Shattered Skies: The Morning Lights

CHAPTER 38: Master of the House

"Nothing changes, nothing ever will
Every year another brat, another mouth to fill
Same old story, what's the use of tears?
What's the use of praying if there's nobody who hears?
Turning, turning, turning, turning, turning through the years...

Turning, turning, turning through the years
Minutes into hours, and the hours into years
Nothing changes, nothing ever can
Round and round the roundabout and back where you began
Round and round and back where you began..."

- Claude-Michel Schönberg and Herbert Kretzmer

SHATTERED SKIES: THE MORNING LIGHTS

By BHS

ACT III: UNBREAKING

Chapter 38: Master of the House

La Fin de Toute

(formerly Galactica Palace)

Stars.

Sayaka Miki sat on the lip of the battered half-asteroid that housed Dead End's palace, wrapped in layers upon layers of energy shielding as she gazed up at the stars. The shielding likely wasn't necessary, as her "body" was a mere facsimile; her actual being was compressed into the sapphire jewel she wore in an ornate silver ring on the middle finger of her left hand. A Soul Gem couldn't get sick or die from the emissions given off by the melted mass of irradiated slag that used to be La Fin de Toute's exterior, nor could it suffocate in the airless void of space. Sayaka didn't care. She used the shielding and the oxygen bubble it supplied, even if she didn't need either, because they made her feel human.

Sayaka came out here to be alone. The lower-ranked Dead End soldiers were more than capable of repairing the palace... as long as they lasted, anyway. The grunts didn't need her help. Her specialty was brute force, and since Joker didn't have anyone for her to attack or kill at the moment, she was allowed to wander as she saw fit.

So she sat on the lip of the asteroid, her legs dangling over the side of its craggy, pockmarked face, and she gazed up at the stars. Without an atmosphere to distort them, they could shine in all their beauty, crisp and clear and brighter than they had ever been when seen from Earth. Most people thought that space was inky black from end to end, with only the stars providing light and color. Out here, however, only a few layers of shielding away from the endless void of space, Sayaka saw the truth. There were more colors in between the stars than she ever imagined: not just black, but deep, midnight blue and indigo, great wispy clouds of violet and royal purple and rose and vermillion, spread across a canvas dotted with stars as old as time itself, in a spectrum of colors all their own. Bright bluish-white stars and burning yellow stars and dusky red stars and little brown dwarf stars on the verge of dying out... The universe spread out before her, and she sat and watched it go by in a profound silence only broken by the sounds of her breathing and the pulse of her mock-heartbeat in her ears.

Dead End's vantage point above the supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A*, made the view even more spectacular. Sagittarius A* itself was invisible, a gargantuan, disc-shaped hole in reality 27 million miles wide, where space just wasn't, but the vista of rest of the universe appeared to swirl around it, dotted with turning, interlocking rings of stars. Some rings moved clockwise and others counterclockwise, but they were always in motion, never stopping. Somewhere in Dead End's vast library was a detailed explanation of why they looked like that... Sayaka recalled bit and pieces of her science classes in school, which said that black holes curved not just light, but space and time around themselves. She supposed that the rings were what the effects looked like to an observer up this close, but the deeper science behind what she saw was beyond her understanding. She didn't need or care to know. Dead End had plenty of other people whose job it was to think about the stars and how the universe worked; Sayaka's job was to fight when she was told, and that was all.