Thoughts swirled through my mind.

Time travel. Time travelers. Yuta Uramaru bending over like he’d been kicked in the gut when he learned his wife and son had died. The sounds he’d made. His wailing. The way he raked his hands through his blankets. The way he’d hunched over and drummed his fists into the mattress, as if he’d break the earth in half just to bring them back. Ichigo’s booming voice; his command that we “remove ourselves” from his lord’s presence. Had Yuta not come unstuck in time, his pain would have been just another ripple in the waves of history. Entropy would have dashed his grief to pieces, silenced forevermore.

For me, the worst part was my ignorance. I was mired in that awful place halfway between not knowing how to help, and not knowing if I could help at all. Here was a stranger from a different life, and he’d just suffered some of the worst pains a man could ever know. What could I do for someone like that? He didn’t even understand the words coming out of my mouth. He looked at me like I was a thing from another world. And, really, I was.

But even if I could help him, would that even make a difference. Time travel was real. Nurse Kaylin hadn’t been seeing things, after all.

What was a guy supposed to do when time travel got thrown into his lap?

I wish I knew.

I kept walking until I found an unoccupied chair in the hallway and then carefully planted my tailed derrière into the seat. Not knowing where to begin with something like time travel, I decided to set it aside. Maybe I could make some progress with one of the lesser impossibilities currently on my plate.

What in the world is a “star”?

And why did it matter that there weren’t any of them in the Night?

I pulled out my console. I could have done an internet search, but something told me I needed to aim higher than that. Thankfully, there was an app for that.

Whenever Pel got her hands on my console, she always gawked at it, telling me I had more apps on it than any reasonable person ever should—and she was absolutely right. Whether they were downloaded from the Cloud or provided by the garrison of little black chips plugged into ports hidden beneath the door on the console’s back side, if an app struck my fancy, I had to have it. I had everything from Super Gerbil World - The Forgotten Tower (a rogue-like spin-off of the critically-acclaimed RPG), to an app that could scan fruit and give it a taste rating so that I would never again be disappointed by stale tangerines or lackluster pears.

One of the treasures in my app-hoard, a full, unabridged copy of the Fitchtide Dictionary of the Trenton Language, in all its majesty. It even updated itself whenever a new edition was released.

And Pel had called it a waste of money!

Opening the application, ready to enter the word, only to realize I didn’t know how to spell it. Was it S-T-A-R? S-T-A-R-R? S-T-A-R-G-H? S-T-A-R-R-E? S-T-A-R-G-H-E? You could never know with this sort of thing. Trenton was a simple language, spelled absurdly. One by one, I tried them all, and each time I came up empty, except for S-T-A-R-R-E, where the app had suggested “stare”, thinking I’d misspelled the word.

Shaking my arms in frustration, I groaned and stowed my console in my hazmat suit’s pocket.

“What’s wrong, Mr. Genneth?” asked a familiar voice.

For once, her timing was right on the money!

Could you come out of the not-here-place, Andalon?

She popped into existence in front of me, next to plastic bromeliad.

Do you know what a ‘star’ is? I thought-asked. It’s something in the Night sky.

Dr. Horosha’s words came rushing back to me.

And they’re beautiful, I added.

There was a momentary pause as Andalon blinked and nodded.

I cleared my throat.

What is a star? I asked.

“Uhhh…” Andalon looked up at the ceiling and scratched her head. “What’s the big thing in the sky called? The bright one.” She pursed her lips. “The one that doesn’t sometimes disappear and make everything dark and scary.”

“That’s the Sun,” I said.

Andalon nodded. “Yeah. That’s a star.”

Frowning, I shook my head. “No,” I said, “the Sun is… the Sun. It’s special. It’s unique.”

The Sun was the source of all warmth and light. Its presence alone—supposedly the Angel’s Face—kept us from drowning in Hell’s eternal darkness.

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“Yeah,” Andalon said, “but it’s also a star.”

I stared at her. I was so taken aback that I didn’t even bother to couch my questions as silent thoughts. “Wait… so you’re saying… there are other Suns?”

What’s next, the Earth travels around the Sun? I thought, sardonically.

“From what Suisei said,” I explained, “it seems he thinks the Sun is supposed to be visible at Night.” I shook my head. “But that makes no sense.”

Inside, I was definitely freaking out. I squeezed my lucky bow-tie tightly, running my gloves along its bold red spots.

Andalon nodded. “But it is, Mr. Genneth. There are lotsa stars in the sky. Lots and lots and lots. They’re nice and big—though some are pretty small, and some are really big—but most of them usually look very small, ‘cause they’re super far away. All those far away little lights make the big black look really pretty. Though they’re so hot and shiny that they aren’t a safe place for the wyrmehs to play. Not safe at all.”

“The big black?” I whispered. “Do you mean the Night?”

Andalon looked at me expectantly.

“But…” I shook my head again, “there aren’t any ‘little lights’ in the Night. That’s what makes it the Night.”

But Andalon merely shrugged.

I face-palmed; my palm smacked against my hazmat helmet’s visor.

