There’s a hush that hangs after midnight in the waters of the Everglades–a silence that isn’t truly silent, threaded with the constant, murmuring chorus of crickets and frogs. They keep time, measuring the slow, rhythmic breath of night as it passes.
I wake, but not in the boathouse where I remember being chained… bound to a support beam by rusty shackles that scraped my bones each time I moved. I glance down, rubbing my wrists where the soreness still lingers. My skin feels bruised and raw and…different, somehow.
Did I escape? How? Or was I…left here?
I look around. The air is thick, dense with warm, damp dark–a wet heaviness I swallow down with each slow breath, tasting faintly of ancient bark and earth. My clothes are soaked, clinging to me, heavy with muck from the water that lies everywhere around me. My arms and legs are streaked with mud.
Did I swim here? Drag myself across these waters, using the last shreds of strength I didn’t know I had? The thought is impossible–but then, so is waking up alone, unbound.
For days I grew weaker–given only water to drink. But soon that wasn’t enough, and my limbs trembled as hunger gnawed at me. They ignored my hoarse pleas:
“For the love of God, I need something to eat.”
They ignored me most of the time, absorbed by working on their–thing. I don’t know what to call it, whatever it was. They didn’t speak to me much, but the one that did seemed to have a limited grasp of English and the other one…he didn’t speak to me at all.
Now here I am, on this tiny island, as if I’d crawled up from the mud like some swamp creature, my back pressed to the knotted roots of a cypress to keep from sinking into the soft earth below.
There’s something strange that has been bothering me since I opened my eyes. Of course the fact that I’d been held captive for a week by two thin swamp hillbillies with hollow, sunken eyes bothers me…and that I woke up here, on this muddy island bothers me too; but that’s not what I mean. Something else entirely has been bothering me–it’s a feeling that has been persistently gnawing at me, telling me that something is different–just a little bit off from how it’s supposed to be–changed. Something’s changed.
It’s been there since I opened my eyes, and only now can I place it: there’s plenty of moonlight, the stars uncommonly bright, but beneath the arms and leaves of the canopy above, so little of that light reaches me…yet, in the dimness all around, where every shadow should be shrouded and vague, menacing…I don’t feel anxious or afraid, because despite the darkness, I can see perfectly.
How strange.
Should I feel this calm? The only feeling that seems to have any hold over me is hunger, and that feeling is strong. So, so strong, and I’ve only just noticed it now, when the thought of it was brought to mind. I think I should be traumatized, maybe? Something like that? After being kidnapped and held for over a week without being given anything to eat, shouldn’t I feel damaged? Out in the open in the Everglades without any sort of camping or survival gear, shouldn’t I be feeling something? Anything but hunger?
Has being in the swamp after nightfall ever bothered me? No. I don’t think it has. Not the endless press of black water or the sound of ripples as things move darkly, dangerously, just beneath the surface. Even the strange chorus of voices in the night closing in around me fails to be a problem.
Before those men–stretched out as long and elastic as rubber bands, with their smoldering, flame-like skin and reed-thin, bony arms–took me to their little lair, I’d come out here to stay. I’d come here for a reason–a purpose. I’d been meant to do something out here at night.
Why? What was I doing?
A sound rises faintly, and I realize immediately how uncommonly quiet it is. I shouldn’t hear it at all above the shrill twitching of crickets or the discordant croaking all around me. A wall of sound penetrated by this whisper of movement, like feathers brushing paper. It should be hidden and I know that I shouldn’t hear it–but I hear it anyway, even pinpointing that it’s coming from somewhere to my left. I turn my head.
It’s a moth. Why does it seem so familiar? Do I know this moth? Have we met?
No, that’s not it at all. Close. But that’s not it. Something about it is connected to the thing I’d been trying to recall before I heard it.
The memory is there, lurking on the frayed edges of my mind like a nightmare, quickly faded and forgotten. It’s still half-asleep in my mind, and I want to shake it awake so it can tell me the secrets it keeps–the things I want to know. But it’s just out of reach.
The moth moves toward me, stopping to hover. Waiting. Watching. I feel the urge to follow it rising like an instinct that belongs to someone else, so I climb to my feet. As soon as I do, it flutters further. I pause, so as not to startle it, and it circles back to face me, waiting again, so I release any hesitation and follow. The moth doesn’t stray far; it leads me to the edge of a small clearing, where a gnarled, twisted, and rotting trunk rises from the damp ground, its roots knotted in thick coils reaching down into the mud.
