The stars were wrong, and I knew I was going to die for noticing.
I felt it as I pressed my face against the cold glass window of our observatory tower, watching the constellations through the fog of my breath with the kind of desperate attention I usually saved for avoiding Padre Vicente's questions about my "unwomanly pursuits." Above Cordoba's sleeping rooftops, everything looked normal; Ursa Major wheeling toward the horizon, Cassiopeia climbing toward her throne. But the celestial order had shifted, a change that made Papa's carefully drawn star charts look like they were from another time.
The autumn wind carried the scent of orange blossoms through the open window, along with that metallic smell that comes right before a thunderstorm, though no clouds marred the crystalline sky. I shivered and hunched over my desk again, trying to ignore the way my hands shook as I scratched notes across parchment already covered in calculations and frantic corrections.
Celestial phenomenon observed, pattern suggests recurring cycle, I wrote, then scratched it out hard enough to bore a hole in the paper. The Inquisition had spies everywhere. Papa had warned me about writing down anything that might sound like prophecy, and it would seem "predicting catastrophe based on mathematical observations" qualified.
I tried again: Unusual alignments noted, further study required.
Safe. Boring. Useless.
But the truth burned in my chest like swallowed fire. For months, I'd been tracking an anomaly that defied every astronomical text Papa had taught me to read. Using Papa's connections, I discovered the ancients had written about it in fragments; scattered references in Greek scrolls about "the Night That Devours Light," Egyptian warnings carved into temple walls about "the Time of Empty Sky." Even the Maya had calculated its return with obsessive precision.
Every eight thousand years, stars vanished and disaster followed.
I'd found the pattern on my own, working through calculations that made my eyes burn and my head ache. I'd cross-referenced eclipse tables, tracked precession cycles, mapped gravitational anomalies that shouldn't exist. What I'd discovered was impossible, heretical, and absolutely certain.
What I had been calling a convergence was not just a figment of an overactive imagination that had been raised on the stories of the cosmos. It was real. Certainty crystallized within me just as a candle's flame on my desk guttered and died. Not with the honest flicker of spent wick, but as if invisible fingers had reached down and pinched it out. Then another.
My quill clattered to the floor as darkness crept across the observatory. In the growing shadows, my star charts shimmered and danced, the ink lifting from the pages as if they remembered they were once star dust and were trying to return home. All those careful calculations rearranged themselves into patterns that hurt to look at directly.
The atmosphere had turned malevolent. More threatening than usual. The remaining candles burned lower with preternatural speed, wax pooling on the stone windowsill where I'd set them for better light.
For the past week, I'd felt watched; not by human eyes, but by a presence vast and patient that seemed to peer down from the spaces between stars the way eternity might watch a mayfly, with neither malice nor kindness, only the terrible attention of something that measures time in the death of galaxies.
Papa said it was nerves, that the Inquisition made everyone jumpy. But I couldn't shake the feeling that whatever was coming for the stars might be coming for me first.
The last candles died, plunging the observatory into complete darkness.
In the silence, I heard footsteps on the spiral stair.
My heart hammered against its cage of bones. Papa was in Seville on Queen Isabella's business. I was supposed to be alone in the tower, the only person with a key. The guards would never let anyone up without permission, unless—
The footsteps stopped just outside the door.
"Estrella Serra," said a voice that sounded impossible, like the sound stars make when they dream.
I pressed myself against the desk, charts crinkling beneath my hands. "Who's there? How do you know my name?"
The door opened without a sound.
What entered wasn't quite a person. It might have been wearing robes; there was a suggestion of fabric that moved like liquid night, spangled with points of light too numerous to count. The face beneath what might have been a hood shifted and blurred, beautiful one moment and terrible the next, as if I were seeing it through water or tears or the distortion of intense heat.
"You found it," the thing said, and its voice came from everywhere at once; from the stones of the walls, from the air itself, from inside my own chest, which already felt too small to contain my terror. "You found the event."
I tried to speak and couldn't. My tongue felt heavy and clumsy, my thoughts scattered like leaves in a windstorm. This was what the old stories warned about; creatures that existed in the spaces between human understanding, beings that drove men mad just by being perceived. But even as fear threatened to shatter my mind, the astronomer in me stirred. This being knew about the anomaly I was tracking. The pattern I'd spent months discovering. Whatever it was, whatever it cost me, I had to understand.
The thing moved closer, and the air grew thick and strange. The dead candles suddenly flared back to life, their flames stretching upward like grasping fingers, while shadows danced on the walls in patterns that suggested wings and the slow turning of immense wheels.
"The Starless Night," it said, and the word resonated through the stone chamber like a struck bell. "You calculated its return. You see the truth hidden in the heavens."
"I don't understand," I whispered, though part of me did understand, the part that had been dreaming of silver-haired princes and stars raining from the sky.
"You will." The thing extended what might have been a hand, and a perfect silvery white light began to gather around its fingers like captured moonbeams. "But not here. Not in this form."
The light spread, filling the observatory with radiance that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere. My charts began to smoke and curl, but instead of burning they dissolved into streams of silver that flowed toward me like living water.
"Please," I gasped, feeling my strength ebb as the light touched my skin. "I don't want to die."
"I'm sorry," the thing said, and for a moment its voice held something almost human; grief, perhaps. "I need you."
The last thing I saw was my life's work transforming into threads of pure silver that wrapped around my heart like chains. Then the light swallowed everything, and I was falling upward through centuries of darkness.
I was falling toward death.