Here the shooting star had plunged into a hillside, blowing open a crater like a tumbled mine shaft.
Easing his sword from its scabbard, though he sensed no danger, Sunbright paced forward. The forest here was scrubby, rife with pin oaks and mossy granite rocks taller than himself. Yet several rocks had been blown aside like dandelion fluff when the star crashed. The forest was hushed, for animals still avoided the area. Quietly, wary of hidden holes, Sunbright padded across old leaves, then onto fresh-turned dirt of yellow and brown. The hillside was not high, and the impact had split the top like a loaf of bread, leaving a large hole. Sunbright tiptoed to peek inside.
The bottom was ten feet down at a slant. Nothing showed but dirt. Considering the size of the hole, and being unfamiliar with shooting stars, Sunbright had no idea how deep the star might be buried.
He stood up straight and checked the forest all around, but saw nothing but a pair of cardinals chasing each other through a wild rose bush. The sun was one hand over the horizon, for he'd spent the afternoon walking. Now that he was here, he didn't know what to do. Once he called quietly, "Greenwillow?"
No answer.
Humming a love song to himself, he swept clean a rock and sat down, to wait for sunset, Harvester across his knees.
"There you are! What's this hole?"
Sunbright rose to meet the arcanist. Candlemas, always curious, sank sandal-deep in fresh dirt as he climbed the low hill and peered into blackness.
"A shooting star landed last night. I saw it from a window." The memory of almost tumbling out made Sunbright's knees shake, but he clamped them straight. "I don't know how deep it is."
"Keeper of the Sun!" Candlemas reared back as if from a bonfire. "Feel that enchantment!"
Sunbright stood alongside, but felt nothing. "What? It's magic?"
"By Jannath's Tears, I'll say! My, it's-imagine how strong the magic must be if we can feel it at a distance!" The stocky mage jumped in place like a child offered a treat. "We must dig it up! I must have that star!"
Shrugging, Sunbright sheathed Harvester, cast about for some digging implement, for he wouldn't ply his sword as a shovel. Breaking a dead branch clipped by the fallen star, the barbarian slid down into the hole and dug. Candlemas helped, shoveling dirt with his hands like a dog. As the sun disappeared, he picked up a stone, muttered a small cantra, and set it glowing like cold fire.
"That's a handy spell," Sunbright told him.
"It's nothing."
The star was not deep, it turned out, not over two feet buried. Sunbright missed it at first and started to dig around, until Candlemas stopped him. "What are you doing? Dig it free!"
"This?" The barbarian thumped the branch on the star. It looked like a plain, lumpy stone, burned black. "This can't be it."
"Why not?" Candlemas hunkered on his hams above the hole. "What did you expect?"
"Shouldn't it glow, like your rock there?"
A snort. "No. It was afire when it fell, like iron in a forge. It was snuffed by the dirt."
"Seems pretty ordinary for something so magical."
"And what's an emperor's crown but a hoop of pointed gold? Yet it can move mountains." The mage ran his hands over the burned, sandy surface lovingly. "My, my. I might get my own floating city after all. Imagine the value of this thing! I'll be rich."
"It'd make a fine anchor." Sunbright tried and failed to lever the thing up. "It's powerful heavy. Or else stuck."
"It's not stuck. Here, give me a hand."
But dig and grab hold as they might, the two men couldn't budge the star, though it was no bigger than a pumpkin. If anything, the star settled deeper into the hole they scratched, as if alive and wishing to hide.
Sweating, swearing, Sunbright opined, "You'll have to dig away the hillside, and hitch an ox team to drag it out. It weighs more than lead!"
"I think you're right." Candlemas's face and hands were sooty, his arms sandy to the elbows. "It must be made of… I can't think what. The densest metals are lead and gold, though the old books speak of adamantine being harder and denser. Still, this is the most solid stuff I've ever seen. I doubt your sword could scratch it."
"We'll never know," countered the barbarian.
The forest was dark. In a distant bog crickets chirped and peepers cheeped. Candlemas reached out, grabbed the small stone he'd illuminated, snuffed its magic and turned the hole black. "We'll return on the morrow. I'll have Damita from the stables bring a hitching rig and a stone boat. Then-"
"What's that?" Sunbright snapped his head up, out of the hole. "There's a rushing in the treetops."
"Night wind. It's-no, wait."
Candlemas squinted in the dark. The little star was glowing. Ripples of green light chased each other across its surface.
Sunbright glanced down, hissed, "You said it wouldn't glow!"
"It shouldn't!" Candlemas backed up, slid on sand, landed back on the cooling star. Eldritch fire illuminated his hairy toes. "It's magical, but-"
Near Candlemas's shoulder, Sunbright ducked as the rushing sounded again, louder, as if a giant bird beat the forest, hunting them, or a hurricane stirred the tree crowns. But the sound was loudest in the hole. The rushing came from the fallen star. "It's hissing! It's working! It's-"
"Get out!" Candlemas grabbed the barbarian's belt to haul himself along even while pushing. "Get out! It's going to explo-"
Green light flashed from the star, engulfed the two men, and winked out.
The smoking hole lay empty.
Chapter 4
Mouth open, hands clawed in an instinctive flinch, legs splayed to dive out of the hole, Sunbright stood frozen, unable to move anything, even his eyes. All that worked was his brain, and it wondered at what he saw.
The dirt and rock and black sky were drawn from solid objects to fine threads. A stone under his foot shrank and elongated, until it was a gray line like a pencil mark traveling from underneath him out of the hole, into infinity. So too went the dirt, and the nothingness of the hole itself. The night sky was shredded into splinters that sailed past him like black spears to mingle with strings of soil and tree roots that could encircle the world. All these objects stretched in two directions, all intermingled yet all separate, so Sunbright could follow the lines of each with his stiff and staring eyes.
Even Candlemas was drawn thin, like gold wire under a smith's tiny hammer, the outlines of the arcanist's body flattened and smoothed and stretched. Yet it was still the pudgy mage, Sunbright knew, whole and intact, but hair-thin. And so, he supposed, he must look to Candlemas. Sunbright shaved into a thousand splinters laid together like hair in a horse's tail.
They were moving and yet not moving. But if the lines of themselves were stretching from the hole to somewhere else, where were they going? Was this magic, or some other force? Certainly Sunbright had never heard of anything similar. Had the magic star somehow fashioned this weird not-spell? For it too was not an arm's length away, yanked fine, sailing through space, yet lying still as ever.
It was confusing, frightening, maddening. Sunbright wondered if it would last forever: certainly he felt like a granite statue. What if the fallen star sought to protect itself, and had suspended them in a spell forever? Could anything break it? Was this the ultimate curse, to stand and think unmoving for eternity? Could they be rescued, or even found? What if the hole collapsed about them, and buried them unmoving? How many seasons would pass before they saw sunlight again?
And if Sunbright stayed frozen this way forever, how would he ever find Greenwillow?
He stood for years, centuries, longer, waiting and fretting and wondering if this strange journey would ever end.