The dream began, as it always did, with silence. Not the quiet of a still room or the hush of snowfall, but a vacuum, a swallowing void where sound itself seemed to unravel. Tatsu stood in a cavernous hall, its vaulted ceiling lost to shadows. Ahead of him stretched a staircase of cracked obsidian, its steps glinting like shattered glass. At the top sat a throne, skeletal, ancient, its arms twisted into spirals that ended in jagged points. Empty. Always empty.
Then the voices came.
They seeped from the walls, the floor, the air whispers in languages he couldn't understand, overlapping, swelling into a chorus of grief. A woman's sob, a child's whimper, a man's enchanting prayer. Tatsu tried to cover his ears, but the sounds burrowed deeper, vibrating in his ribs. A phrase rose above the din, clear and cold: Find the cracks.
He woke sweating, his sheets tangled around his legs. Morning light filtered through the gauzy curtains, painting his room in watery gold. Outside, the distant hum of maglev trains and the chatter of starling birds hybrids with iridescent feathers hatched from fallen star fragments filled the air. Normal sounds. Human sounds.
Tatsu groaned and rubbed his eyes. The star-shaped birthmark on his left palm itched, as it always did after the dream.
Breakfast was a quiet affair. His mother, half-star herself with her alabaster skin and eyes like twin supernovas (one blue, one gold), floated between the kitchen and the dining nook, her movements precise, effortless. She placed a bowl of steamed cloud rice in front of him, the grains shimmering faintly, grown from soil enriched with decomposed stardust.
"You were thrashing again," she said, not looking at him. Her voice carried the melodic lilt of the star-born, syllables curling like smoke.
"Same dream." Tatsu poked the rice with his chopsticks. The star on his palm pulsed faintly.
She paused, her hand hovering over the teapot. A scar, thin and silvery, curved along her wrist, a relic from the Splinter Wars, when humans and star people first clashed over the crumbling world. "Dreams are echoes," she said finally. "But echoes fade."
He wanted to ask what that meant. Instead, he shoved a too-large bite of rice into his mouth.
School was a sprawl of hybrid architecture: domed classrooms forged from fused meteorite, gardens where bioluminescent star-vines crawled over steel beams. Human and star-born students mingled in the courtyards, their features a gradient of both worlds. Tatsu's best friend, Kio, was waiting at the gates, her hair dyed cobalt to mask the silver streaks inherited from her star-born father.
"You look like you fought a wraith and lost," she said, tossing him a levity apple. The fruit hovered an inch above his palm, its skin swirling with galaxies.
"Dreams," he muttered.
"Ah, the throne again?" She grinned, but her eyes flickered with unease. Kio's family were historians, archivists of the Splintering. She'd once told him the throne was a myth, a symbol from the old star religions. A relic, she'd said. Like your mom's taste in music.
The bell chimed, a deep, resonant tone that made the star-vines shiver. As they walked, Tatsu caught snippets of conversation:
"Another quake last night, near the eastern fissures."
"My cousin said they saw a falling star decompose midair. Just… dissolved into ash."
"Heard the frozen ones in the Blackwood are waking up."
He stiffened. The Blackwood. The abandoned forest on the city's edge, where the trees grew sideways and the air tasted of iron. Where people who ventured too deep were said to freeze mid-step, trapped in pockets of fractured time. Where the stars, the real ones, fell so often the ground glittered with their corpses.
Kio followed his gaze. "Don't even think about it."
"I didn't say anything."
"You breathe stupid ideas." She flicked his ear. "Remember what happened to Aya?"
Aya, a senior last year, had sneaked into the Blackwood for a dare. They'd found her three days later, her body rigid, her eyes wide and unseeing. Her skin had been cold. "Colder than space," the medics said.
Tatsu's palm itched again.
The day bled into a haze of lessons. Star-history with Mr. Veyn (the Splintering began 300 years ago; theories included divine punishment, cosmic decay, and sentient black holes). Algebra. Hybrid biology, where they dissected a starling bird and charted its human-like lungs. Through it all, the dream gnawed at him. Find the cracks.
By dusk, he stood at the edge of the Blackwood.
The forest loomed, a tangle of charcoal trees, their branches clawing at a bruised sky. The air smelled wrong, sharp, metallic, like blood and lightning. Tatsu's phone buzzed in his pocket. Kio. He silenced it.
The first star fragment glinted in the undergrowth, a shard of crystalline light. Then another. And another. They littered the forest floor, pulsing faintly, dying embers. He stepped over them, his boots crunching on brittle leaves.
Then he saw the first frozen one.
A man, mid-stride, one foot raised. His face was contorted in terror, his star-marked eyes wide. Ice encased him, but not ice, something clearer, harder, like diamond. Tatsu reached out, hesitated, and pressed his star-marked palm to the surface.
The world split.
Not the forest, but his mind. Voices roared the same ones from his dream, screaming, pleading. A vision flashed: the obsidian throne, now occupied by a figure shrouded in starlight. Their heads turned slowly, and Tatsu's breath froze.
The eyes. Twin stars, swirling, collapsing.
Then pain. White-hot, searing his palm. He stumbled back, tripping over a root. The frozen man's face began to move, his mouth twisting into a silent scream. Around him, the other statues shuddered, their icy shells cracking.
Above, the sky rippled. A star streaked down, burning crimson, and dissolved before it hit the earth.
In its wake, the throne's voice boomed:
YOU SHOULDN'T BE HERE.