Rising Shards

A few years earlier—well, it had to have been three or four as I was either twelve or thirteen—I remember sitting at the apartment’s kitchen table in a rare meal at the table. Usually, Stella let me sit wherever once dinner was served, but some nights she wanted us to eat together. I didn’t mind; I never phrased it like that to her, but it made us feel more like a ‘normal’ family to eat dinner together. Some people I’d talked to at school around the time—well, listened in to people sitting at the same cafeteria table as me, I was too shy to converse much—mentioned how awkward their family dinners were. I couldn’t deny the way they described having lots of siblings, parents, grandparents, aunts uncles, cousins, and more made me feel a bit longing. The girl talking to me said something about having no elbow room at the table with everyone there, and I couldn’t help but think about that as I sat across from Stella as she poured some chicken and carrot stew into bowls for each of us. As our silverware clanked on the bowl, I didn’t have much to say about actual class, and Stella didn’t have much to say about work.

“Stella…do you ever wanna, I dunno,” I said. “Talk about our family?”

She froze with her spoon in midair. This was usually her first reaction when I asked. When I was in kindergarten, I had to make a family tree with construction paper and crayons, and when I asked, she froze, then said a bunch of nothing before offering to help me with the project. The next day, the teacher said it was OK for me just to have myself and Stella on my tree.

After I asked at the dinner table, Stella stood up, and started pacing. She did that a lot too when talking about our family.

“Sorry, I shouldn’t have said—” I started.

“No, no.” Stella said. “It’s not your…fault…” She sat back down and took a deep breath.

“I just…” I said. I don’t know what I was gonna add there. Just wanted to know? Just curious? Just finding it weird that my family was just me and my older sister?

“Zeta, it’s sore,” Stella said. “I’m sorry I can’t explain right now, but. It’s sore. I’ll…I know I’ll tell you."

I found the phrasing weird. She knew she’d tell me? Like she had a vision of the future or something where she did? Or was she just trying to promise herself she’d tell me some day?

I also had a routine when I worked up the nerve to ask; seeing how immediately freaked out Stella was made me clam up and apologize over and over. “I’m sorry for asking,” I muttered.

“No, don’t be,” Stella said.

We had the rest of our dinner in silence, as I spent most of it wondering what it would be like to eat with no elbow room from having a crammed dinner table.

I had a dream similar to that night right after Oka had been banished to Lillia’s room by Caya and the cruel rules of the school. I sat eating with Stella, but there were others with us. I didn’t recognize any of them, except for Arctus Kathron, the boy I had talked to once at school, and had met again on the void trip.

“Faleur family tradition,” Stella said, gesturing to the food, which changed from a home cooked meal to fast food and back about five times during the dream. I remember Arctus nodding and repeating it. “Faleur family tradition.” In the dream at least, he was family. He nodded to two older family members sitting at the head of the table. They had to be our parents. The actual words they said were gone from my memory seconds after the dream ended, but I remember them sounding very motherly and fatherly respectively.

I woke up before Kalei and rolled over, feeling immediately sad that Oka’s bed was empty. Sure, she was just a few rooms down, but her presence in our room really kept me level in ways I hadn’t appreciated before.

With nothing else to do caught between “can’t fall back asleep” and “it’s too early to get up,” I stared at the empty bed and thought about the dream. Dr. Diast said Arctus might’ve been something made by the void, made by my longing for family. But that answer bugged me. First off, I talked to Arctus at school. So I was either losing my mind, or that guy was real, and the void guy was conjured, but then what did that mean for the Exumi and everyone else there? That place had a history, and I definitely didn’t come up with that. How much of us went into that place when Wildfire Hearts made it from our memory trials? Not only that, but Jeans apparently combined a bunch of failing void nodes as well.

Or they both really were the same guy. And this guy that said he came to the school to find me maybe was some long-lost family. With the way Stella talked about the rest of our family, I guess I assumed they weren’t dead. Just somewhere else. And the void was very much a somewhere else. Maybe that’s where Arctus came from. And that’s why he wanted me to use that sword, since it was like, my family heritage or something. He told me he’d explain everything to me soon. But…how? 

It’d be pretty cool to go from just Stella as a family to this big legendary cool guy. It’d be almost as cool as Raina Starlight secretly being family. Maybe I could get to use that Kathron sword again.

It was all so dumb, weird, and confusing, while also being potentially cool, family growing, and awesome that I couldn’t help but think about it for at least an hour as I tried in vain to fall back asleep.

Really the big thing that I could do something about: what about the Arctus I talked to at school? I tried to remind myself to talk to Caya about that soon since she was investigating him now. For some reason, working up the nerve to ask her about that filled me with the same stress that thinking about asking Stella again about our family did.