After you die, you start your new job in the polar colonies. The workhouse that has a claim on your corpse collects its property, ships you out on a freighter headed north. In the colonies they slit you open, dry you out, fill your veins with liquid salt. A necromancer walks between the rows of corpses, recites the ritual, raises up a fresh crop of sailors. You all shamble aboard the star trawler, animated by the contractions of frigid corpseflesh that only dimly remembers living. You’ve nothing left to lose - not life, not liberty, not even a claim over your own body.
Up north, you freeze. The world is very, very cold. The air here is dry as salt; every drop of moisture has been frozen. If you were still breathing, your breath would freeze down through to your lungs, so it’s a good thing that you aren’t. During the six months of day, sun glares off the sea of ice to become blinding. So you work through the half a year of night, great vats of seafire burning, their searing heat only barely holding back the wall of cold. Your flesh freezes, thaws a little, freezes through twice over, ice crystals rupturing through the cracked furrows of your skin, your face rimed by what little fluid still lasted in your cells. The first few hours after arrival, you’re all shedding white flurries of flakes like dandruff every time you move. After that, the cold and salt preserves what’s left, preparing you for your endless work.
You are here to dredge up stars. Sometimes you see them streak across the sky as the ship obediently glides across the ice to intercept them. Elsewhere, stars touch down in the oceans and are extinguished instantly in great clouds of steam; or else they hit land and burn too bright to even hope approaching, dying down to leave only ash and a smoldering black ingot of celestial steel.
Here, even fire freezes if exposed to the cold too long, twisted tongues of it stretching up from torches left burning across shifts, crystalline and bright as flame. Stars hit the sea and freeze on impact, becoming glittering clusters of gems to be dredged up and shipped around the world and put to work in forges, or in shards for profligate nobles to let thaw and flicker and die out, behind their smiling lips making a wish.
Mostly, the work is waiting. Stars fall sparsely, and with little warning, and the sea is very, very vast. You sail beneath a calm night sky that stretches on forever, through the unimaginable cold, the stars distant and impassive. You don’t mind the tedium. You’re dead. Your life is over. None of this means anything. You could man this ship forever, frozen, waiting for the stars to fall away one by one until there’s nothing left but the darkness of the grave. It’d be familiar.
And then, one day, you catch a star.
Down below, the astrolabe that pilots the ship starts whirling wildly, magnetized in the direction of star metal, veering the ship off-course. Up above, the sky glows blue. It’s like an inverted sunrise, the star so bright it seems to bleed into negative, a frequency of light your undead eyes can only comprehend by its absence. It would be beautiful, if you still cared, or were capable of caring. The star streaks down, igniting the dry air as it passes, cutting a fiery trail behind it, growing brighter, brighter, too bright to even look at, until it crashes down into the sea.
The sea ice shatters, upheaves, from ice to water to a roaring cloud of steam in half a second, and almost as instantly back to ice again, a scintillating galaxy of droplets suspended in the air, glowing with the star’s reflected light. The sea surges around the star, swallows it, is cast up by it, is liquid and solid and gas and flame all flowing in phases seamlessly into one another. Flames crystalize, burning brighter than they ever have before, and the frozen sea becomes fluid beneath the trawler, tossing it on a surge of vapor, flinging you about like matchsticks. Dead sailors grab at the rigging, their faces lit by an unearthly light that for a moment makes them look almost angelic. And then you are thrown overboard, down into the sea that freezes over you, down into its black and icy depths until motion slows and comes to a stop, leaving you all alone down there in the cold and fathomless dark.
It’s fine. You’re dead. You had nothing left to lose anyway. The last thing you see is the distant light of the frozen star, before the darkness swallows you up and becomes complete.
There is no light. There is no air. There is no heat. You’re not sure how long it takes for you to realize that you’re awake.
Your hands are working, in the darkness. Your lips. Your eyes. It’s simply that there is nothing to see, not a hint of light to see by. You feel the ground beneath you, and only afterwards realize you are feeling. Long-dead portions of your brain have come alive again, slowly puzzling out sensation. In the airless, lightless void, old memories come welling up of your life before the colonies. They hurt. They overwhelm you, these distant thoughts of light and warmth and people you once loved. You were dead. It was over. You were supposed to have nothing left to lose.
And then you feel the touch of filaments crawling gently across your face, and you realize that you are not alone.
The filaments slip into your ears, into your eyes, down your throat. They tap at the little membranes in there, pluck at the nerves directly. You hear the vibration of voices thrumming to you in the airless void. They apologize to you profusely, say that they found you frozen at the bottom of the seabed, and probed their graceful filaments into your brain and bit by bit pieced it back to working order, and woke you.
They are, again, very apologetic about this.
They are doing something to your eyes. The darkness lightens slightly, becomes fuzzier, less absolute, giving you the impression that maybe there is something to be seen. How long has it been, you try to ask them. Your throat and tongue convulse, without air to push through your lungs, and the filaments listen. When is it now?
It is the end of the world, they tell you.
The stars are all gone, as are the sun, the moon, they tell you. All fallen from the sky a long, long time ago and shipped around the world and burnt down to nothing. The seas have evaporated, the air grown too thin to breathe. There is no light left, and very little heat. Though they can tweak the nerves leading to your brain, they hasten to add, to make you believe you are in a bright, warm place with plenty of air, safe from harm. You can tell that they are trying very earnestly to appease you. It won’t be that bad, the end of the world, they tell you hopefully. You might actually find it rather pleasant…?
You are exhausted. You have lived too long, seen too much, had a stake in far too little of it. You’re done. You don’t care, about light, or warmth, or safety. It is the end of the world, and you don’t understand why you are still here to witness it. Why did they bring you back to life, you ask them. Why now? What was the point?
They hesitate. They were hoping you might tell them what it was like, they tell you, tremulously. To look up at the sky and see all the countless stars?
You sit in silence. The darkness has taken on the quality of the darkness behind your eyes, as if you’re sitting quietly with your eyes closed, thinking. The memory of the star crashing into the sea comes rising up, unbidden: the clouds of steam flash-frozen into ice, the crystal fire, the star descending from the heavens to paint the night sky blue, that moment of unearthly beauty at the frozen ends of the earth, witnessed only by the listless dead with nothing left to lose - and then you trace your fingers over the trembling filaments running across your face, and in a halting voice you tell them about the stars.