There, clinging to the trunk just above my head, is a fragile bloom. A small white flower, the roots reaching down, coiling into the bark and holding it aloft so it seems to float midair, swaying on the breeze. The contrast of the white petals glow like a specter in the gloom of the night.
Ghost orchid.
Giant sphinx moth.
The memory is finally awake. This is why I’d come out here. Before those men found me, I’d come out here alone with scent traps and night-vision cameras to track these orchids and these moths, to study how often the insects visited to pollinate, to find out if any factors in the environment were disrupting their patterns. It was work for the Florida Department of Environmental Protection.
My name is Elara Knox. I am a botanist. There are between 1,500 and 2,000 of these orchids left in the wild. This flower is endangered.
Wait–had I forgotten all of that and only remembered now? Even my own name? What had those men done to me? Everything I should remember–things I should know about myself–it’s all still there. I can feel it. But it teeters, misplaced on the edges of forgetting. Rearranged into corners where it doesn’t belong. Making sense of the fragments as I discover them and pull them to the surface is a daunting task. Daunting, but not impossible. Everything I am is still here, trapped in the clutches of forgetting and I just have to jar it loose…
When they found my tent just before dawn, I was lying down to sleep having spent the night searching out giant sphinx moths in the hopes they would lead me to a ghost orchid. I was on the verge of closing my eyes when they’d forced their way into my shelter.
Their skin was so hot it scorched the nylon when they snatched the tent’s doorway seam and yanked the zipper open.
Their hands were like burning skillets when they grabbed me from my sleeping bag and dragged me out into the growing purple of dawn as it crawled to life on the edge of the horizon. The shorter one was in charge. He wore muddy overalls without a shirt beneath, and he made the taller one put the rust-pocked shackles on my wrists.
I screamed and screamed, and neither one of them ever said a word to me. The taller one just slung the opposite end of the chain over his shoulder, the bony blade attached to it as large and round as a serving platter. It stuck out beneath his stained undershirt with a striking, strange prominence. A strange smell hung in the air around them–familiar, yet I didn’t have the words to describe it at first–but then, it began to remind me of something I knew. It smelled like the frayed cord of something that should have been unplugged immediately…of melting microchips. They smelled like a pair of electrical fires.
The taller one, with one hand plunged deep into his pocket and the other clutching a fistful of corroded chain links, moved with the casual posture of a man on a leisurely walk with his small dog as he pulled me. He followed behind the shorter one leading the way deeper into the swamp.
The taller of the two made no sound as we traveled through the swamp, yet the smaller one spoke excited and animatedly the entire time. He kept his voice low, the sound of it like the speaking whisper of a rat. Quietly, so as to prevent me from hearing he muttered strange things to other as they walked. Most of those things sounded like words in an unfamiliar language. In truth, I’m unsure of that assumption because I never heard a single syllable clearly enough to make sense of it, screaming at the top of my lungs for help as they pulled me along. I knew there was nobody around for miles to hear, but I screamed my head off anyway.
Presently, the moth flutters over the orchid, as though allowing me to take in its details before it will finally alight and I accept its strange invitation.
The thin white petals stretch outward, yawning open in thin, ghostly curls. It sways almost imperceptibly, breathing with the night, its pale petals drinking in the hints of moonlight until it seems to glow with it. The air around it carries a fragrance of sweet decay, something once dead, hauntingly brought back to life.
The moth lands, folding its wings, painted in patterns like shattered glass. It reflects against the dark like distant starlight as its silvery, soft body shimmers and finally settles. Its mirrored black eyes seem to stare back at me, and the feathered antennae on its head flex, feeling the texture of the orchid’s surface.
Unbidden and moving without my command, I watch in indescribable horror as my hand moves through the darkness with the silent speed of an owl descending from above. My fingers wrap quickly around both moth and orchid, tearing the flower away from the tree trunk, roots and all. The movement is quick, yet so delicately precise that I’m able to clutch both the flower and the moth in my fist without crushing either, feeling the insect squirm against my palm.
My mouth opens in a wide, hungry yawn, and I stuff both the moth and the orchid into the back of my throat, swallowing them whole.
