Chapter 1 #3
"You have never told me your name." She couldn’t look him in the eye, instead focusing on the way her fingers fluttered over the bloom. Her Stella rose to meet it, gentle blue sparking over the edges.
He sat beside her, his legs dangling over the crater. His face hardened as he stared into the charred pit.
"I do not have one."
At that, she turned to look at him fully.
"Celestials are nameless," he said.
Her fingers fell away from the bloom. She could not imagine being nameless. Names made them who they were. Without it, they were nothing—only Souls.
She shifted, dirt on her knees as her skirts rose. "Do you wish for a name?"
His dark eyes flicked over her face, falling to where her hands were in the dirt, leaning toward him. She liked to think she was getting better at understanding his expressions.
Perhaps she was fooling herself. He was not beholden to the idiosyncrasies of humans. He was a being wholly unto himself, unable to be known.
"Would you name me?" he asked.
It was forward of her but… "Yes."
"Very well, Vesperin Vox. Grant me a name."
"I will," she replied, "though not now. Names are important."
She vowed to put the most effort into giving him a name.
As the weeks passed, each time he would see her, instead of a greeting, he would say, "Have you chosen for me?"
To which she would reply, time after time, "No."
She spent her days in the archival building when not doing chores. She carried her wax tablet everywhere, writing down names—there were so many.
But none fit.
Her Star needed something other.
One afternoon, she saw the clouds and the ever-present everything beyond and above, and untucked her tablet from her satchel, quickly scratching down, Cosmos.
Later that night, staring at her ceiling, she scratched away the word.
That was not a fitting name for him. It was other enough, but not quite right.
There was a leather-bound tome in the archival building, an image of their planet, Stella, on the cover. Her fingers traced over the sketches and words with fervor.
That was the moment she knew she’d found his name.
She held onto it for many more days, wanting to ensure it was right.
Finally, she could keep it secret no longer.
"Have you chosen?" he asked as he came to sit beneath the willow tree.
The air was colder now. It approached the frigid season. Soon, her village would celebrate the change with a grand feast, as the darkness of the days lengthened.
The flower petals in the meadow were shrinking away from the cold.
"Yes." She said nothing more.
"Will you not tell me?"
"Atlas," she pronounced softly. "Because you are a bearer from the sky, holding up the Stars with the weight of your shoulders. That is why I have chosen this name for you. Do you like it?" she asked.
His face would be unreadable to most, but not to her. She saw the slight dip to his throat. The lowering of his eyes.
"It is striking, but not as much as the one who gave it to me," Atlas said. "Say it—my name."
"Atlas, Atlas."
"Vesperin," he murmured. "And Atlas."
He did something then that surprised her. He turned, took her face between his hands, and pulled her close. He gave her a single breath before his lips met hers. Her first kiss. It was gentle. When he pulled away, she could only stare.
"Why did you—"
His tongue traced over his bottom lip, as if to chase the taste of her. "I have wanted to do that for some time. I could not help myself."
She blushed. "How did you know… about that?" She could not bring herself to call it what it was—kissing.
His hair fell over his brow. His features had grown sharper the longer he had lived on this planet, as if the pointed edges of the Stars were clinging to him. "I know what humans do. I have watched for a—long time." He spoke as though a long time were something no one like her could understand.
She wondered what a being of the Stars would consider a long time.
"What kind of things have you watched?" She remembered him asking her to tell him about humans. "Why did you wish to know what humans were like if you already knew?"
He answered only her second question. "Watching and knowing are different.
" His fingers traced over the sides of her face as if to commit her shape to memory.
"You can watch a farmer sow seeds, but you do not know what it is to feel the give of the dirt under your plow or the toil in your bones until you do so yourself.
I wanted to know how you felt as you described the things I have only watched. "
She leaned into his palm. "This is one thing I did not know, either. We discovered it together."
"You have never been kissed?"
"I have now—by you."
From that day on, Atlas made it a point to kiss her in greeting every time he saw her.
Weeks turned into months, and every evening Vesperin visited him beneath the willow tree.
The air grew cold and sharp, the nights long and weary. Fresh meat, vegetables, and fruit grew scarce as the ground was no longer ripe for sustenance, and the animals burrowed away.
