately painted by a constellation of white, fine dots. She could see the furs around the head of the moth, and it’s antenna, who were a striking cream color compared to the rest of its body. It was simply beautiful. Mesmerizing. She had very little knowledge of insects in general, but there was something here, about the creature, that was just so…. Oddly captivating. Without quite thinking about it, or knowing why, she stood up. Took a few steps.

The moth continued to flutter in the air, right in front of her. As if tempting her, trying to entice her to come forward. Her arm raised itself, and for a wild moment, she had the thought that, if she could reach the little being, she would hold an entire universe in her hands. A flutter of stars and nebula.

The moth was moving away from her. Her feet followed.

She felt her breath catch in her throat. Her worries didn’t seem so intense, so painful, when starring at such starlight. Dimly, she realised she had never seen the actual night sky, free of light pollution, as she had always lived in the city.

The moth was just there. Her arm extended forward, a futile attempt to grasp the infinite. She didn’t realise the ground of the park and shifted under her feet, that she was advancing on pavement.

Light flooded the area. And in those incandescent, powerful headlight, she saw more of the wings of the insects. She saw the galaxy in those wings, slowly moving under her amazed eyes. Just out of reach.

Just out of reach of the car.

She never quite heard the noise. The screeching tires, the honking, the panicked screaming of a poor taxi man and of his two drunk passengers. Her eyes suddenly were taken off the moth, as she too was airborne for a moment, bouncing on a windshield and on the roof of the car. She felt her body break, getting crushed by intense energy, her bones shattering inside of her, the shard of them becoming human shrapnel for her organs.

She didn’t scream. Didn’t make a single sound.

She hit the pavement, her head making a sick sound, like a broken egg. There was no air left in her collapsed ribcage for her to wheeze. The pain and come and went, so fast, as her brain struggled to process her destruction. She couldn’t feel her legs. Somehow, that bothered her more than the pool of blood forming under her. Her vision was darkening around the edge. She realised she was dying.

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As she laid there, and wondered if there would be anyone at her funerals, anyone that would care to remember her, her fading gaze caught movement.

The moth.

It was still fluttering. Still holding a galaxy in its wings. But, seeping into its delicate wings, was also blood. Her own, splattered upon impact.

Sarah Bate died, with that vision of a universe, drenched in her blood. She was 21.

The moth shuddered mid flight, as her soul exited her body. It went in a circle above it, higher and higher, in a fashion that would have been seen as nervous by any observer. But all the people were looking downward, at the dead young woman on the ground, and not at the moth, going higher and higher, the galaxy shining brighter and brighter in its wings, until it’s light englobed the entire little being, indistinguishable from any stars of the sky.

And then the light vanished.

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Sarah wasn’t cold.

Or warm, for the matter. Which was odd, because her studio was usually freezing in the winter, and boiling in the summer. Such were the joy of being broke. But she wasn’t in her apartment, wasn’t she? No.

She was dead.

It was an odd realisation, that didn’t induce panic in her. She remembered the pavement, the car, the light- and yet it all seemed so unimportant at the moment. Her body didn’t hurt. Didn’t feel much, really. Just… Contentement. Peace. It was as if she both existed, and didn’t, at the same time. Nothing seemed to matter. Not time or sensation or space. Just… being. In this perfect blackness, this infinite void.

She kinda enjoyed it.

She was still unsure if her eyes were open or not, if she could see or had eyes left to see, when a light started to grow in front of her. It was a pale light, the color of moonlight, and out of it, a form was slowly emerging. To her great surprised, it was…. A man. But not really.

The man seemed young, possibly younger and shorter that she had been. He had hair a pure snowy white, and a skin that looked… Strangely grey. He was wearing an odd cape, with a rounded edge, that seemed to have swallowed the night sky. The collar of the shirt, which seemed to be an old-fashioned blouse, was made of thick white fur, almost the same color than his hair. But most striking about him, were his huge, disproportionate eyes. They seemed to shine like a mirror, without visible iris or pupils. It was vaguely unnerving. The man, or boy really, advanced toward her, and while his enormous mirror eyes made it hard to read his expression, he still seemed distinctly…. Confused.

“What.” He whispered. His voice truly betrayed his age, and she knew she had a teen in front of her. “Are you”?

Sarah, to her honest surprised, was able to make a sound. She wasn’t sure how, as she still felt like she had no body, but it still resonated between them.

“I’m Sarah. A human” she felt the need to add, as she had the distinct impression that the being in front of her was not one. “Who are you?”

The boy seemed to hesitate, turning around, as if he had expected someone to be behind him, to tell him how he should answer.

“My name is… Dusk. I am a servant of Ira.” He then looked around himself again, as if unsure. “… You aren’t supposed to be here. No one is.”

In many other circumstance, Sarah would have been a bit more worried about being stuck with a teen named dusk in a weird place, but she had finally realised something, and she could not contain her exclamation.

“Your eyes! They are compound eyes, like insect!” It did explain the odd, shimmering effect they had. And the lack of blinking. He starred at her, visibly even more confused, and maybe even a bit frustrated, by her words.

“That’s not important,” he said, impatient. “You came here, but that’s impossible. No one is supposed too, not since Ira disappear. Her realm his closed.” He then gasped, as he starred at her. Strangely, Sarah could feel a glowing light slowly emitting around her non-form, growing by the second. This seemed to urge the moth boy along, as he started to speak urgently. “Ira is missing, and I don’t know why you are here. But you have to help. You have to help me find her.”

As she was feeling the world swim and twirl around her, in a dizzying way, she couldn’t help but ask in a cry: “Who is Ira?” before being swallowed by the light.

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Sarah gasped, her heart racing. Her palm was stinging against the coarse, cold floor, and she scrambled to her knees, wincing as a pebble dug into her flesh.

…. Her flesh. Pain. Vision.

She starred around herself, wide eyed. Around her was a large room, visibly abandoned. Light was streaming in from a hole in the roof, and he vegetation was slowly reclaiming the place. It looked like an old ruin. The wall had faded engraving, and some old broken pieces lying around might have been wooden furniture. In the center of the room, was a large, broken archway of dark stone, that somehow seemed… Dead. It was an odd feeling.

But more important than anything else, was herself.

She was alive.

Alive!

She giggled in joy. Was this heaven? Was this her reward for a life of misery? Well, she would have liked clothes, for a start. She was nude in this room, and it was a bit cold. But just as she was slowly rising to her feet, something caught her eyes.

Fluttering toward the ceiling, was a moth with wings like the night sky. The same one that had made her step into traffic. With the same pattern that had been on the wings of Dusk.

Remembering the boy, the last words he had said before her disappearance echoed in her brain, making her smile fade.

Who is Ira? She had asked.

And the last thing she heard, from a desperate voice, before reappearing here, had been his reply:

The Goddess of the Afterlife