#fff64

She tapped her fingers on the desk while she waited. Her mother's psychosis was the supernova that had sprinkled her with stardust, leaving her to the same, inevitable, and unenviable, fate.

She'd always thought it would explode in the same metaphorical sense. Years of resentment towards the constraining role of wife and mother and then boom. Psych ward.

There was a reason she'd never gotten married. A few of them, actually.

It always surprised the handful of people who interacted with her in something resembling a social life how young she really was.

Her musing were interrupted as the door to the lab slid open. Ah, there he was. Clearly a newbie. Forty-three minutes late. Like this place was difficult to hack into or something.

The kid was not expecting someone else to be in here. A real rookie.

"I'm here to…." He trailed off, waving at the jar. She just nodded, waiting to see what he did. He took a few steps forward and froze, careful not to touch the souped-up mason jar.

"It's amazing," he breathed.

"Magic sky dust, if you believe the August Saints."

The kid flinched. She kept her sigh to herself.

“Real stardust,” he whispered, more to the jar on the counter than to her.

“Technically comet dust,” she said, sliding her chair down the counter and picking it up.

"Don't touch it," he hissed.

"It hasn't exploded yet," she muttered, putting the jar down.

The silence stretched. The kid shuffled his feet, considering the jar and then her, and then the jar again.

The jar sat demur on the counter, the not quite rocks, not quite gas inside settling as much as they ever did.

"Carry case?" Gray asked, nodding to the wheelie bag the kid had drug in with him. He nodded.

"Well, supposed we'd better get on with it," she continued. He seemed to think that statement was a little odd, but not odd enough to provoke him into changing course.

This kid had a lot to learn.

He pulled on heavy rubber gloves before touching the jar. She spun herself back towards the desk, pretending to look at documents while tracking his movements out of the corner of her eye.

The kid packed the jar into the carry case, carefully stacking dense foam padding around it. Then he straightened up, and with more confidence than she'd seen out of him yet, headed for the door.

“You didn’t think I was just going to let you walk out of here with that, did you?”

She could hear his shaky, rattling breaths. He’d have his gun out, pointing at her, hand trembling.

Gray ducked to the left, a bullet shattering something expense on the counter where she'd been sitting.

She came back up, grabbing the kid's wrist from behind and twisting, dislodging the gun. It clattered to the ground as he came around, swinging.

Pain exploded in her lip. He’d gotten in a lucky hit. She blocked his next throw and decked him across the face, sending him stumbling back to the wall.

She was right up on him. From here she could see the flecks of gray in his eyes. He was older than she thought. Her age. Just lacking in the things that furrow brows and carve lines into faces. Her own eyes sparkled, flashing with the glint of something ancient.

He went down, slumping against the wall like she'd stabbed him.

Which she hadn't.

She could have told him "better luck next time" or that situational awareness and flexibility are paramount in this business.

What she couldn't have told him was how her pounding heartbeat made her feel like the first time she'd ever fucked up.

“Won’t you regret this?”

Won’t you regret killing me? Won’t you feel bad?

“I’m human—guilt is part of the package.”

Please feel bad.

She smiled through reddening teeth. The taste of iron in her mouth.

“Remorse and regret are not the same thing.”

True stardust in the making.

"I know what you are," he coughed out.

Her hand froze on the handle of the carry case.

"You took the lid off," he continued.

"What kind of moron keeps matter from outer space in a mason jar?"

He shook his head.  

"It's not." He broke into another coughing fit. "It's not glass."

Something was humming through her veins. Something heady. Powerful.

Terrifying.

She clenched her fist and closed her eyes, trying to contain it. To contain herself. Stardust felt like the power of a giant in her veins, spiraling inward, to the inevitable collapse and explosion across the sky.

"Not just religious fanatics, then."

The kid shrugged, blood on his lip. "Sometimes we're right."

She kept her fists clenched, struggling to speak. "Well, then the first order of business is getting out of here."

He was relieved when she helped him up, but not surprised. Too much trust in humanity for his own good, she supposed.

In the end, stumbling towards her ship, gunfire around her like summer rain and the scent of home, she had the oddest sense she was limping towards something unexpected but maybe not entirely unwelcome.

Maybe.

And if he turned out to be annoying (or wrong), she could always shoot him.

Varis’ smile was more melancholy than hers as he watched her from the edge of the clearing, but she found it hard to be melancholy when she was so thrilled with the sight in front of her. The flowers sparkled in the moonlight, each giving off their own sliver of light in the otherwise empty clearing. They glittered like stars, and made her feel peaceful.

Portia nestled herself among them, letting the glow of the flowers surround her, and for just a moment, she felt normal again. For a moment, she could forget that she was dying.

It wasn’t long until she heard Varis’ footsteps beside her, and saw him sit beside her in the clearing. “There’s a history to these flowers, you know,” he said.

She glanced at him from the corner of her eye and gave him a questioning noise.

“Long ago, it was said that something from another realm came and hit the earth, leaving the seeds for these flowers deep within its surface. As time went on, the depths that these flowers were found in were the same underground areas that dark elves settled. They hated the light that the flowers gave off – it reminded them of the surface that they’d been banished from, and so they set out to eradicate them.”

She looked out over the clearing of flowers. “That’s terrible… They didn’t succeed, did they?”

