𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐫𝐬 𝐰𝐢𝐥𝐥 𝐟𝐚𝐥𝐥 | carlisle cullen

(𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐩𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝐨𝐧𝐞) stars will fall

song for this chapter
stars will fall - duster

✧✧✧

1856

EVERY YEAR ON THE 22ND OF NOVEMBER, there was a celebration. The story of how it came around was long and boring yet patterned over everyones lives for at least the last few decades. It happened over the finest states in America, a different each year and this year (1856) it happened to be in Washington. Everyone wore their finest gowns, moonlight illuminating silks of violet and velvets of emerald. Fire danced in torches outlining each cobbled street. Women laughed at the sour jokes of men who trailed them around like show dogs, their hair piled in pretty curls and adorned with fine jewelled flowers.

Estella stood just outside the large canopy where the dozens on dozens of couples were dancing with their perfect elegance, each in time not only with the music but also with each other. Arms lay elegantly at their sides as they span, like carefully placed tree branches reaching for someone to hold, a hand dazzling and slender would entwine and the gorgeous gowns would fly out again in colours to draw eyes.

However despite the dancing fire, the twirling gowns and the gorgeous array of music calling out from the glowing canopy, Estella's gaze remained firmly rested on the sky above her. It wasn't that she didn't see the beauty in the ruffles and the laughter. The appeal poured out of almost every corner of the nightlong celebrations and although she hadn't really wanted to come here, she enjoyed the ambiance of it none the less.

So it wasn't necessarily that she saw the whole thing as pointless or too pretentious, it was that the sky was so clear that night and no one else had noticed. The soft indigo fabrics of the world had coiled carefully with the lavender clouds which would've been picturesque enough on its own but that's not what had caught Estella's eye.

Instead she had her neck craned in an uncomfortable position in order to stare at the stars. So many in dazzling array to one another. They stood apart from the sky yet couldn't be closer. Each had a different story, yet in the tangling galaxies there were too many to hear, too many to know and certainly too many to tell.

Estella had always had a fixation with the stars ever since she was small. Her mother had sang her to sleep wrapped in glorious song of stretching stars for miles and miles. Each story had left her in a trance wondering what it would be like to sleep on the moon or dance on Jupiter. Stars trailed along her life, leaving imprints in her footsteps. There was such a beauty knowing that the stars were one of the only things that man couldn't touch.

Her mother had died when she'd been thirteen, eight years ago now. Yet her stories of the stars still sent Estella into an interrupted sleep most nights. Estella supposed she found comfort in them but it was more the beauty that drew her eye. Despite how much her neck began to ache as she stared tirelessly towards the sky, she didn't look away. Estella wondered if she would be able to even if she pleased.