I’d searched for one of these ghost orchids for over a week before the men found me. This was an important find: a rare and delicate endangered species, I’d come out here to study…
…and I’ve just swallowed it instead.
I don’t know what came over me. The Hunger was so strong, I couldn’t help myself.
The eerie calm I felt when I first awoke has fled–but it also still clings to me, like a strange duality. A part of me wants to vomit. But another part, a second self, seems to have watched all of this happen from within, uncaring. I feel both because I am both, perhaps?
I would never have done this willingly, yet I just watched my hand do it on its own, following the command to feed, given by something wordless and unknown in the dark. This hunger isn’t mine, but it is inside me. It doesn’t belong to me–it feels like a passenger, something with no name or shape, existing in all directions at once.
It is endless. Boundless.
Limitless.
And just like it, I feel boundless too. The Hunger takes no single form because it needs none. Just as I need none…
The act of consuming the orchid fills me with an odd lightness, a release of pressure, and the heaviness that I felt in the pit of my empty stomach seems to lift. But then, a moment later, it returns twice as strong. I am moving again, toward the water’s edge without telling my body to move, drawn to the soft light of fireflies gathered in the reeds.
This time I watch without horror, only detached fascination, as my hand darts through the air, snatching and swallowing them one by one. The Hunger ebbs and flows, like a pulse, each time I catch one and swallow. The memory of the orchid drifts from my mind, and I become consumed by the need to feed.
Eating the fireflies affects The Hunger differently somehow.
“They sate themselves on both: life a morsel and light a feast, Astravor…” a ghostly voice whispers from somewhere close by, startling me. Is there someone else out here? One of those strange men? Both of them?
Watching me?
“Hello?” I call out, my voice cracking slightly. It couldn’t be the voice of the shorter man. His was high pitched and the voice I’ve just heard was like a low rumble–an avalanche of stones rolling off the face of a cliff in the dark. It may be the taller man; I never heard him speak.
Two feelings strike at once: I am both calm, oddly unafraid, and horrified by the thought that someone might be out here with me in the dark. The sensation of both is a strange dichotomy, and I find the commingling of these states slightly soothing yet also deeply unsettling. These emotions–conflicting, binary–cohabitate within me, existing together in a quiet, alien harmony.
I wade into the thick mud at the water’s edge, drawn by the instinct of the Passenger within me, out into the dark, glittering water where the reflection of the moon floats distantly, waiting.
They dragged me behind them, the shorter one quickening his pace as the sun begins to crest the horizon, and the tall one matches his speed with a fluid, eerie ease. I realize our destination is a boathouse, hidden deep at the swamp’s edge. Layers of faded paint peel from its warped walls, curling in thin strips that mimic the bark of the cypress that surround it. It’s camouflaged, forgotten, nestled in the swamp like something waiting to be uncovered.
When we reach the door, the shorter one stops and turns to me, his orange eyes gleam with a strange excitement. They seem to hold a light of their own, burning in his hollow, sunken face. He reaches out to touch my arm, and his fingers press against my skin with unbearable, scorching heat. I flinch back instinctively, and he withdraws his hand immediately, raising it as if in apology.
“They are one. They? One. Yet, also many,” he says, his high-pitched croak of a voice jarring against his appearance. He says it without breaking eye contact, and the words hang there, cryptic and strange, as though they have a meaning I am meant to understand. Something in his voice, and those seemingly random words feel deliberate. I don’t understand what he’s trying to tell me but those words feel violating, as though he’s intentionally reached into a part of me I hadn’t intended to share.
He glances at the tall one. “They are perfect. A vessel,” he murmurs. He pulls the door open on creaking, rusty hinges. The first pale shaft of morning sunlight breaks over the horizon, slanting through the trees, and casts the faintest glow across the door’s surface. I watch, confused and dazed, as the light stretches toward the short man’s hand where he grips the door, and the moment it makes contact, he hisses, jerking that hand away.
A thick plume of smoke rises from his skin where the light touched him, curling into the air. Staring, wide-eyed and bewildered, I immediately link this phenomenon with the unsettling length of their torsos and limbs. This is the first moment I consider that these men might be something other than human.
“Inside! Quick! Quickly!” he snaps to the taller one, voice sharpening with urgency. “The star awakens!”
