Spectra: The Eternity Vault

1 | The First Dance

"Val! Wake up!"

A soft, hushed voice and a hand on his shoulder roused him from sleep. Blindly, he looked up in the dark of his room, only able to make out the silhouette of someone standing over him. He moved to turn on his lamp on the nightstand next to his bed, but a hand reached out to stop his own. "No, no light!"

"Ten?"

She shushed him, planting another hand over his mouth to keep him from speaking. "Quiet! You're going to wake Prag up!"

He stilled and silenced himself, giving her enough confidence to remove her hand. In a whisper that now matched her volume, he asked, "What's going on?"

"Remember what we talked about? What I wanted to show you?"

The haze of interrupted sleep kept him confused about what she meant for a moment or two. Blinking away his exhaustion, he recalled what she was talking about. "Wait, we're doing this tonight? Now?"

"Yeah, right now." She leaned away from him now, hurriedly but quietly rifling through his dresser. Grabbing a pair of pants and a shirt, she threw them at him where he laid on the bed.

"Hurry up and get dressed. Meet me at the front door in five minutes."

—V—

Outside, Jantii's night sky was black and moonless. There was little to light their way, nothing brighter than the dim lamps stationed throughout the plots of okinla fields below. More than once, Val caught his foot on a hidden rock in the dark and nearly tripped as he and Ten climbed up the grassy hill adjacent to the farmhouse.

"Not much further," she whispered, helping to guide him up the path with which she was so much more familiar than he. Following her lead, he continued after her and did his best not to fall back down the hill.

True to her word, it wasn't but another few meters or so before the hill leveled out, becoming flatter and easier to stand on. Turning around, Val took a moment to catch his breath and noted the tiny lights of the field lamps below. "You know, the hill looks a lot shorter from down there."

Ten panted lightly alongside him. "A little exercise never killed anyone. Come on."

Leading him a few feet away from the edge, right to the point where the flat of the hilltop began to decline, she sat down and patted the space next to her. He obliged, coming to rest beside her. The two of them laid back in the soft turquoise grass, flat against the ground, and gazed up into the infinity above them.

"It's so much easier to see them up here than down there," she said quietly, her voice only just more audible than the wind as it blew over the crest of the hill. "The lamps get in the way, blot out the light. It takes a bit, but you'll see."

The two of them spent the next few minutes in silence, nothing said or heard save for the ever-present breeze carving its way through blades of grass. As time went on, Val's eyes began to adjust to the dark, and he became more sensitive to the twinkle of distant stars painted against the sky's canvas.

"Wow." There were far more than he'd ever remembered seeing before. The sky was no longer even truly black, a streak of blue crept across its center as deep space was illuminated by thousands of distant white dots which shone brightly in the pitch of night.

"Yeah."

"There's so many of them! I feel like it'd be easy to get lost up there."

She sighed next to him. "That's a nice thought."

"What do you mean?"

"Exploring the stars, having fantastic adventures on uncharted worlds—it's an appealing idea." She was quiet for a moment. "When I was really young, the stars always made me feel so small, like I was just one more light amongst billions. But they helped me a lot when I left home."