They could hear the screams of their distant cousins, begging them to stop.

They could see planets shy away from their grasping limbs, the movement so swift in their view and yet taking light years to those who saw below.

Their siblings demanded they stopped, and yet they could not. They did not remember what caused this--anger, desperation, hunger? Perhaps they had just burned themselves out too quickly. Perhaps something had interfered. They did not know. Most of them did not care. They were famished.

Either way, their self had collapsed far too early, long before their death should have come, and they found themselves hungering for life again, scrabbling to absorb everything around them.

They could sense their eldest, Alpha Leonis, Regulus, speaking ancient words in radiation. It caught in their limbs, dragged down for them to hear, to listen to the banishment for their mistake, their collapse.

The words of their siblings was too much to bear, the curse laid upon them was condemning. Their siblings were older, much older than they were, and their words gave them shape again, contained the anger and hunger into a smaller form.

And they were falling.

----

Waking up was not something Omega Leonis did. That was not what stars did. They were awake in the sense that the oceans were awake, the earth was awake, always moving and churning and breathing.

And yet there was a distinct lack of memory, a distinct break between their fall and now. Darkness, like the void that quietly hummed away inside them. They looked up at the sky, head tilted, hovering quietly above the ground. They saw their siblings stretched out in the sky, the gaps invisible to the human eye but visible to them where they used to be, where their cousins who had been devoured used to be.