Yuta spent over an hour just showing us the telescope. Unfortunately, because there was only one of it (and him) but two of us—and because I didn’t want to make things any weirder than they already were by trying to duplicate Yuta and or the telescope—Andalon and I took turns looking in his telescope. I’d conjured up a chair for myself to sit in when it wasn’t my turn, and I would have done the same for Andalon, but she managed well enough on her own, floating preternaturally off to the side, which was good, because she had to float up to even reach the telescope’s eyepiece. The thing was located at a point almost twice her height above the floor.

Yuta regaled Andalon with detailed explanations of his star-work—I believe astronomy was the word he used—and though much (if not nearly all) of the information went over Andalon’s head, it was as clear as day that the two were enjoying themselves. Even without the time differential between us, Yuta was older than me. According to his memories, he was in his early fifties when he died. Looking at him effortlessly engaging Andalon without skipping a beat no matter what her (winsome) ditziness threw his way made me feel more than just a little self-conscious about my own abilities as a father. It also hammered home just how tragic his and his family’s deaths were.

If only Andalon could have saved them…

Somewhat to my embarrassment, I found myself getting jealous of Andalon. I got antsier and antsier every time her turn to look at the telescope came around. It was a display worthy of Rayph.

After what felt like forever, it was finally my turn again.

I pressed my face against the telescope’s eyepiece so quickly, I almost bruised my nose.

“Now,” Yuta said, “look here, you should see a—”

“—Fudge, what is that?” I exclaimed.

That referred to the thing I was currently squinting at: a swirly green marble floating out in the depths of the starry night. If I squinted even more, I could just make out what looked like striated bands of green, yellow-green, and turquoise—and maybe some blue, too. The marble wasn’t alone, either. Several small points of light far brighter than any of the background stars were loosely clustered around the marble, though at a distance. Curiously, all of them level with the plane of the marble’s equator.

“It is one of the planets I mentioned before,” Yuta said, emphasizing the word—it was still new to me. “Your people called it Jeron,” he added. “In Munine, it is called Torasei—the Tiger Star.”

“Torasei?” I asked. “Like the Beast God?”

“Yes, exactly,” Yuta explained. “The six Crown Mountain Gods correspond directly with the six most prominent heavenly bodies: the Sun, the Moon, Tetsusei, Saibaisei, Torasei, and Shijinsei. I would not be surprised to learn that, long ago, these objects were the gods, but then the concepts took a life of their own.”

“Why does it have its own stars?” I asked.

Andalon bundled her hands into fists. “Yeah, yeah! Why?”

Yuta’s eyes sparkled like the stars he so loved. “Those are not stars,” he said. “They are moons.”

I shook my head and blinked. “What?”

“Those lights are to Torasei what the Moon is to our world. They orbit it.”

This was news to me.

“But… that’s impossible,” I said. “Everything in the Night travels around the earth.”

Clicking his tongue, Lord Uramaru pressed his hand against his forehead and chuckled, and then outright laughed. “Incredible. You cured Darkpox, have flying carriages, and you can speak to someone on the other side of the world as if they were right next to you, yet you still believe in geocentrism?” Tempering this amusement, he cleared his throat and regained his composure. “Well, I suppose it makes sense,” he said. “Your world’s skies know only the Sun and Moon. You would have no reason to suspect that, despite appearances, it is the earth that travels around the Sun. Even in my ear, many people still believe the earth is the center of the universe, but they are wrong, and Torasei’s moons prove it. Look! They circle around Torasei, not the earth.”

It wasn’t every that your literal worldview gets turned upside its head, let alone twice.

I gulped. “Please don’t tell me the Moon goes around the Sun, too.”

Yuta snorted. “No, no, the Moon goes around the earth. That much is right.” He sighed. “Still, I am somewhat… surprised that you have so readily accepted the heliocentric theory.”

“I’m turning into a psychokinetic wyrm necromancer who houses the afterlife in his mind, to guard the spirits of the dead against the forces of Hell. Compared to that, learning that the Sun doesn’t go around the earth is barely a ripple.”

Turning around, I looked toward the paper-strewn desk in the middle of the room. “So, other than staring through the telescope,” I said, “what is it that you do here?”

Walking over to the table, Yuta sat down on a cushion on the floor beside it, resting in a kneeling position. He ran his fingers over the ink-scrawled sheets.

“Most recently? Parallax.”

Andalon scampered over to him. “Parawhat?” she asked. Rising up on her tip-toes, she leaned against Yuta’s back, brushing an arm across the back of his haori as she craned her head over his shoulder.

“Yeah… what she said,” I said.

Lifting up his hand, Yuta curled his fingers into a fist and a thumb’s up. “This is how Gouji-san explained it to me,” he said. “Closing your left eye—and keeping it shut—look at your thumb. Then, open your left eye and shut your right.”

I did. Stepping back, Andalon tried to do this, too. Remarkably, she couldn’t seem to get it right.

“Now, go back and forth. Left, right, left, right.”

Again, I did.

“See how your thumb appears to jump from place to place?”

“Yes, I do,” I said.