At first, I entered the swamp only because my feet were moving through the mud on their own, as if controlled by something else–the Hunger, my Passenger. It pulled me toward the moonlight, and something strange about that distant reflection haunting the water stirred within me like a shadow, dark and unsettling. I couldn’t put my finger on it right away, but I felt the other parts of me drawn to it too, unable to say why. When my curiosity took hold of my thoughts and the desire to keep swimming toward the light rose within me, The Hunger released its grip on my body, and I found my arms and legs freed to move by my own will. I kept drawing closer to it then without being forced.
After crossing the water of my own accord for several minutes, I understood what felt so wrong. That elusive, unsettling quality I’d sensed was finally clear: getting closer to the reflection of the moon wasn’t physically possible, and yet here I was, defying logic and science, watching that pale circle of light swell as I drew nearer.
I understand physics well enough to know this: the reflection of the moon should follow the same laws of perspective as everything else, shifting as I move, always receding, just out of reach. Any glimpse of it on the water’s surface is only an illusion. It doesn’t actually exist where I see it–that’s just a trick of light and distance. No matter how close I try to get, it should remain a fixed distance from me, mirroring my every move toward it, slipping away.
And yet, within minutes, the image of the moon sits buoyantly on the black surface of open water at the center of the glade, and I find myself treading water within its circle of light.
“They are hollow, and hollow things must fill themselves, Astravor. Drink the glimmer.” The voice, like a tremor in the shadows beneath the surface, low and laden, churns up as if from the mud deep below.
I put my lips to the water, drawing in a mouthful of foul, stagnant muck.
The voice laughs, a mirthful murmur that bleeds forth from the marrow of the night. Reverberating through the shadowed trees, echoing, rippling across the water like distant thunder.
“The water is a darkness drink. They drink of the glow for the glow is theirs alone.”
I try to speak, to tell the voice I don’t understand, but the only part that escapes my lips is the beginning of a word before The Hunger takes hold of me again. Demonstrating, it purses my lips, drawing in breath, slowly–deeply, slurping at the open air around me. My chin moves slowly from left to right, and as it does, the light begins to rise from the surface of the water. The reflection of the moon’s luster, in thin tendrils, passes between my lips, warm and slightly damp. I feel it slide down, down, and down my throat as I swallow in long, successive gulps, each one feeding the warmth into me, like sunlight wrapped in silk.
The taste is full and deep–swallowing the incandescence of pure energy, melting through me in a slow, simmering pleasure that spreads outward from within, tracing warmth along my veins.
Within moments, the moon still shines above, but its image, once cast against the waters of the Everglades like a talisman to fend off a little of midnight’s shadow, is completely gone. The water around me has transformed into a pool of endless ink.
I feel full. As I swim towards the shore, I feel the power of devoured light surging through me.
Inside the boathouse, I’m struck by the oddness of the atmosphere, the unsettling way it defies the rot I’d seen outside. The building’s exterior had looked barely standing, condemned to the verge of collapse, warped boards peeling, waiting to sink into the swamp. Yet, inside the walls are seamless–no cracks, no gaps between the boards for daylight to seep through. The place has no windows, and though the day should be fully dawning outside by now, not a single sliver of light breaches through.
Instead, everything is steeped in a strange, teal phosphorescence, dim and pulsing eerily. The men drag me to a beam in the center of the room, attaching my chains with a quick series of metallic clinks. I cough against the thick, noxious stench. Smelling just as metallic and fetid as my captors, the air has the hot, rancid breath of an overheating machine in a constant state of exhale. I try breathing through my mouth, but even then the taste in the air is tinny, bitter. It’s somehow better than the smell, but not by much.
As my eyes adjust to the gloam within, I glance around the space and notice the source of the glow: in the far corner sits a strange contraption, some kind of machine unlike anything I’ve seen before.
The light pulses from it in rhythm, breathing out a turquoise haze. Tubes and wires twist around it at odd angles, looping and knotting, some diving back into the machine’s body, others disappearing into the walls and floor. Various pipes gleam with condensation, dripping in steady intervals, as though carrying something cold and viscous within. Its blue-green light radiates from no particular spot, but instead seems to diffuse across the entire surface, rising and falling as if in the act of breathing. The diaphanous movement radiating from it makes every shadow move and menace. Seemingly, they stalk the darkened spaces all around me, the edges of them reaching out from where they crouch as though they might devour me whole.
