Chuckling softly, I pressed my fingers together and looked down at my hands. “I imagine you’re asking because you want to know the tale of how the great plague was finally vanquished. Considering the era you are from, it’s natural you’d be so concerned with it, just as it’s natural for a person to seek closure.” I sighed. “I’ll tell you, but, let me warn you, I’m almost certain it’s not going to be what you expect.”

“I’d rather see it for myself,” Yuta said.

I glanced at Andalon, who nodded encouragingly, before I told Yuta what he wanted to know.

“I’m sorry to disappoint you, but… there is no grand tale to tell. The vaccine was discovered by accident, thanks to a young man’s carelessness. A physician—Lennard Ulster—was conducting experiments, infecting chickens with darkpox, using extracts from the infected chickens’ spleens to keep the experiments going. Dr. Ulster’s young assistant accidentally left one of the puréed spleen samples out to dry, and when they used it on a chicken, the chicken barely suffered any illness. It wasn’t long before they’d discovered it was immune to darkpox altogether. But for that accident, who knows how long it would have been before the secret was discovered, and how many millions more would have died in the interim.”

Yuta’s face turned expressionless after that.

He did not speak for a while, to the point that even Andalon began looking at him with concern.

“Is everything alright?” I asked.

As he replied to me, Lord Uramaru stared off into the distance, lost in contemplation. “It is not fair,” he said, softly.

I sighed. “I know,” I said.

“No,” he answered, “you do not. When every day is a struggle to survive, when food, shelter, and peace are alien to most men, there is no time or place for happy accidents. There is no room to explore and contemplate.” He shook his head. “I should know, I’ve certainly tried. But it’s difficult. It’s very, very difficult.” He looked me in the eyes. “Dr. Howle, I made my livelihood on the field of battle. War is a friend I wished I never knew. Battlefields are mankind’s most worthless creations. How can anything ever change for the better when we waste so many days and lives slaughtering each other. And now, you tell me these things, these horrible, beautiful things. It is a cruel poem: those who suffer the most will never be able to save themselves, because their eyes are blinded by pain and blood.” He sighed. “I’d ask what your era has learned of the stars in heaven,” he added, “but Horosha told me they aren’t a part of your night sky.”

Now it was my turn to stare at him in shock.

He knew about stars.

I stared at Yuta with an intensity that shocked all three of us. “You know about stars?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said, “I—”

“—Can I see them?” I asked.

“How would you…” Yuta furrowed his brow. “…how would that work?”

“I’d step into your memories. We could see it together.”

Excitement curled in the corner of Yuta’s lip. “I can see the observatory again?” he asked.

“I don’t know what that is,” I said, “but… yes.”

He nodded resolutely. “Do whatever you have to do.”

So I did.

Leaning toward him, I placed my hands on Yuta’s shoulders and then, with a gentle tug, pulled him apart, splitting his body down the middle. Dazzling, multicolored sensory curtains filled the widening gap and swelled out, engulfing us all. A moment later, we promptly found ourselves elsewhere.

No, not just elsewhere. Elsewhen.

Andalon and I stood on a wooden veranda, in the old Munine style, facing a wooden building with a steep, pitched rooftop. Beneath the overhanging eaves stood lightly built walls of wood and translucent white paper, illuminated by paper lanterns hanging from underneath the roof. The building had a wood-paneled tower jutting out from its side. The tower was capped in a dome-shaped roof.

I’d never seen anything like it before.

“What is it, Mr. Genneth?” Andalon asked. “Are you lookin’ for something?”

Slowly, I stepped around the corner and peered over the veranda. “This… this is incredible,” I said.

It was hard not to gasp as I took in the view.

We had just time-traveled, after all—even if only by proxy.

We were in a small multi-building compound, built atop a tall hill. A fortifying wall of interlocked stones girdled around the hill, several yards down. Beyond that, down the long, shallow slope, I could see bonfires shining in a distant settlement. About halfway up the hillside, in between the town in the foothills and the observatory—as Yuta had called it—was another multi-building complex, again of Munine make. It was like an island of light. It was larger than the observatory, and far more heavily fortified, with two tiers of walls.

The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

It even had a watchtower.

“Daikenja be praised!” Yuta said. “I’d never thought I’d see this place again.”

Turning, I saw Yuta standing not far from us. For the first time since I’d met him, he seemed genuinely at ease, as if a burden had been lifted from his shoulders.

“You wanted to know what stars are?” he said. “Look up, Dr. Howle. See them for yourself!”

So I did.

There are points in a person’s life past which there is no returning. This was one of them.

I don’t know how to describe my reaction other than to call it a religious experience. I think it might be more accurate to call it an experience which others might have called religious. After all, all matters of faith are ultimately in the eye of the beholder.

And, by the Angel, did I behold.

I didn’t move. I didn’t gasp. I didn’t cower or gape. I just… stared.

