A/N: Hello, my fellow shooting stars how's life treating ya, good, I hope. Sorry for the lack of chapters I had to go back to school and had to adjust, but I still kept writing and they are all in my drafts do don't worry new chapters will follow shortly.
now to let you know I posted Sable's stat sheet in the auxiliary volume so you can check it out there.
also to let you know the world will be very slight AU only to allow the story to flow better and tie up loose ends, but it's only slight (so no gender bends unfortunately)
Also, if you want to ask questions ask, I would love to answer them and I would appreciate feedback.
Now without further ado let's get back to the story
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(Sable POV)
The runes I'd carved into the hotel's wood floor had long since bled gray into the varnish—thin, precise, and a little obsessive, like the Etch A Sketch of a man who'd slept four hours in two days. The circle took most of the room: lines nested in lines, star-nodes like tiny compass roses, a threading of sigils I'd copied from Tomb's memory until my hand cramped.
The Chalice sat dead-center, its constellation nodes cold and dark, reflecting the ceiling light like beads of black ice. Six nodes glowed faintly from the last few weeks in Seoul—six out of twelve. Half a night sky. Enough to do something stupid.
"Three nodes," I murmured to the room, to the Chalice, to myself. "Costs three just to open the door."
Tomb didn't ping. It didn't need to. I'd read the ritual a dozen times; my fingers still remembered the shape of the sigils even if my body begged me to pretend I'd never learned them. Energy routing. Aspect alignment. Anchoring thread. And that lovely footnote: Failure will result in catastrophic dispersal of the caster's soul across adjacent membranes. Which is magical Latin for get turned into glitter between worlds.
I rolled my shoulders, shook out my hands, and drew a slow breath. My palms hovered over the Chalice's rim. The metal was cold enough to bite.
"Okay," I told no one, because no one in particular needed to hear it. "Let's be idiots."
Star-Fire rose at my call, a heat without heat that started behind the sternum and bloomed outward, slipping down the nerves like velvet lightning. My forearms tingled. The white lines etched under my skin brightened from faint glow to steady pulse. The apartment's air thinned—pressure changing the way it does before a thunderstorm.
I fed the Chalice.
Light caught inside it like frost catching sun. The first three nodes flared, then the fourth and fifth brightened until they were pearl-white, as if something had woken inside the metal and remembered that it used to be a star. Will is a muscle; I kept the flow steady, not a surge. The runes drank, the circle drank, the Chalice drank.
On the twelfth beat of my heart, the floor groaned—wood fibers complaining as the air got colder and the room stretched in a way rooms shouldn't. The runes began to throb in time with the nodes, slow-long-slow-long, like a bell you feel in your bones. A hairline seam traced itself in the air above the Chalice, vertical and clean.
I pushed.
Reality wrinkled, then parted.
It didn't tear so much as it opened—like a heavy curtain being drawn back on a stage, except the curtain was the room, and the stage was a corridor of darkness that wasn't empty. The edges of the aperture rippled with thin threads of light, as if the world were stitched and I had picked a seam. Beyond: not black, exactly. Not anything. A suggestion of depth with no walls.
I stared into it for three long breaths, then said the dumbest word a person can say to a doorway between universes.
"YOLO."
Even as it left my mouth I winced. "On second thought," I muttered, and stepped forward before I could upgrade to something worse like cowabunga.
Crossing felt like being stretched in six directions by a bored god with a fondness for rubber bands. The hotel, the floor, the circle, all yanked away; my thoughts thinned into taut threads I could feel vibrating, little harmonics of self twanging under invisible fingers. Sound vanished. Motion vanished. There was only a long, elastic ache as if I were both moving and being moved.
Time works different when you're spaghetti. It might have been a second or a century before sensation snapped back all at once.
I staggered onto damp earth, dropped to a knee, and swallowed against the nausea trying to climb my throat. Cold air slapped my face—sharp, iron-scented, clean in the way of places that don't know what gasoline is.
"Okay," I said to dirt. "That was a choice."
I closed my eyes and reached inward for the anchor thread—the tiny, silvery pull Tomb had taught me to feel. The connection hummed back at once, faint but definite, stretching away into some unseeable direction with the resilience of a spider silk. The cylinder I'd left with Rumi answered like a lighthouse. I let my lungs empty.
"Still there," I whispered, a private relief no one would ever get to judge me for. "Good. No glittering today."
The evening had come to whatever this place was. I pushed to my feet and took inventory. Trees: high, dark conifers like spears stabbed into gray. A wall: stone, thick and old, shouldering across my sightline twenty yards away, its top bristling with wooden palisade and iron spikes. A road: rutted and damp, winding up to a heavy gate studded with black nails. Smoke: a dozen thin columns within the walls, carrying the smell of wood fires and boiled iron and—faintly—blood.
I looked down at my boots, then at the wall, then at the sky that was thinking hard about night. "So," I said. "Medieval."
A beat. "So… no toilets."