The shorter man notices my gaze lingering on the device. His jaundiced, carroty eyes gleam with an eager, unsettling excitement, and he steps into my line of sight, gesturing back to the machine behind him. He grins, eager, baring a mouthful of mismatched, crooked teeth in a way that makes my skin crawl.
When he speaks, his voice that same high-pitched trill incongruous with his form; a croaking squeezed from the throat of something drowned:
“Xyrax Coil dims. We dim. Stranded, yes? We wait beneath bad star. Poison star. Burning. Retrieval? They understands, yes? We wait. We fade.”
Fear rises from my stomach, twisting as his words coil through my mind, their meaning alien, indecipherable, though I feel certain he’s making an earnest attempt to explain something–but what exactly? Am I meant to understand and forgive them for kidnapping me from my tent? I stare at him, bewildered, a faint sob rising in my throat. The words are in English, but they’re impossible to parse. I look to the taller man, searching his face for some sign of familiarity or recognition, but he’s silent, his gaze is fixed on his partner, nodding along, as though agreeing with something unspoken.
The tall man meets my eyes, his lips twisting into a strange, wild grin that spreads far too wide, pulling, stretching, stretching and stretching until his mouth is as taut as rubber, skin pulling over his cheeks, distorting far past any human limit. For a horrifying moment, I think he may be trying to comfort me with that smile. A scream rises, raw and unbidden, tearing its way out from my stomach and clawing up my throat, a jagged, ragged sound that scrapes through me endlessly like shards of broken glass. It goes on, and on, and on until my lungs empty, the sound finally dwindling into a series of breathless, heaving sobs.
When I finally look up at the two of them again, the tall man’s face, skin thin, nearly translucent and carved in shadows, looks down at his partner with an expression of shock and confusion.
“I don’t understand.” I say quietly between the sobs. “I don’t know what you were trying to tell me. I don’t know what you want.”
The tall one, still looking at the shorter, furrows his brow and seems to raise his hands in an irritated gesture silently conveying: See? I told you.
The small one moves closer to me until his face is inches from mine. Looking over his shoulder he makes his own gesture to the other, as if telling him to shut up, though he hasn’t spoken once.
“Weak,” he says, his putrid breath as hot as his touch. He points to himself, then to the strange machine, repeating the word: “Weak.”
Shrill and sickly, his voice seems to drone like the high pitched buzz of insects swarming over bones not yet denuded fully, still clinging to rot.
“They gather.” He says, pointing at me. “They nourish. Yes?”
“No,” I whisper timidly, “gather what? I don’t understand what you’re trying to–”
He presses his fingers against my lips to silence me, and the searing heat of his touch makes my skin crawl. I wrench my face away, disgust curling in my stomach, but he doesn’t seem bothered by my revulsion. Instead, he raises his finger, pointing to my temple.
“They are one. Also many. Fluid aspects inside. Yes?” I don’t know what expression passes over my face but it must tell him something I don’t mean to and he begins nodding wildly.
“They–accommodate?” His infection seems to indicate an uncertainty whether this is the word he means to say.
“Yes. Accommodate. They accommodate more. Yes?”
“No!” The word chokes its way out of me. Bile rises in my throat. I feel sick, violated. The implication of his words is too horrifying to consider, too intimate, and I can’t bear the thought of what he seems to mean.
With a growing tremble of fear, I stammer: “They–they do not accommodate more! No accomodate–no more!”
How could he know? How could he–
“They accommodate more,” he repeats, a faint, twisted satisfaction in his tone. “More aspect. One more.”
A shiver courses through me, sharp and predatory, slithering through my body like something clawing slowly to life. Inside I feel it burrowing, intent to carve out space within me for itself.
I glide through the dark water, the shore a distant shadow that grows slowly as I swim back to it. The moon’s reflection feels heavy in my stomach, churning contentedly, radiating its alien heat from within, moving through every inch of me, surging through my veins and arteries on the backs of my blood cells.
I’m halfway to shore when I see them–two pinpoints of light with a faint green cast, hovering on the surface, cold and distinct. They burn strange and mesmerizing, like matchsticks struck to life in shadow. I can’t tell what I’m looking at, but The Hunger, which has drifted on the edge of sleep since drinking in the moonlight, stirs now, awakening in me. I begin to swim toward the pair of beacons, floating patient and silent in the darkness.
