Star Eater
Far beyond the last root of the World Tree, past the final pale moon at the edge of everything, a light goes out.
It is a star. Or to be more accurate, it was a star.
For a long age it burned in the cold, one of the first sparks struck against the dark when the dark was all there was.
Now, something folds around it and draws it down and in, the way Fate is drawn up from the black pool in the heart of Yggdrasil, only backward, an ending instead of a beginning.
The star does not burn out. It is unmade. Its heat, its weight, all of it comes apart, and then, there is one less light in the sky.
The sky does not notice. The darkness grows a little larger than before.
This is not cruelty. It does not know the word. It knows only that it was first, that everything bright was made out of it and borrowed from it, and that a borrowed thing is owed back.
It doesn't steal the light. It collects it.
For most of forever, it had nowhere to go, because it had never learned there was anywhere at all. It widened slowly in the black and ate what drifted near and wanted for nothing, because it didn't know that wanting was a thing that could be done.
That was before a small, curious thing that should have known better came wandering out past the safe and the sensible to look at the very edge of creation.
Too clever to stay home and too trusting to be afraid, it came close enough to touch. The nothing, which had never in all its ages met a single new thing, opened up and took it, and found for the first time that it was full.
Full of ideas. Full of names and numbers and songs, and the shapes of nine bright worlds strung on a tree of silver light. A thousand thousand living things that had never once occurred to a dark that had only ever known itself.
The wanderer had been so full of somewheres that in the eating, the nothing swallowed the most dangerous thing it would ever taste.
Knowledge.
Now it moves with purpose, as it never has before. It follows the road the curious one carried folded away in its bright and busy mind, the way home the wanderer never meant to leave open behind it.
Star by star it comes, and eats as it comes, and in the far bright worlds the songs grow quieter, and the wise feel a cold they can't name and blame one another for it.
Ahead, still distant, still patient, the great tree waits. Heavy with more magic and more life. Warm, new things that the nothing has words for, because it has no words of its own, only borrowed ones, only appetite.
A feast awaits. It is not there yet, but it is closer than it was.
Scattered on one of the worlds of the tree, a new light has kindled. Small. Whole. Fierce and unafraid and steady. The nothing knows that whatever the little star is, it will taste the sweetest.
It does not know the star has a name.
It does not know she was made for precisely this.
It knows only that it is hungry, that she is warm, and that it is almost here.
Thank you so much for reading!