“That is parallax,” Yuta said. “It’s all triangles.”

“Ah, triangles,” I said, with a grin, “my old nemeses.”

Keeping his thumb out—and ignoring my snark—Yuta pointed a finger of his other hand at his thumb, and then at his eyes. “Your eyes—the observers—are located at two different points on the triangle, separated by a distance. When you close one eye and open the other, the position from which you observe your thumb changes, while your thumb stays fixed in place. Whenever an observer’s position changes relative to that of an object fixed in place, the object will appear to move. This is parallax. The strength of the effect increases when the object being observed moves closer to the observer, or if the two points of observation are made more distant from one another.”

“I’m following you so far,” I said.

“Andalon does not get it,” Andalon said, happily.

A look of concern flashed across Yuta’s face, but I waved my hand dismissively. “It’s alright. I’ll try explaining it to her later.”

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“If the heliocentric theory is correct,” Yuta continued, “and, according to the calculations of Lennart Craulson, the orbit of the earth around the sun should be an ellipse, though one very close to a perfect circle.”

He pointed at one of the diagrams he had up on the cork board. It had drawings of ellipses split up by lines inside their interiors. Stepping toward it, he traced a finger along the ellipse’s curve.

“The earth completes one orbit along this path over the course of a year. So, over the span of half a year,” he said, bringing his finger from one extremity of the ellipse to the other, “the earth should move from one side of the orbit to the other. This should cause an observable parallax in the stars. The position of any given star in the summer should be slightly different from its position in wintertime. As of late, I have been trying to observe this difference.”

“To what end?” I asked.

Yuta stepped away from the cork board.

“The Lengthless Road speaks of the tension between truth and ideals. We can never have them together.” He lowered his head. “Since I cannot…” he passed, “well… since I could not make my ideals a reality, I strive to contribute truth to the world. While the other nobles waste their time with petty power struggles, or the pleasures of Sakuragi’s Ōoku, I choose to use the time I have been given.” He sighed. “I want to set a good example for my family, for Ichigo… for everyone. I want to use the privilege I have been given for something worthwhile.” He raised his finger at me. “Ideas, Dr. Howle, they are the only foes worth slaying. If I confirmed stellar parallax, it would deal a mortal blow to the geocentric theory.”

“I see,” I said.

“Unfortunately,” shaking his head, he shrugged, “despite my efforts, I have been unable to observe a parallax.”

“Does this mean the Sun does go around the earth?” I asked.

He scoffed. “Perhaps, or… perhaps it means the distance between the earth and the stars must be far greater than anything anyone has ever imagined.”

“Fascinating,” I said. “And I really mean that. This is the kind of information that could change people’s lives. It changes the way we see the world.”

“I’m glad to hear that.” Yuta smiled. “My wife thinks it’s a worrisome obsession. She’s concerned that my swordsmanship will suffer as a result, despite my assurances to the contrary.”

He glanced over to Andalon. “What do you think of all this, Andalon?”

“Andalon does not get it, but… it is still really, really cool.” She nodded vigorously. “Yep yep yep.”

He smiled again. “Just like my children.” Yuta looked up at the moonlight shining down over the middle of the telescope. “I bring them up here when their mother permits it,” he said, looking at me askance, “and, together, we bask in the wonder of the stars.”

Lord Uramaru’s voice softened, his demeanor turning contemplative.

If I was going to ask him about what happened to our stars, I figured now would be as good of a time as any. He seemed at peace, almost as if he’d forgotten that he was no longer alive.

“Yuta, given your astronomical knowledge,” I said, trying out a new word and liking it very much, “do you have any idea what might have happened to our sky? How could we not have known about stars?”

It was hard to convey how good it felt to finally get that question out in the open. It had been eating away at me since I first laid eyes on them. Now that I could appreciate the depth of the mystery for what it was, I couldn’t shake the feeling that, all this time, I’d been asking the wrong questions.

“Perhaps… they faded,” Yuta suggested. I’d say it was a tenuous suggestion, but that wouldn’t do his comment justice.

I narrowed my eyes at him. “You don’t believe that,” I said, narrowing my eyes at him. “No, I do not,” he said. “Truthfully, I have no explanation for how or why there could be no stars in your sky. It… it frightens me.”

Yuta began pacing around the room, scratching at his chin, lost in thought. I was about to let my own mind wander when an epiphany struck me like a lightning bolt to the spine.

I’d been so rapt with my discovery of heavenly bodies that I hadn’t noticed the most glaring issue of all.

Darn it! How could I have missed that!?

Then again, I was still trying to wrap my head around the idea that time travel was real, so there was a possibility that I was just being too hard on myself—though I doubted it.

“Angel’s breath!” I swore.

“What is it?” Yuta said, whipping around to face me.

Closing my eyes, I shook my head. “No, no… there’s,” I sighed, “it’s worse than that.”

“What do you mean?” Yuta asked.

“Think about it. Your Night has stars, as does Dr. Horosha’s, but mine doesn’t.”

“So?” Andalon said, pointedly.

