There was once a rock in the middle of the Star Sea. In a remote region of Gamma-Theraviel Void of Cassiopeia Superocean, lay the Badger's Rock. It was an uninteresting rock made of worthless greenish-gold stone.

Nobody wants this rock. This inconsequential rock of unremarkable igneous rock does not attract any customer. In the middle of a large void far away from any shipping routes and parsecs away from the nearest celestial archipelago, it lays alone. It stands in its lonesome in its parcel of the void where nothing ever happens and where nothing ever finds it. Surrounded by an ocean so deep that the waters that surround are more black than blue, the rock was a great pillar that jutted from the invisible ocean floor, defiant to the rather placid currents. The air of the void was perpetually calm, so calm that sails and windmills can barely catch any wind.

On this out-of-the-way rock stood a house made of blue-green wood. This is the badger's house, the house of the badger which the island was named after. Its walls were bound by copper nails and wire whilst its roof was tiled with dark slate. It's an old house that had stood enduring in the face of the Gamma-Theraviel Void.

The aforementioned badger lived in this house. She had lived in this house for a very long time. She could not count the passing of years or days because there was no sun to indicate a cycle of day and night. She had no clocks to defer timekeeping to except the biological rhythms that ticks within her.

The badger was stuck on this tiny rock in an unforgiving universe for as long as she could remember being stuck. She could not remember being elsewhere but this little island in middle of the frosty sea. The distant stars beckoned her, taunting her a life of light. Their glow shone faint in the sky as if at any moment, their brilliance may fade without warning. They felt so cold, so far away, that the badger had no hope of stretching her arm far enough to grasp their majesty. She could only imagine the warmth they could be exuding on the rock where their rays had already grown cold by the distance.

In her consolation, there was only one thing that brought her greater hope, a hope that the distant lights of her stellar neighbors were bare: an ancient key. There was no indication that the key was ancient, she only knew, and she trusted her intuition in this regard. The ancient key was a large bronze key, made a dark dull brown by dirt and skin oils. It's design was that of an archetypical medieval key used in cartoons. Small dull-teal patches grew at parts of the key; whether the teal patches were oxidation, weeds, or fungus colonies is uncertain.

Atop the badger's house was a strange contraption. Two pillars made of tree trunks stood erect two meters apart. It was banded with metal bands engraved with magical inscriptions and geometric matrices. Two fake crystals made of melted glass (from the occasional bottle that drift by) were fastened atop the pillars by metal spikes.

The entire construction thrummed with excitement... or perhaps that's just the badger's heart hammering, giving the illusion of thrumming. There was great significance in the construction. She decorated the pillars with friezes of constellations and various mythical figures of badger-kind; the designs were made to emulate the style of the ancient key. The creation that stood before her resonated with her spirit, echoing alongside her sense of satisfaction.

The badger held the ancient key forward, in the space between the two wooden pillars. She held it solemnly and religiously. The key in her hand quivered as if beheld by strange magic. Electricity flowed in the pillars, going up to the crystals atop and casted signals to the void.

Her hands quivered harder as the magic did their work. Tension filled the air, made it tingle with excitement and anticipation. A fire was burning inside the badger's heart and behind her eyes. She was finally going to leave the accursed island, the island that she was condemned to dwell upon without resources and escape, surrounded by a vast sea devoid of abundant life. The emaciated form under the coat of wild black and white shook at the very thought of existence outside the rock, beyond the gate.

The ancient key in her hand shook intensely. She held on to the ancient key for many minutes, waiting for the event. The air was filled with electric excitement that made her body shake with anticipation. The ancient key shook...

And shook...

And shook...

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Sending pulses of imperceptible electricity up the pillars...

Casting signals to the void...

The ancient key shook...

And nothing.

Nothing happened.

The ancient key fell off the badger's hand. She dropped to her knees as pyres of hope were extinguished in her heart. The key made a dull thunk on the wooden floor. Nothing was happening.

She could feel things happening. She religiously built the gate. She made sure that it was properly built, that its dimensions and designs were apt for hooking onto higher dimensional ledges to allow wormhole generation. She meditated on the physics of it! There should be things happening, but alas, it was all wishful thinking.