I dragged a hand over my face and groaned into my palm. "Goodbye, plumbing. Hello, holes in the ground and moral rot."
The breeze lifted, carrying a bell's low voice from inside the city. The sound lodged under my sternum like a weight. The place had that tight feeling old stones get when bad things have happened too many times: the sensation that the mortar remembers screams.
"Okay," I told myself, because whining wasn't going to manifest a bidet. "Stop bitching. Work first."
I summoned a proxy with a twitch of will: a bead of pale blue light that crawled out of my palm and feathered itself into a bird midair. It shook itself, scattering dust motes, and looked at me with a little glow where an eye ought to be.
"Friends," I said, and three more formed with a gentle pop—each a translucent sparrow with faint star-lines in its wings. They rose in a soft V, waiting.
"Rooflines, vantage points, congregations," I said, pointing. "One along the wall, one over the main street, one for the big tower, one for wherever they're collecting. Don't get cute. Try not to get shot."
They zipped off, white-blue threads weaving and vanishing over the stone. I folded to the first one as soon as it perched—the world snicking inside-out, distance swapping with location like a card trick. An instant later I sat crouched on a steep slate roof inside the city, legs crossed, the clay tiles cold under my thighs.
From here it looked like a painting in gold and blood. The last light spilled over crooked roofs, lighting up chimney smoke like silk. The Princely Court's dark tower shouldered up over clustered streets like a judge at a trial. Narrow lanes braided under me, torchlight already kindling in iron brackets. A blacksmith somewhere nearby hammered not quite in rhythm with the bell. The smell of meat, sweat, damp wool. Old wood. Horses. People. Life, heavy and a little afraid.
"Please be Renaissance," I breathed, scanning for anything that looked like a printing press or a person bathing. "Please be late Renaissance. Or, you know, hygiene-adjacent."
My lip curled at a smell that wasn't any of those things. "If it's the Dark Ages, I'm going to get persecuted on sight by a man who's never washed his hands. And then die of someone else's cough."
I let my eyes go soft and my mind drop into the tethered eyes of my sparrows. Vision thinned, multiplied: four little windows cut into the world, each painting a different moving frame. One slid along the inside of the wall, taking in sentries with spears and longbows that hadn't seen oil in a while. One danced above the market, where women in hooded shawls bartered bread for coins with rough hands. One tilted toward the tower's shadowed face, tracing notches in the stone like old scars.
The fourth found a crowd.
I tuned the others down and leaned into that one's sight. A square. Not grand—more like a widened street where three lanes met and argued. A platform. No, not a platform. A stake. Rough and tall in the way of things meant to be seen from far away. Rope wound near the top, something dark around the base.
"Festival," I said, hopefully, like an idiot. "Festival pole. Harvest thing. May Day."
Then I saw the woman tied to it.
My hope didn't die gracefully. It just fell over and rotted.
A ring of men in brown and gray stood near the front, faces set into pious masks with lips thin from overmuch scolding. Priests. Two wore black robes with white collars; one held up a book and shouted something about law. On the other side, a man with a torch walked like the world owed him the satisfaction of lighting things. The crowd behind them was tightly packed, as crowds are when they're trying not to think about what they're complicit in.
My jaw clenched. I didn't move. I let my mind do what it does: list risks, list gains, list the number of ways a stranger who appears beside a condemned woman and cuts her free becomes a story that gets told and told again until the telling draws soldiers.
"Don't," I told myself, low. "Not your world. Bad idea. You make one move and they burn your face on a carving for the church door. Quiet. Unknown. We keep it quiet."
The man with the torch put fire to the kindling around the stake. The dry stuff took fast, snapping and whispering the way small fires whisper when they're about to become bigger, dumber fires. Smoke curled up the pole like a white ribbon.
I didn't decide. I moved.
"Dive," I told the sparrow, and it dropped through the smoke, wings flaring blue as it tucked itself against the woman's shoulder, a breath from the rope. I pulled.
The world flipped. The square crashed into me—sound and light and heat and a hundred faces turning at once. I stood ankle-deep in kindling on a platform already too warm under my boots, smoke licking my face like a dog that doesn't understand personal space.
The noise the crowd made wasn't one noise. It was a quantity: shouts, inhaled breaths, a woman's high sob, a stone clacking against wood.
"Demon!" somebody shrieked, because of course. "Witchcraft!" yelled someone else, as if the scene below me weren't already the most witchy thing happening.
I ignored them.
Up close, the woman was too light in the way bodies get when they've been fed on malice and scraps. Wavy blonde hair had been hacked short and uneven, the ends breaking into little hooks where the blade had torn instead of cut. Her face was a map of fasts and fists: sharp cheekbones, a split at the corner of her mouth chicken-peck red, blue around one eye. Even so, the irises were stupidly bright—the blue you only see in sky over mountains or a cut of ice in a clean glass.
She looked at me like a surprise and a question. The exhaustion didn't quite cover the spark.
"Hi," I said, because I say dumb things in crisis. "We're leaving."