I slow to a stop suddenly, treading in the water as a feeling of primal awareness rushes over me–a sense of being watched. The spots in the distance are two glowing eyes. Realizing this, I remember the dangerous things lurking in these waters, especially after nightfall.
Hesitant, I stare at the eyes, and they seem to stare right back, unblinking. The Hunger’s impulse presses me forward, pulling toward the lights, but this time it doesn’t compel me. It holds back, almost as if waiting to see what I will choose of my own accord.
“They are drawn to what glimmers in darkness, as they were drawn before. Draw closer, Astravor.” The whisper speaks again, dense and heavy in the silence, as though the darkness itself has found a voice. “The light within them: stronger than any creature that stirs after sunset.”
The voice seems to come from nowhere and everywhere at once. I hear it surrounding me, yet I know it makes no sound at all. Chilling clarity settles over me–I recognize it now for what it must be: the voice of The Hunger, echoing from somewhere deep within me, urging me forward.
As the distance between us shrinks, I realize that whatever owns those cold, green eyes has begun moving toward me as well.
The outline of its head breaks through the water, only yards away now, and I recognize the alligator for what it is. Its broad, flat skull glides just above the surface, so close I almost expect the icy weight of its unblinking gaze to seep into me, to steal the heat pulsing beneath my skin. But when this doesn’t happen, I am unsurprised.
We are close enough now for it to lunge, for those jaws to clamp down on any part of me it chooses and drag me beneath the water, spinning, pulling me down into the mud, holding me beneath the surface until I drown at the bottom. I know exactly what it will do if it chooses to strike. Yet it holds still, eyes on me, cold and assessing, as though waiting for the moment its instinct spurs it into action.
I am not afraid as I stare back, meeting its gaze. I feel the excitement of The Hunger inside me lurking, waiting, humming from anticipation within. We are two apex predators, suspended in silence, each sizing the other up. Then, as the alligator’s body shifts, The Hunger surges inside me, and I let it loose, letting it pull me forward with a speed I didn’t know it was possible to move–a speed charged with swallowed light stolen from the moon itself.
The next moment blurs; it happens in a single, electric instant. One second, I am waiting at the water’s surface, watching the alligator tense. In the next, I’m beneath it, my hand curled into a fist and thrusting upward, breaking through the soft, pale underbelly and plunging straight into its chest.
When my hand emerges, it does so with a fistful of heart. I watch in fascination as its pulse slows in my grip; slowing, slowing and slowing…until it stops.
I find dragging the lifeless body by its tail to the shore is easier than expected. Sitting there at the water’s edge with my toes splayed in the soft mud, I open my mouth wide–wider, impossibly wide. As I’m about to begin devouring the gator’s heart, my reflection catches my eye in the dark surface where it glimmers faintly in the sparkling water.
My eyes, lit from within, burn like headlights, the stored moonlight spills from them like a pair of white hot stars. The raw power of the light taken from the lunar reflection pours from my open mouth as well, a blinding beam projected down onto the heart in the palm of my hand. In my spotlights, I imagine it standing on a stage surrounded by a multitude of onlookers in a darkened auditorium. Each member of the audience waits with bated breath for the show to begin. I see my jaw, unhinged and hanging low enough to swallow the entirety of the thing in a single bite, and a strange, prideful thrill hums through me as I place the still-warm organ on my tongue.
I swallow it whole, feeling it slide down into me in a single, smooth motion.
Remembering the true prize I’d swam toward, I reach for the alligator’s eyes. One by one, delicately pinching each between my fingers I pluck them free. I pop these then into my mouth, savoring their texture; a pair of grapes, precious and rare…forbidden. I crush them then, between my teeth savoring the energy that splurts out from them to coat the inside of my mouth. The juices are rich and thick as honey as they seep onto my tongue…
The taste is exquisite, a dark sweetness almost as intoxicating as the surge that swirls within me, commingling with the moonlight already coursing through my veins. I feel warmth expanding outward, heating me from the inside, and The Hunger’s earlier words rise in my memory, echoing through me like a truth, newly uncovered:
…life a morsel and light a feast…
A morsel, perhaps, when the life is small–a firefly or a moth–but the lifeforce of this eleven-foot carnivore is something else entirely. The heart, paired with the creature’s luminous eyes, radiates a different frequency, a stronger, brighter wavelength of energy, surging through me like nothing I’ve tasted before. Though it pales against the potency of the moonlight, the energy absorbed from the reptile is incredible, settling into my bones, sinking through my skin. I feel powerful and deadly. Predatory. Boundlessly alive.