Her designs were mere daydreams and her scientific contemplation was a fiction. Her portal had been destined to fail from the very beginning. It was fake, constructed from pseudoscience and desperate hope. The distraction it provided shielded her from sanity-draining loneliness, but it was now over.

The badger sobbed. She was here for so long, she was tired of it. She was tired of perpetual darkness and eternal dampness. The stars judged her unworthy; their light continued to glow dim and gloomy, and none of them came close to pity, berate, or accept her.

The loneliness was getting to her. She was hungry, thirsty, lonely. She needed things, things that weren't on the measly rock that she had made her home. The ritual had siphoned her of energy.

She was tired...

She was tired...

She needed to sleep.

Abandoning the ritual, the badger went downstairs to her bedroom and slipped under her bed. It was a quaint room with a quaint bed made of wood and sawdust. She looked out the window to gaze at the stars for one last time before falling asleep. She sobbed until she fell asleep.

She fell asleep...

A deep sleep...

A deep restful sleep.

Lord knows she needed it. She hadn't had a good one in a while. A comfort it was, but even then, the sleep was for nothing. She knew that she would wake on the same rock she slept on the next day. Sleep could take her away from it, but she could never leave it permanently.

~==*==~

The badger woke up, roused from her sleep by her instinct. She tentatively extracted herself from her bed. She stretched her meager muscles as she got ready for her morning activities.

She sighed as she looked out the window to gaze upon the pacific waters of the void sea. She saw an expansive plateau of sun-parched ground. Small weeds grew from the cracks while small hardy creatures scampered across the dust. As she breathed, she witnessed tiny short-lived dust devils twist into existence and die before her eyes.

She realized something was amiss. Some sort of light source was overpowering her sconces. The light filtering through the window was filling the room with warm buttery light, a light that she had never felt before in the longest time on the desolate rock.

Exiting the bedroom, the badger rushed up the stairs to the rooftop. Something was weird. Something queer was going on. She had to see more. The thumps of her steps harmonized with the beat of her heart.

Stepping into the open air rooftop, she gazed upon the vista that stretched around her. Instead of an endless sea of dark water, she saw an expanse of dusty pale orange earth bathed in the warm rays of the overhead sun. Speaking of the sun, she turned her head upwards and examined the spread of bright blue firmament. She saw glittering clouds drifting peacefully across the sky, carrying newborn stars in their embrace.

Beside them all, a glowing object attracted the attention of the badger. It glowed so bright in the sky above that it made all the other lights appear feeble. The star above shone with such great intensity that its bright rays tinged the sky above with a cheerful pale blue. It was beautiful. Bathed in its light, the badger felt her body warm up, warmer than it could be in the cold desolate void.

The badger fell to her knees admiring the lights above. Unlike what she could on the rock in the middle of a void, the stellar lights above appeared so close, so near, she felt she could touch them just by stretching her arms up to them.

She fell over. Tears flowed out her eyes. Lying on the floor, she saw the ancient key between the two pillars. The floor beneath key was charred black by some sort of discharge. The wooden pillars that reach for the skies beside it were riddled with a spiderweb of black scars as if it had been struck by lightning. The black scar stretched from where the key was to the tippy tops of the pillars where laid two shattered crystals.

Gathering up some strength, she stood up to inspect the place she found her house and herself in. As far as she could see, the dry dusty pale orange land stretched as far as the horizon, but even if it couldn't be seen, the badger was confident that the edge of land wasn't too far (not on the scale of light years at least). She was confident that the shores of the Star Sea would only be a few kilometers away.

Looking down the side of the house, she found that her house stood upon the cliff of a deep crevasse. Down at the bottom of the crack, the badger could spy a small river flowing through. Tracking the crack with her eye, she found that the crevasse her house happened to stand beside stretch far into the distance in opposite directions.

The badger was happy. She was now somewhere else. She could go somewhere else now if she wanted to.

The stars above and below had blest her. It was a great blessing. She wasn't stuck to a rock with not enough space to go anywhere in the middle of an unpopulated void.

The celestial bodies in place in the sky felt so near that she could touch them.

Maybe she could.

Maybe she really would.