The First Star slipped into my hand with a thought—a silver unfurling the size of a heartbeat—and hissed bright as I cut. Rope bit, parted. I sheathed the blade mid-motion and caught her before gravity could add injury to indignity. She made a small noise, half pain, half disbelief, and then the air behind me split with a priest's voice cutting high.
"Stop him! Stop that—"
I was already folding.
The crowd and stake and smoke smeared to a streak; the cold of trees slammed into my lungs. I appeared under a fir as tall as an accusation, her weight in my arms, the forest floor damp underfoot. The evening wind breathed resin and leaf-rot and river-wet rock. The city wall hulked in the distance like a bad idea I didn't regret yet.
I ran.
Star-Limb is one of those ideas you have when you're tired of getting punched in the mouth. I channeled energy down my legs and let it bloom in quick, contained bursts: calves, hamstrings, the little stabilizers in the ankle that the body never thanks until they're gone. Wisps of white licked from knee to toe as though my shins had learned to exhale. Heat flooded the muscles—not burning, not yet—just a lightness like springs hidden in the bones.
Quick bursts only. You hold it too long, you're not running—you're roasting yourself.
I cleared a tangle of roots in one bound, then two slick rocks and the dead trunk of a fallen pine in three strides I had no business making on foot. Step, burst, step, burst— a rhythm that felt a little like cheating and a lot like freedom. The woman in my arms was a barely-there weight against my chest, her breath ghosting my collarbone in small, hot puffs.
"Hi," I said to her not-quite-conscious face, because conversation is how I pretend none of this is insane. "Quick survey: name, where am I, do you like the concept of not being set on fire?"
Her head lolled against my shoulder. No answer. Her lashes fluttered once and settled. The line of her mouth that had started to become a question softened into nothing.
"Of course you passed out," I muttered, deadpan to the pines. "Why would this be easy."
A hound bayed, distant and false in the way echoes are when they bounce off stone and come back wrong. I cut upslope under the darker shadows, choosing the terrain that didn't love riders or organized men with torches. The ground changed underfoot from damp loam to needle-dense spring, then to patches of frost that held the light like ground glass. The moon hadn't quite found the sky yet; the forest was a cathedral aisle where the choir hates you.
I let the Star-Limb fall away for a handful of strides and felt the return of weight like gravity pulling down my decisions. Breathing settled into the square shape of work. The warmth from the technique receded from my calves, leaving them annoyed.
"Okay," I told the trees, which were very interested in not caring. "Camp first. Questions later.."
The word left a metallic taste. The air tasted like iron and damp stone—the flavor of old places where things with teeth get bold after sunset.
I angled toward the sound of water that existed more in my ears than in the actual auditory world. Proxies fanned out in a loose arc ahead, their blue eyes pulling my attention now and then like little strings on my mind. No torches. No human voices close. A fox once, with the smugness foxes wear like cologne. A deer I didn't see, only heard bolt when my burst landed wrong.
The ground fell away into a shallow gully slick with ferns and the suggestion of a stream that would be a river in spring. The bank cut into a low shelf of dirt and roots, half-curled under an old stump. Shelter. Good enough. I eased her down onto the driest patch, my coat under her head because I like my dignity but I like her skull intact more.
Up close, the damage read clearer. Lines around the wrists where rope had been pulled too tight for too long. Pale marks under grime where hands had grabbed too hard. A welt along the ribs that made my teeth grind.
"You're okay," I told a stranger in a voice I reserve for people who need to believe nonsense. "It's okay. We'll argue about everything tomorrow."
She didn't move. Her breathing had that shallow, careful shape that belongs to people who've learned that if you breathe wrong in front of certain men, you get hurt for making the air upset.
Night thickened in layers, the trees blackening to cutouts. I sent one proxy far up to perch high in a fir and keep a bead on the road; another I tucked on the gully's lip to cover the approach from town. The third did a slow circle and then nested in the roots above us, little blue pulse beating like a second heart.
I stretched my senses along the anchor thread and found it cool and steady, far-away and present, like a call that always answers on the first ring. The cylinder—my ugly, precious anchor—was still in Rumi's hands in a different sky. The relief of that sat strange in my chest, like laughing at a funeral.
"Not alone," I told myself, filing the truth for later when I could afford it. "Just not here."
I drew the First Star and used the flat of the blade to reflect what moonlight we had, casting a pale wash over the gully. No eyeshine in the brush. No glint of iron. I sheathed it and pressed my palms together to rub warmth into them, the white under-skin lines along my forearms fading back to their patient, quiet selves.
A bell tolled again from the city, far away, too cheerful for its job. The wind ferried the smell of smoke and something else that rode under it—tallow? pitch?—the perfume of torches looking for a purpose.
I leaned back against the gully wall and let my head thud into dirt.
"Welcome to wherever the hell," I said to the night. "One star idiot, one rescued not-witch, zero toilets."
The forest didn't laugh. It just breathed, which is the kindest thing old places ever do.