What exactly had those men done to me?
Never leaving the room where they kept me chained, the two men spent hours–and then days–making endless adjustments to the luminous machine in the corner. They worked with countless tools that were strange beyond description, as if from some place unknown, a mix of both the mechanical and the organic. Robotic insects, as big as fists, whirred and buzzed, equipped with saws that moved in fine precision, while others wielded white-hot welding torches, each tool responding to the smaller man’s commands in an unknown language I’d never heard in my life. Some of the tools appeared to be alive, their surfaces glistening with layers of what looked like living skin stretched taut, twitching and pulsing faintly as they worked.
As the days passed, my stomach grew louder, the empty ache sharpening to an angry rumble. They had piles of bottled water–crates of it, in fact, gathered who knows how. I drank one after the next, and each time I finished, they provided another. But no food ever came. At first, I demanded it, loudly, my pleas echoing off the walls, but by the third day, when every plea went unheard, I gave up. I accepted that I would starve here, chained to the support beam in this dark, decaying boathouse. From where I sat near the edge of the wooden platform, I could see the murky water beyond, lapping at the posts that kept this structure afloat. In moments when I wasn’t watching the men work, I would fixate on the darkly shifting water, imagining it swelling, the boathouse sinking slowly into the swamp, collapsing like it was meant to on the day its rotting beams finally gave in.
On the third or fourth day, the smaller man knelt in front of me, and in his sickly pallor, he looked more like a corpse than the gaunt figure who had first dragged me from my tent. He was shockingly skeletal now, his skin gray and paper-thin, his eyes once a gleaming shade of orange, had faded now to the sickly color of dijon.
“Soon. They accommodate. Soon,” he said, his voice thin and exhausted, barely a croak. The glow in his eyes had dulled to a dim, bleary haze, an emptiness that seemed to stretch on without end. “Adjustments soon completing. After, They accommodate more. One more.”
“I’m not accommodating shit for you, you bastards,” I hissed, spitting on his cheek, aiming for his eye and missing by just a fraction. “Food! Do you understand that word? Food!? I need to eat, you sick fucks!”
Whatever energy I had left for outbursts drained from me then, leaving only a hollow ache. “Can’t you see I’m starving?” I whispered, my voice cracking as I fought back tears. “I don’t want to die here. Just let me go…please.”
“Go? No. Accommodate? They will…yes,” he rasped, wiping the spit from his cheek, his high-pitched voice wavering, sagging as if every word threatened to crumble. “One more. Xyrax Coil places. Remember it? They will not. No. No memory. After, They gather. They nourish.”
He spoke to me very few times over the course of my captivity and his limited grasp of English kept him from ever fully explaining their intended purpose for me. Reason told me this much: if it were something I might ever agree to, they wouldn’t need to keep me chained. The same words fell from his mouth again and again, rearranged in endless, cryptic orders. His health, seeming to decline more and more as each day passed made the weight of those words grow heavier, each repetition more grotesque, as I was left to continuously imagine what they could ultimately mean. By the fifth day, I still couldn’t fully grasp their intentions, but with each passing day, I became more certain that I had been singled out for a purpose–that they’d chosen me deliberately.
That was the day they put the headband, a strap of strange material, almost like leather, connected to the machine by a series of coiled wires across my forehead and everything after and much of what happened before went dark.
Removing my damp clothes, I discard them atop the mud and clumps of algae that float at the water’s edge. I can sense the creatures in the night now, their reverent fear thick in the air. The crickets and frogs have ceased their songs of darkness, and I feel the eyes of countless hidden things falling upon me. Every nearby creature lurking close enough to see me on this shoreline has turned its gaze my way–watching, quiet and unmoving in the endless darkness.
“Astravor, if such power moves you, let Them claim the starlight of any in the sky above–They will know the limits of the limitless.”
“What is this word, Astravor?” I ask the Passenger within, “you repeat this word each time you speak but I do not know it. Is it a title? A name?”
“They discover Their true purpose as They drink.”