She lived on thin herb soups and dried meat. She grew thinner.
Atlas grew worried.
One early dark night, bundled in a thick fur cloak, she trudged through snow to the meadow. The crater had long since filled with leaves, then grown packed with snow.
She kept shivering, and Atlas could take it no more. She was too frozen to protest as he led her away, down the slippery ice-coated hill and past the barren meadow.
He seemed torn, as though he would rather see her cold and clinging to him than safe and warm anywhere else.
She wouldn’t go, even if he forced her away.
She had grown reliant on him—the only being who had ever truly heard her, who had listened to everything she kept hidden.
She told him things she never told anyone else.
"Where are we g-going?" she asked through frozen lips as his hand was tight and warm around hers, leading her stumbling through the snow.
He walked deep into the forest. Snow clung to the deadened tree limbs and blanketed the ground.
She did not fear the forest, for her Star was with her.
"You are not made for this," he answered, almost angrily.
Her hand was limp in his as he pulled her on. They wove through trees and past rocks until they cleared a thick passage, nestled between two pieces of stone, jutting up to form an arch. Beyond, the mountains rose. Snow began to fall in earnest, clinging to her lashes.
Her fur-lined boot caught against a gnarled root, and she started to fall. Atlas caught her before she blinked. His hands were so warm on her skin, burning through her cloak.
He held her. "You are like ice, Star of mine." He’d taken to calling her that, sometimes; mostly when she was unaware. For him to use it now meant he thought she was too freezing to focus.
He lifted her effortlessly, cradling her to his chest. She sighed into his neck as he carried her into a deep cave. It smelled like him, almost.
Her lids fluttered as she was laid on something soft. He released her, and she stared at his back as he kneeled over a pile of twigs, ash on the stone surrounding it.
Atlas never told her where he went when not beneath the willow tree.
"This is your home?" she questioned.
Fire illuminated his golden skin, its crackle promising warmth she could not ignore.
She began to shift forward, numb fingers tugging at her snow-coated cloak. He stilled her, pulling it away. She was left in her simple gown, the inside hemmed with fur.
"I have no home—you would do well to remember that I am unlike you in this way." Atlas cupped her hands between his and held them toward the fire. "It is never clearer to me the differences between us when you are like this. Vulnerable." He said the word like a curse. "Mortal."
"Not everyone can be immune to the elements," she managed, body slowly thawing.
"That is not what I speak of, Vesperin. We both know this is not eternal." His thumb stroked over the back of her hand. His words were soft, but their meaning was hard as ice, cutting through her.
"It does not have to be eternal to mean something. The things that mean the most are fleeting, because you hold onto it tighter, knowing it does not last."
In the months since their first kiss, there had only been a few instances in which it had grown heated—in which she had blushed the whole walk home, hand hovering over her swollen lips.
She always wondered what her mother and father would think, knowing she let herself be touched by a man without a chaperone.
But Atlas was not a man. So her guilt never stayed long.
Atlas gave a long-suffering sigh, as if he truly did hold up the Stars.
"There is much I cannot tell you, Vesperin, but know this.
" He took her hand and pressed it against her chest. Her Stella rose, blue crackling around their joined fingers.
She had never seen his magic, not since that day, but she felt it sometimes, just beneath his flesh.
"If there is one thing you are, it is eternal.
And if there is one word to describe what you mean to me, it is far from fleeting. "
He kissed her, then, and she melted from the heat of him and the fire.
Atlas pulled away until their lips barely brushed. "You mean everything to me. You are the only thing keeping me from slipping away and dying like a spent Star."
"Don’t slip away," she said against his mouth. "I won’t let you." She knew there was much she could never, would never, know about him.
She wasn’t made to know.
He had fallen, and she had found him. He liked to say she had saved him, but she liked to think they had both saved each other. That was all she needed to know. That was enough.
They fell back against fire-warmed furs.
His hand pressed near her head, fingers tangling in her brown hair. The line of his body pressed against hers. Ensconcing her within his depths.
She wanted to take him into her, do the things she had only heard in glimpses of gossip from the other girls in the village.