#warofshallows
## War of Shallows 003: What Lives in a Star
Radiv looked from Juva's face to North Eis.
"What am I supposed to see?"
"If I tell you, you will only look for that."
"That's generally why people tell each other things."
Juva crooked one finger. Radiv sighed and came closer, positioning himself just beyond what he believed to be her reach.
She stepped behind him.
"Stand straight."
"You've recently thrown me through a rock. Standing straight is now more ambition than posture."
"Pay attention."
He raised his head. North Eis shone above the river, larger than the other stars and white at its centre.
"I see a bright light," he began. "Round, perhaps, although from here-"
Juva placed her palm against his spine.
Radiv stopped speaking.
The riverbank disappeared.
He did not travel through the sky. Distance simply ceased to protect him.
North Eis opened.
Its white surface separated into lights too numerous to count. Each light contained another, and each of those divided again. Millions of beings arrived in him at once - not their bodies, but the pressure of their living. Hunger. Rest. Fear. Work performed beneath unfamiliar skies. A hand reaching for another hand. A creature dying alone. Something newly born turning toward warmth.
He felt lives that lasted a breath and lives that stretched beyond any history he knew. Joy passed through him without belonging to him. So did cruelty. He could not separate one being from the next, yet none of them vanished into the whole.
The brightness had darkness inside it.
The darkness was alive too.
Radiv tried to pull away, but he no longer understood where his back ended and Juva's hand began. His changing hair flashed through colours with no relation to the riverbank: silver, violet, a yellow so pale it was almost sound.
Then Juva removed her palm.
The world struck him from below.
He lay on the ground gasping. Air entered his chest but seemed too small to be useful. Juva knelt and gripped his arm, anchoring him against the spinning earth.
"Radiv."
He opened his eyes.
The river had no colour. Neither did the grass, the rocks or the sky. He saw only their edges traced in radiant white. Juva was a tall boundary filled with light. Behind her drifted forms he could not hold: a black shape, a trembling knot, something that branched into three and vanished before he understood it.
He reached toward them.
Juva slapped him.
Colour returned with the pain.
"Stop dreaming," she said.
Radiv stared at her. "What was that?"
There was no joke waiting in his face.
Juva sat back on her heels and waited.
"You tell me."
"I can't tell you. I don't know what happened."
"Then look again."
He turned toward the star. His body remained tense, but his expression had changed. He no longer looked as if the sky belonged to anyone who could name it.
North Eis was once more a single distant light.
That frightened him more than the millions had.