Minute lights twinkled in the sky, forming a dome that lit up the darkness from horizon to horizon. It was like a fistful of sand had been thrown onto the face of Night, and gotten stuck there, glistening as they burned. I saw silver and gold in points and swirls. I saw glittering travelers locked in a broad band that spanned the sky like ink-plumes in water. And it stayed like that.

Andalon cooed in delight as she joined me in looking up. “Hi stars!” she said, reaching up to the sky. “Andalon is here!”

For the first time, I think I actually envied her.

“Suisei was right,” I muttered, tightly clenching my fist. “They really are beautiful.”

I closed my eyes, and for a minute, held them shut, and when I opened them back up, the stars were still there.

“Are they always like this?” I asked, in a quiet voice.

“Yeah…” Andalon replied. Her excitement had softened to quiet wonder.

I turned to Yuta. “Every night?” I asked.

He nodded. “Every night.” But then he shook his head. “Well… unless there are clouds, or other inclement weather.”

I swallowed hard.

The Words of Witness said that the Angel had no face, and yet had many eyes. As I looked up, tears trickling down my cheeks, for the first time in my life, I felt as if I could see those eyes.

I must have been twelve or thirteen before I could sleep on moonless nights without having the lights on in the hallway, and a nightlight by my bed. On some nights, even with the lights on, I’d look out the windows and gaze at the black void in the sky and cry and cry. It was as if some part of me knew there was something wrong with all that emptiness, as if something precious had been lost and forgotten, only no one knew what it was.

Now, I finally knew the answer.

Eventually, my terror of the night got so bad that my sister had to sleep beside me in bed. She made up mantras for me to recite to keep the shadows at bay, and, as a kid, I genuinely believed they had magic power. And why wouldn’t I? Dana had made them. And Dana was magic.

Now, I saw a new kind of magic.

All my life, the Night was a sea of black, fit only for the moon to bob in its depths. Standing here, though? That Night was dead to me. It was a falsehood, a lesser creation that paled to what I now beheld.

Like I said, this was like a religious experience for me.

I just wish it hadn’t brought so many disquieting questions.

Why had we been denied this? Was it punishment? Or was it something else?

I felt… robbed. Wronged. All my life, I’d searched for wisdom and understanding, scouring philosophy and scripture, yet always coming up short. But not here. Not here. Here was the wordless completeness that had forever eluded me. It was all around me, numinous and sublime. All I had to do was open my eyes and take it all in.

It was enough of a miracle for me.

I wanted to stare for ages. I didn’t care that my memory recorded every detail with perfect fidelity after just a moment’s gaze. That wasn’t enough. I’d gone a lifetime without this sky overhead. I couldn’t bear to leave it now. It was too soon.

“Come, come, Dr. Howle,” Yuta said, beckoning me with a wave of his hand. He pointed to the dome-roofed tower. “The Observatory awaits!”

For once, Yuta seemed to be at peace and in high spirits, and I didn’t want to be the wet towel that rained on his parade. So, Andalon and I followed him inside his observatory.

I lost track of my melancholy the instant I stepped inside.

I let out a gasp.

The observatory was a rectangular room about twelve feet by twenty-four, with a nearly thirty-foot-tall tower rising up from the ceiling at the far end of the room. That had to be the dome-roofed tower I’d seen from outside. The numbers just came to me, osmosing into my awareness directly from Yuta’s memories.

He really must have been happy to be back here.

A simple, slender ladder lay against the tower wall, though the ladder was little more than backdrop for the long barreled telescope that stood within it, mounted in a stand some fifteen feet tall. About ten feet of telescope spread out in either direction from the stand’s pivot point. The telescope itself was jet black with a silky sheen, courtesy of the lacquering that coated it. Gold filigree inlays on the lacquering depicting herons wading among marshy bamboo groves.

“Whoa…” I whispered.

Yuta’s observatory was a carpenter’s dream. It was wood, wood, and more wood, and all of it was stunning. The place was sumptuously furnished: wood frame walls, cabinets, shelves, low lying tables. Beneath the light of candles flickering on their candlesticks and paper lanterns hanging from the ceiling, the wood’s varnish gleamed like polished stone.

“What is it?” Yuta asked, glancing back at me. Candlelight flickered against his blue haori.

“If I hadn’t known any better,” I said, with a sarcastic chuckle, “I would have said I’d just stepped into a wizard’s tower.”

Yuta furrowed his eyes at me. “There are no such things as wizards.”

“I know,” I replied, “but that’s not what I meant.” I sighed. “It’s a long story.”

To be fair, this observatory wasn’t properly equipped to be a wizard’s tower. For one, it was missing the enchanting table and an alchemy station. I also didn’t hear anything that suggested Yuta had a familiar or two lying about. Still, if you added in the missing utilities and maybe a disgruntled, snarky talking hummingbird as a familiar, it would have done great on the wizards’ real-estate market.

But, the more I looked, the more I realized that, like with the stars, there was a kind of magic here, though not of the usual type. It was the magic of the mind: contemplation, exploration, and elucidation.

Having noticed me looking around, Yuta joined me in gandering at the place.

“It’s just like I left it,” he said, barely above a whisper.