“They almost did,” he replied. “It’s said that worshippers of Eilistraee gathered the seeds that they could find and distributed them among themselves for safekeeping until they could get back to the surface and replant them,” he said. She watched as he cautiously reached out and ran his hand along one, as though he was afraid it’d burn him. “Today, when worshippers of Eilistraee come to the surface and heard her song for the first time, it’s said that they plant one of these flowers where they could be sure she could find it. It’s their way of returning her gifts back to her.”

Portia turned to watch Varis as he ran his fingertips along the flowers. He was so delicate with them, like he was afraid of tarnishing their beauty. “How did you learn about them?”

His smile shifted to something warmer, then. “I have a… I have a friend who taught me about them once. If you pick them and dry them, they crystalize on their own.”

She made a small gasp and turned her attention back to the flowers. “That’s incredible. They crystalize?”

He nodded, picking one of the flowers and tucking it behind Portia’s ear. “They do. It’s said that they’re even more beautiful once they’re dried and catch the light of the sun.” He looked at her out of the corner of his eye as he turned his attention back to the flowers.

She hadn’t been traveling with him alone for long – just since they’d left Rosemary and Hrímdorn – but there was no doubt in her mind that Varis was incredibly kind, albeit a bit naïve. She smiled at herself for the thought that she’d found the one being on the planet more naïve than a halfling. And though that might be true, Varis was more knowledgeable about things than she was, and had a much better sense of direction.

She had picked a good travel partner for the last leg of her journey.

“And if you take that dried flower and crush it, legend says that you can recreate a small amount of the stardust that breathed life into these flowers in the first place.”

Portia’s hand reached up to touch the flower tucked behind her ear. It felt different than she expected, softly textured like velvet but hard to the touch like the blade of her dagger. She could see how it would crystalize instead of dry out like a normal flower. “Won’t someone be mad that you took one of their flowers?”

There was a rustle as Varis pulled an instrument out of his pack and set it on his lap. “I think Eilistraee would be fine with it, as long as we give her something else in return, don’t you?” he asked. “Why don’t you sing a song with me as a thank you? We’ll rest here tonight, in a protected space, and head out in the morning.”

Squinting his eyes, he scanned his surroundings: it was a very dark night, and Swamp Dragons’ night vision was pretty much non-existent. Despite that, he didn’t give up, trying to make sense of the darkness that surrounded him.

The little waves hit his body and he sensed the shore nearby. He veered with his tail, when his talons also touched the gravel beneath the water, and he rejoiced.

Soon the dragon reached the shore, and he scrolled the water off of him. He looked around him, squinting his eyes and ears wide, but the night was silent. An owl made his voice heard from deep beneath the trees, but apart from that, nothing stirred the tranquillity of the place.

“I wonder if I’m in the right place.” He sat down and looked at the sky. It was a moonless night and the stars shone bright, little white dots on the dark blue. A curious wind blew on the foreigner’s body, making him tremble with cold.

“He wasn’t joking when he told me his country was very cold. The water was freezing. How do they even swim?”

The dragon took the bag dangling from his back and put in on the ground, petting it with a few delicate strokes. He took a peek inside and nodded happily when he saw its contents weren’t damaged.

He put his head on the ground and started walking, trying to sniff for new smells. He soon found a tree and started feeling the grass with his talons, finding a few branches. He collected a few of them and put them in a bundle. He closed his eyes, focusing on the wind and the ground beneath him, when he snapped his eyes open, a newborn fire crackling into existence.

He breathed a little onto it, to make it more lively, and reveled next to it when he was done.

The dragon had almost fallen asleep, when his eyes spotted a shaky figure walking towards the fire. He jolted awake, baring his teeth, but as soon as he recognized who it was, he lowered his head.

“Oh, my dear friend. You’ve finally arrived.”

“Sorry for making you wait. Today’s fishing went for longer than we thought.”

“I hope everything was alright.”

“It was. Fortunately, I didn’t need a Swamp Dragon to save me from drowning, this time.”

The dragon looked at his friend. He was very small, so much smaller than him. His friend barely arrived at the middle of his neck. The krekna of the north were known to be short, but also to be extremely fierce.

“I hope your travel went well”, he continued.

The dragon nodded. “It was long, but uneventful. The rivers protected me.”

“And what’s that bag, I wonder?”

The dragon smiled: “A gift for you, my friend.”

The krekna jumped on his feet, clapping his wings together: “Oh, really? Really? Let me see! Let me see!”

Chuckling, the dragon took the bag and gently opened it.

His friend stopped in mid-step, then slowly lowering his feet on the ground. His eyes got wide, his beak agape.

Inside the bag there stood a round vase, transparent glass that reflected the fire light in a little explosion of colors and crackles. The krekna slowly approached the gift, as if it could hurt him at any moment, and lifted it as if it were a newborn.

“This is… simply wonderful.”

“I know how much you love glass. I thought to make something special.”

“This is TRULY wonderful!” in his excitement, he shook it a little, before stopping and checking it if no damage was done.

The dragon laughed: “Don’t worry. It’s quite sturdy. It’s made of star dust, after all.”

The krekna raised his gaze: “Star dust? Where do you get that?”

“Dust from Star Spirits. We had a gathering of them a few full moons ago, and I thought of you.”

“I am truly speechless, my friend. Thank you.”