Chapter One
A New Idea
By Luminousnoble
Erk. Eek. Euk.
The pink-patched fae sat down from atop his book stack, scooching in a half-circle to look out across the long table he took the head of. He looked across the dragons seated at that table, in various eclectic chairs (all painted a dark shade of pink, some more neatly than others), as they all stared back at him, and at the words written on the black whiteboard behind him, in capital runes: ‘NO APOCALYPSE.’
He pressed the hot pink cap onto his marker. He folded his claws around it. His fins twitched.
“Discuss.”
Silence filled the over-elaborate conference room like a mental murk for a considerable stretch of time. Well, it wasn’t complete silence - the once-white walls were covered with sears, runes, photographs, and nonsensical diagrams, all of which moved, sizzled, or shifted in some way or another. Physics toys for undiscovered laws danced merrily on erratic shelves and cockeyed tables, and in the far corner, a crystal phonograph played a record that sounded distinctly like the howl of an eldritch. It was far too full of
stuff to make sense - much less be a functional conference room - for any dragon that wasn’t arcane or arcane at heart.
Fortunately, that encompassed all exalts - at least after their first month or so in the Observatory. And it only went doubly for the Festival Planners.
After almost too long, a Skydancer slowly rose her hand. The pink marker bonked against her beak, and she caught it before it hit the table as if this was expected, twirling it between her graceful claws. “Roslyn, question. Says who? Like… who’s to say we can’t have an apocalypse? I was under the impression that it was… kind of a flight tradition.”
The fae sighed, then rose and snapped his claws. A guardian with a comet hovering behind him stood from his seat, picked up a crate pushed clumsily into the corner, and upended it on the conference table, spilling multiple cups of coffee and ruining countless revolutionary breakthroughs. Naturally, their writers were generally a bit more intrigued by the sheer mass of letters, bearing all manner of colored wax seals denoting hundreds of Arcane clans, in such a significant amount that magic was surely involved in stuffing them into the crate.
The fae gestured towards the letters, with his wings and tail rather than his hands. “That’s why. The entire Arcane flight, it seems, has demanded a peaceful Starfall. Can you imagine what would happen if we failed them on that?
Mass. Exodus. And we JUST won a Dominance battle!”
A spiral blinked, from tied around his chair. “Wait, we won that?”
“Yes! Yes, we won that. It was awesome.”
“It was kind of an apocalypse though.”
“And that’s the PROBLEM!” The fae threw up his arms, fins jumping into the air. “We ended the world early! Too close to Starfall! Now there’s no time for the Clans to recover in time for the Festival, and they’re all,
oh, can’t we have a PEACEFUL Starfall??? Can’t we ENJOY ourselves???” He groaned, and then fell backwards - landing with a thump and a squeak of pain between the wall and the stack of books. A couple dragons giggled.
A snapper lumbering along one side of the table rolled her eyes, then went to a bookshelf, lifting a heavy, leather-bound tome from it… somehow. “Come now, Roslyn. Be more optimistic. This is an opportunity for us! To impress Spacedad - or even all of Sornieth! We have better stories to tell than the end of the world.”
“Maybe
you do.”
“I definitely do.” She dropped the tome on the table, with a bang about five times as loud as the one Roslyn had fallen with. Just about everyone jumped in unison. Looking smug, the snapper nudged the book open to a seemingly random but oddly on-topic page: ‘The Origins of the Starfall Celebration’, emblazoned in black ink above a faded magenta watercolor of a brightly-lit festival dotting the Starwood Strand. In seconds, heads crowded over the page, eyes of more colors than you’d think peering over one another to gawk at the depiction.
After a moment for admiration, the snapper spoke: “This is what the first Starfall Celebration looked like. In fact, the first
multiple Starfall Celebrations looked like this. The apocalypses came much later in our Flight’s illustrious, disastrous history. Perhaps, my friends, we ought to return to our roots?”
A string of gasps fluttered throughout the room, each dragon exchanging glances with the other. Then, a mirror piped up, toothy smile stretching wide - “What about a LITERAL Starfall???”
The fae scrabbled back to the top of the book pile, only to fall off the other wide. “NO APOCALYPSE! NO APOCALY - EUK”
The skydancer stood, waving her claw as her antenna bobbed. “It’s only an apocalypse if the stars are falling!! We can focus on the celebration part!”
At once, a nocturne leapt up, yellow eyes bright. “That’s perfect! We can celebrate the Arcane flight in the truest way - celebrate what makes us truly arcane!”
For half a second, the room was silent.
And then it burst into an uproar. Every dragon present started shouting, waving their arms and flapping their wings, to holler a mess of nearly opposite things - pink sparkles, radioactive waste, explosions, discovery, destruction, science, fantasy, magic. The shouting was so intensely loud that a few tundras winced, and the once-smiling mirror scrabbled under the table, covering her ears. It would have dissolved into disaster, scattering letters be damned, if not for one guardian’s quick thinking.
At the pull of a lever by the door, the room shook, then a loud, clinking creak overpowered the yelling. The ceiling folded up on itself, accordion-style, and when it finally
shunked into place over the inner wall, the outside sky was clear to see.
It was a crystalline night. Far above the Starfall Isles, the cosmos stretched, glimmering white on the blanket of endless ultramarine. Every head in the conference room turned upwards, staring in awestruck silence, as if their arcane hearts had found a synchronized beat.
Someone whispered. “stars.”
And then another. And then another. And soon, every one of them was whispering that one word, softly and reverently, almost like a song if not for its irreverent lack of a rhythm. The nigh sacred moment passed, leaving the conference room in a lull of sizzling, physics-toy-noisemaking quiet.
Roslyn climbed back up onto his books, picked up a darker pink marker, and wrote - under ‘no apocalypse’ - ‘TALES OF THE STARS’. And he sat down, smile soft and yet bright.
“Bingo.”
