Aether

The Night, the great mother, is silent, and so are the children that dream inside her. Them and her are one, until the moment of their laying, and as each egg leaves her starlit shape, its innate energy dims from her senses. By which has gone, she learns about what the hatchling will be like – a crude and primitive feeling, uncertain and fleeting – and as is the custom, she writes a fortune for each: a single glowing rune on every egg, to mark and distinguish them by. She cannot tell how many they will be until she lays them down, but their collective energy has been warming her inside, like a cluster of stars – like the clusters of stars she carries all over herself, like the supernova that fuels her chest, like the starlight burning down her veins.

The first egg’s hatchling’s star shines blistering and bright – like the commanding note of a cello in her mind’s eye: the sign of a powerful individual, or of a resilient soul. Only fools would try to harm it. The second glistens long – a low and hearty baritone - and as its warmth leaves her, its mother feels a sudden sadness. This one would warm others as it goes, be it with words or actions – if only they would allow it to. She sighs after it, finally empty of the hatchlings’ added light - tired and cooling, blissful but weary. So it’s two this time - her beautiful children, both safely in the nest. She coos.

But then there is the usual pressure, and she feels it – a third egg, trying to get out. Inside herself, she feels nothing – no warmth, no sun, only her own faint glimmer. She lays the last egg, and as it leaves her, there is no sign of what it will be like – no gut feeling, no faint image, not even a single note in the back of her mind. There is nothing.

Her veins run cold with fear. How is she to read this? Is her egg-

Stirred awake by the flare of her terror, her mate opens an eye and lifts his head from where he slept beside the nest. His presence washes over her, soothing but progressively more and more concerned. “Are you unwell?” he asks, and his voice buzzes like a swarm of anxious bees.

“Not me”, she says. “It’s this one.”

He looks at the egg she’s staring at in horror, and a realization slowly dawns on his face. “You haven’t marked it”, he stutters. “Is its fortune so cruel that you do not dare to? Is it- going to turn against us?”

The Night lowers her head, and the tears that fall from her face glisten in the moonlight. “I haven’t marked it because I do not know how. Because there was nothing I could mark it with.” Her tearful eyes drill into his. “I fear this one isn’t going to hatch.”

The two of them stay frozen in time for what seems like forever. “What am I to do with all of this silence?” Nyx cries out in the end. Her mate, sensitive to all sounds, proficient in healing, has turned all of his attention on the egg. “We are going to do what we were going to, before this came to be. We will warm it like the rest, and if it never hatches, we try to move on. We have the rest to look out for.” He breathes on the egg once, carefully warming it, then leans against it once again. His feathers flutter. “There is still a faint heartbeat from inside”, he says.


The egg that wasn’t meant to hatch does so first, if only by a few seconds. The hatchling that pulls itself out from it radiates emptiness, like the dead of the night and, unlike his sisters, barely gleams with starlight. Apart from the few dots on his body, he is coloured like the space between stars more than the stars themselves. Words dull to whispers around it, regardless of their user’s wishes – a mark of the power it bears.

“It hatched”, his mother marvels. His father simply smiles.