Above me, in this place so distant from civilization, every star glows with unbridled radiance, sharp and fierce against the black sky. As I stare up at them, the light churning within my eyes beaming outward, I choose a star at random–and in an instant, I know everything about it, as though I’ve held the knowledge of its secrets all along:
The red dwarf named Beglios sits 8.7 light-years from Earth, approximately 2.79 times the mass of the yellow dwarf you call “the sun.” Four planets circle it.
One of these planets is nearly equal to the mass of Jupiter. Its orbit is too close to be sustained; in 4,732 of Earth’s years, the star’s gravity will pull it from its path, tearing it apart with enough force to scatter it to dust. The remnants will fall into Beglios and be absorbed, but this increase in mass will be so insignificant that the event will go unnoticed–not only by those who search the skies here, but by any being on any planet close enough to observe.
Two others, nearly indistinguishable in shape and size, are roughly the mass of Mars. Their orbital paths are so close to each other that, in 1.53 million years, once again measured in the passage of time on this planet, they will become locked in one another’s gravity, pulling themselves into a deadly spiral. The resulting collision will scatter them into an expanse of debris–fragments of planets drifting, silent, in orbit.
The final planet, a molten thing nearly 1.5 times the mass of Earth, circles within the habitable zone, the place where life may one day flourish. For now, it remains a dead, violent place, the host of extinction-level weather patterns and volcanic eruptions, still in its earliest stages of formation. 25,397 years after the twin planets shatter, life may begin here.
None of these things–absorption, collision, creation–will ever come to pass.
For I have chosen this star to die.
As with before, I purse my lips and begin to suck it towards me, drinking its light into the abyss within. As promised by the Passenger, as I begin to swallow the light from this single star above, I understand so much more about myself. Devouring Beglios, a different kind of completeness fills me.
I am nothing yet I am many things.
My experience is fluid. In a constant state of flux or change.
I do not fight the shifts; the changes. I embrace them.
I am woman. I am man.
I am Astravor, Drinker of Starlight. I feed upon the life forces and light forces shining in the night.
I am the emptiness, hollow within, the carved-out vessel made to accommodate more. With this new addition, I am whole.
I am Elara Knox, botanist, human being.
I am something else: otherworldly.
I am something new.
I gather.
I nourish.
I am the vessel that carries the nectar, the fount of power to revive the fading light of the Xyrax Coil. The machine on which Drixar and Ry’ath depend, here stranded on this planet with no means of escape. This planet whose star is poison, radiates in wavelengths fatal to their kind. This star above emits a light they are unable to collect themselves, making it utterly useless to them.
As I drink the radiance of Beglios, every piece of myself, every aspect once hidden, aligns and crystallizes within me, revealing knowledge that expands without end.
When the final light of that star flickers into darkness, I hold the remnants of it within my void. I move across the swamp like a cosmocrat of the night, returning to the boathouse that hides itself: an alien structure, a shelter disguised to appear as a relic abandoned long ago.
This time, I enter it by choice.
Naked, moving through the darkness inside, the damp air wraps around me. I know now what I must do to sustain Drixar and Ry’ath until their promised rescue team arrives, and when they leave this place, I have already decided–I will join them.
Crossing the shadowed space to the Xyrax Coil, where it pulses unsteadily in the corner. The beaming of it dimmer now and on the verge of flickering out, I open the lid of the basin that sits at the top. Tilting my head forth, I open my mouth, and from within me pours the essence of the night’s collection: the rare orchid and moth, the fireflies and moon’s reflection, the alligator’s heart and eyes and the most powerful fuel I carry: the starlight I consumed. All of this is converted now into a liquid state that glimmers brightly with the light of stolen light and the expansive cosmos, and it flows out from me like a torrent into the machine.
I will collect such glimmers as lie lurking in darkness and feed the machine nightly if the Coil should require. Drixar explains collections will not be needed with such frequency. He tells me this in his native tongue and I understand him fully with the knowledge of his speech seated amongst the endless assortment of other knowledge awakened within.
As I finish nourishing the Xyrax Coil, I turn the knob that opens the basin’s aperture and watch the liquid, glowing ethereally as it spirals down, down, and down into the fuel chamber. Almost immediately the turquoise flicker that emanates from the surface of the machine ends abruptly, replaced by the steady, blinding white glow created by the power of life and light stolen from the swamp and the brilliance I’ve swallowed from a distant sun.