“Andalon, this memory is from the past,” I said. “Past becomes present, and present becomes future, so, how can we being seeing stars here and now if—”

—Lord Uramaru’s eyes bugged out inside his skull.

“Shit.” He lowered his gaze, and then bowed his head in apology. “My apologies. I lost myself in old memories. I should’ve realized it sooner.” He nodded. “But you’re right.” He pointed at his telescope. “If this sky is your sky, where have all the stars gone?”

“If my Night ever had stars, it was a long, long time ago. The word ‘star’ isn’t even part of the Trenton language. There’s no way someone could have covered this up, not to mention no way for it to be forgotten or lost to time.”

“Could we be dealing with two different skies?” Yuta asked.

“Huh…” My jaw hung slack. I paced around, scratching my chin. “I think it would be three skies, not two,” I said, “counting Dr. Horosha’s.”

Andalon looked around, confused and concerned. “Is this bad?” she asked. “Cuz it sounds bad!”

Then another observation struck me. I rose from my cross-legged position into a kneeling one as I leaned over the table.

Earlier, after Yuta had first awoken, Andalon had said she knew what stars were. She, like Yuta, had known that the Sun was just the star closest to the earth.

I looked Andalon dead in the eyes. “Andalon,” I asked, “before, when I asked you, you already knew what stars were. How did you know about them? Is there anything you can remember?”

Andalon looked upward, as if she could see through the roof to the starry night beyond. Her eyes lit up with a gentle glow that flickered on the Observatory’s wooden furnishings.

“Stars… they’re everywhere,” she said. She started to cry. “For so long, so long… I was so lonely and afraid. I had no friends. Only twinkle twinkle little stars, but they were always so far away.” Then she perked up, smiling slightly. “But then… I had the wyrmehs. And… and …” But then the smile broke. Andalon looked down in dejection. “But then they were so sad and scared and mad. They were… mean to me, but I just wanted to save them, and…” her voice trailed off.

I furrowed my brow. “Andalon,” I said, very, very cautiously, “what you just said… when did it happen?”

“A long time ago, Mr. Genneth. A really, really long time ago.”

“Oh fudge…” I muttered, as a chill ran down my spine.

“What is it?” Yuta asked.

I looked at Andalon. “This has happened before, hasn’t it”

“What has?” she asked.

I pointed at her. “You and the fungus, fighting over souls,” I said.

She nodded bigly.

I tugged at my lucky bow-tie.

Yuta looked genuinely agitated now. “What is it?” he repeated. “What’s the matter?”

I shook my head and turned to face Yuta. “I’ve been so preoccupied with my ghosts and the zombies, I didn’t notice what was right in front of my nose the whole time.”

“Which would be?” Yuta asked.

“That this has happened before,” I said, rising to my feet. “The fungus, the plague, the wyrms, the zombies, the demons, everything, all of it has happened before, and that’s impossible! The world can only end once; the Green Death can come only once, because nothing survives it, except for the wyrms—and, even then, the only reason we survive is because Andalon keeps the fungus from taking us over, first! So, clearly, this is the first time the Green Death has visited our world, despite the fact that Andalon said otherwise.”

“But I have been here before!” she said, perfectly illustrating my point.

“See?” I said, gesturing at her with a hand.

“I mean,” Andalon looked at us and her surroundings, “…everything’s so… family-er.”

I looked at her in surprise. “Wait, really?”

Andalon nodded again.

I groaned.

I would have kicked a chair in anger, but there weren’t any nearby, and—even if there were—it would have made a mess of Yuta’s observatory, so I settled for throwing one of my hands up in the air. “And there you have it. It’s the battle before creation playing out all over again. The Angel—sorry, Angels—knew about it, about the fungus, about the wyrms, about Hell. It’s all happened before. Everything happens here, in which case, the fungus should have already killed us all long ago, but it didn’t. Or… maybe it did, and maybe we’ve just been dead this whole time, or maybe the Angels found a way to fix it, or…” Letting my arms droop, I went down on my knees, pressing my legs onto one of Yuta’s floor cushions. “I don’t know anymore. This…” I shook my head. “…this is getting ridiculous.”

Yuta nodded. “These are paradoxes: different night skies; events happening before their own causes.” He shook his head.

Suddenly, Andalon’s features tightened. The brightness in her eyes grew a little bit brighter, and for a moment, she comported herself with a maturity that defied her appearance.

“There are many worlds, Mr. Genneth,” she said, speaking in a quiet voice that made my skin crawl. Rising to her feet, Andalon turned around and placed a hand on one of the varnished cabinets. “This place is the memory of a different one.”

I stared at her, slack-jawed.

“Wait,” I said, “many worlds?”

Well, that was a big reveal, wasn’t it?

The light faded from her eyes a little. “It’s like Catamander Brave,” she said.

“Fricassee me!” I cursed, trembling my forearms.

If this was the me from last week, I’d probably be in a full blown panic attack by now, but, after having learned about time-travel and multiple Angels, learning there were multiple worlds—whatever that even meant—felt like par for the course, so I settled for anxiously pacing back and forth.

“This is bad,” I said. “This is really bad.”