“Why are you hitting yourself, Mr. Genneth?” Andalon tilted her head to the side and frowned in concern. “Did you do something bad?”

Holding the top of my helmet in my hand, I let my head hang down for a moment while clutching my other hand against my chest. Sweetness filled my helmet’s torrid airspace as I huffed and puffed in panic and shock, and—obviously—Andalon was in no position to understand why.

If you wanted to know whether or not a person was Lassedile, all you needed to do was call us “Sun Worshippers.” It would make us red with umbrage. Offense and outrage were guaranteed. Even for someone like me, who didn’t really know what I believed, calling the faith “Sun-Worship” was just a step too far. It would be like calling music “ordered noise”; it was true, except in any way that actually mattered. It missed the point altogether. We did not worship the Sun and its Light. Strictly speaking, we adored them. They were zenithal manifestations of the Angel’s undying love for mankind and the world. The way we praised the Sun and its Light was analogous to praising a delicious meal. When you said, “this food is amazing!” you were praising the chef who’d made the food; the food did not make itself.

Lassediles worshiped with the Sun, through its Light. In sacrificing His Flesh and Blood to create the Sun, the Angel set a Covenant with mankind—the Bond of Light; the Sunlight was the Angel’s Blood, and it held us fast, into eternity.. It was not the hand of the Godhead; it was the abiding echo of the Godhead’s will, forever acting upon the world. The Sun and its Light were both promise and memento; both reminder and warning. For the faithful, Light’s glory was the Angel’s glory, and the glory of the glory of the Angel was the Glory of God, and the Glory of God was Love. Even in our fallen state, mankind’s love of Light showed us for who we truly were. It pointed us toward our true home in Paradise, just as surely as our terror of the frigid Night was a sign of our innate awareness and terror at the torments of Hell, a reminder of the terrible fate that befell those who spurned God’s Love.

The existence of more than one Sun would irrevocably shatter Lassedicy’s most foundational beliefs. No denomination would survive. The Sun was the Angel’s Face. If other Suns lit up the sky, there would be no need for our Sun, nor for the Angel’s sacrifice to keep the Night at bay. It… it changed everything. Even worse: if there was Light in the Night other than the Moon…

I gulped. Old habits die hard, and none died harder than habits of mind. Light was love and Darkness was punishment. That value was instilled in every fiber of my religion and my culture. It was as innate to us as bowing had become after centuries of Munine dominion over our lands. The Moon existed solely at the Godhead’s behest. It was a mirror for the Sun’s Light, reminding us of its Glory even as we awaited its return with the coming of day, and from Her Palace on the Moon’s limpid shores, the Moonlight Queen kept watch over us, counting our sins and beatitudes.

Was Suisei some kind of Lucent—canonized or otherwise? Did the clergy really have some secret abilities, like the legends said? The Apocrypha? Did they have the power to see what the laïty could not? The power to work miracles?

Had God not abandoned us after all?

But, if he had, then… why couldn’t I see the stars? If these wonders were all around us, why would we be forbidden to see them? Why had we been denied this knowledge? Was it because we were broken? Was this the cost of Primeval Sin? And if it was… why hadn’t they told us?

Why hadn’t they told me?

I wrapped myself in my arms. It was sweltering inside my hazmat suit, but I shivered, feeling horribly cold. I pressed my hands onto the sides of my head. I bit my lip again and again.

Andalon plopped down onto her knees. “Mr. Genneth?”

“I don’t understand what any of this means,” I said. “Everything I know about the world is being turned on its head.” I crossed my arms; my head hung with my heavy unease. “I didn’t think it was possible for me to be even more confused about what I believed than I already was, but I guess I was wrong about that, too!” I banged the back of my head against the wall, making a dull thud. “I don’t know what to think. I feel lost. Very, very lost.” My arms drooped over the sides of the chair.

“I feel like that a lot,” Andalon said, nodding in understanding. “Wait, no, not ‘a lot’—the other one.” She narrowed her eyes in concentration; then she found what she’d been looking for, and they widened: “Ah,” she said, nodding confidently, “all the time. Andalon feels lost all the time.”

I chuckled quietly. “I can tell.” But that bled out into a sigh soon enough.

“Andalon… is there anything you know about time travel?”

“Time… travel?” she said. “Isn’t that what happens when you wait?”

“No,” I groaned, rubbing the sides of my head through my hazmat helmet. “That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about when, in an instant, a person travels a long time—hundreds of years, or more. They start in one time period, and end in another. Do you know what I’m talking about?”

“I think so,” Andalon said, nodding hesitantly. “I just gots two questions.” She looked me in the eyes.

“Yes?” I said, returning her inquiring gaze.

Andalon made a serious face. “What’s a second,” she asked, “and… what’s a year?”

I let out a long, loud sigh. After a moment of silence, I closed my eyes and chuckled.

I nodded. “Thank you for your help, Andalon. You can go now.”

“Yay!” Beaming, she stuck her arms up in pure, innocent victory. “I helped!” And then she vanished to the not-here-place, leaving me in the here-place, alone with my demons.