Wingspan(Paranormal, Young Adult) MAJOR EDITING**

fifty nine

finally she could indulge in solitude, her preferred method of star gazing.  

many a time she'd wondered how it were possible to be related to those insufferable money-eyed goats.  

aristocrats had no clue that behind her goody good-good demeanor that the princess was familiar with and schooled in meta-galactic space.

and when she'd tried to explain to the la-di-da that had accepted her into their court all because their proverbial husbands had forced them, their faces turned blank, their blinking eyes wide and unsure when she explained the unique differences amidst the galaxies that was surely impossible to miss.

important families that she had grown up with didn't understand her lifelong interest.

when mister tafitta, her fathers business exporting comrade sidelined her clarification on the astronomer scale that gave brighter stars a low number and dim stars a higher number and commented with vindication that contrary to popular belief stars do not actually twinkle, but is a result of atmospheric pressure, her dancing partner had started talking about pepper and the many ways one could use the spice in cooking. pepper of all things. 

to be polite she nodded and smiled and pretended to care just as she had been taught.

Aaah but tonight she was feasting her eyes savoring every bit of the greatest pleasure she'd ever known in all her seventeen years of living.

now that she was alone she gave herself permission to let go of duty and obligation and surrender to that part of herself which had always neglected tomfoolery and forsaken her youth for commitments of devotion and alliance instead of childishness and merriment.

in the night sky some brilliant stars shine brighter than others like tiny pinpricks of light. like a gigantic nuclear furnace.

it was difficult to make out but there were thousands of luminous balls of gas held by its own gravity that emit blue and red light depending on their temperature.

stars, she had learned, were the most plentiful objects in the visible universe that provided light and energy fueling the solar system.  

stars also create heavy elements necessary to form life and a great representation of that happens when a star collapses in on itself. 

the nebula of un-contracted stars coalesce into a dense region called a protostar by the gravity of that passing star or the shock-wave from that supernova nearby.

eventually the condensation of the protostar will reach critical mass and a nuclear fusion begins. this part of the circle of life begins the main sequence phase of the star and depending on its size will spend most of its life in this stable phase.

since very large massive sized stars burn their fuel much faster than small stars their main sequence may only last up to a few hundred thousand years.

just as the generation of man the process of stars repeats itself through the universe in an endless cycle of birth, death, and rebirth. 

thus every living thing on earth was connected to a greater unknown, the universe. 

her favorites, variable stars, changed in brightness when they are old and dying, except these ones she was looking at were incandescent and beaming. if she'd used a telescope she would have picked out one star behind another.

joyous happy laughter filtered beyond the inner sanctum of the castle, the people unaware of a pursuit in quest that ended outside on the balcony.

getting past the guards had been easy.