Chapter Text
The moon and the Pleiades have set,
it is midnight,
and the time is passing,
but I sleep alone.
The lecture hall smells like old paper and young dreams. Rumi sits in her usual spot—back row, third seat from the left, close enough to the door that she could leave without disrupting anyone, far enough from the other students that they don't think to include her in their whispered conversations.
Not that they would remember her if they tried.
Dr. Zoey Park is writing on the whiteboard in quick, efficient strokes: Μοῖραι - Moirai - The Fates. Her handwriting is terrible, barely legible, but the Greek letters are perfect. Practiced. Rumi feels something loosen in her chest that she didn't realize was tight.
"Three sisters," Zoey says, not turning from the board. "Clotho, Lachesis, Atropos. The spinner, the allotter, the unturnable. Between them, they held every mortal life in their hands." She caps the marker, faces the class. "Who can tell me what each one did?"
A hand shoots up—the eager sophomore in the front row who always has an answer. "Clotho spun the thread of life, Lachesis measured it, and Atropos cut it."
"Good. And what does that tell us about how the Greeks viewed fate?"
Rumi could answer. Could explain that it wasn't quite that simple, that the Moirai were more complex than the simplified version that survived in myths, that there were others who served them—helpers who could see the threads shimmer into existence, who watched them measure out their lengths, who turned away when the shears came out because even immortals have limits to what they can bear to witness.
She doesn't raise her hand.
"Anyone?" Zoey's eyes sweep the room, pause on Rumi for just a moment, move on. "Come on, people. This is important. What does it mean that not even Zeus could change what the Moirai decreed?"
A junior volunteers an answer about predestination. Another student counters with free will. The discussion builds, students leaning forward, arguing with the kind of passion that makes Rumi remember what it was like to care about questions that had answers.
She takes notes in careful Greek, the letters flowing from her pen with the ease of muscle memory millennia deep. She's been auditing Dr. Park's "Greek Mythology and Society" course for three weeks now. Before that, it was a semester of Medieval Literature at a college in Maine. Before that, Introduction to Archaeology in Ohio. Before that, a blur of lecture halls and libraries and temporary apartments where she never unpacked all her boxes because what was the point?
She'd been doing this longer than Vermont had been a state—longer than the language these students speak had settled into its current form. She'd watched the printing press change everything, watched the Industrial Revolution remake the landscape, watched the Internet arrive and make the world simultaneously larger and smaller.
She's good at watching. It's staying that she's never mastered.
Vermont is nice, though. Small. The university tucked into a valley between mountains that are just beginning to think about winter. October means the trees are burning—red and orange and gold—and the students are still optimistic about the semester, haven't yet reached the exhausted panic of finals week.
October means Rumi has been here almost two months. Soon she'll need to move on.
Soon, but not yet.
"The Moirai weren't cruel," Zoey is saying, pacing in front of the board. "That's a common misconception. They were inevitable. There's a difference. Cruelty implies malice. The Fates just... were. Like gravity. Like time."
Like me, Rumi thinks, then pushes the thought away. Self-pity is tedious, and she's had two thousand years to grow tired of it.
A student raises her hand. "But didn't they punish people sometimes? I thought I read something about them cursing someone who tried to cheat death."
Zoey's face lights up—she loves when students actually do the reading. "Yes! Good catch. Anyone remember the story?"
The discussion shifts to Sisyphus, to hubris, to the difference between fate and punishment. Rumi lets the words wash over her, less interested in what's being said than in how it's being said. Zoey teaches the way Rumi remembers the old priestesses speaking—with reverence but not worship, with scholarship but not distance. Like the myths matter not because they're ancient but because they're true.
Not literally true, maybe. But true in the ways that count.
The lecture ends. Students pack up, flow toward the door in their clusters and pairs. Not giving her a second look, hardly a second thought. She's good at being invisible—it's a skill she's cultivated carefully, a survival mechanism older than most of the buildings in this town.
It's not entirely their fault.
She's never been sure exactly what the gift left behind when the Moirai faded—whether the forgetting is something she does or something she simply is.
Either way, the effect is the same: Eyes slide past her like water past glass. She could sit in this classroom every day for a year and most of these students would introduce themselves to her fresh each time.
The barista at the coffee shop three blocks from her apartment has taken her order four times this week. Never remembers it.
Rumi has stopped being bothered by this.
It's useful. It's safe.
It's the closest thing to armor she has left.
Rumi waits, organizing her notebook, her pens, giving everyone time to leave.
"Please return the handouts, if you don’t want them!" Zoey calls, gesturing to the pile on the desk behind her. “Save the environment, you guys!”
Rumi takes her sheet on her way out. She sets it on Zoey's desk as she passes.
Zoey glances at the paper, then at Rumi's retreating back.
“Rumi?” Zoey hesitates, "Hold on. You corrected this."
Rumi pauses at the door. "Did I?"
"The noun form. It's wrong in the textbook." Zoey's tone is light, curious. "You caught it."
"I must have read it somewhere."
"Huh." Zoey sets the paper down, something thoughtful crossing her face. "Interesting."
Rumi doesn't wait to see what else Zoey might say. Just continues out into the October afternoon.
The campus is beautiful in that specific New England way—brick buildings and old trees and students sprawled on the quad despite the chill in the air. She can see their threads if she lets herself look, bright and tangled and so blissfully short. Seventy years, maybe. Eighty if they're lucky. Gone in what feels like a blink.
She doesn't look.
The library is her next stop—it always is. She has a favorite corner on the third floor, tucked between Ancient History and Mythology, where the afternoon light slants through the windows just right and no one ever bothers her. She has a book she's been working through, a new translation of the Orphic Hymns.
The dead were instructed to drink from the spring of Memory, not the spring of Forgetting.
She's been doing that for two thousand years.
Remembering everything.
Forgetting nothing.
She's not sure anymore which would be worse.
Three hours before she needs to decide what to do with her evening once the library closes.
Walk, probably. She always walks at night—through the small downtown with its coffee shops and bookstores, past the residential neighborhoods where families are sitting down to dinner, out to the edges of town where the streetlights give up and the darkness feels less like loneliness and more like privacy.
She's been doing this for longer than Vermont has been a state. Longer than America has been a country. Walk. Observe. Move on before anyone notices.
It's sustainable. It's safe.
It's so achingly lonely that sometimes she forgets what it feels like to be known.
But Zoey's class helps. Hearing the old language, the old stories. Remembering when she was part of something larger than herself, when she served the Moirai and believed her purpose mattered. Before the temple fell. Before the priestesses died. Before she understood that immortality isn't a gift—it's a sentence.
Rumi finds her corner in the library, opens her book, and reads about gods and mortals and the spaces between. Outside, the autumn light fades to gold, then amber, then gone.
She doesn't notice the time passing.
She never does anymore.
Thursday's lecture is on the Olympians—Zeus and Hera, their eternal marriage, their eternal war. Rumi sits in her usual seat and takes notes she doesn't need, listening to Zoey explain power dynamics and mythology as cultural memory.
Friday she walks through town, buys groceries she barely eats, returns to her small apartment three blocks from campus.
Saturday and Sunday blur together—reading, walking, existing in the quiet spaces between other people's lives.
Monday she's back in the lecture hall, and Zoey is writing on the board again: Guest Lecture - Thursday - Dr. Mira Kang, Astronomy
"My friend from the astronomy department is joining us," Zoey announces. "We're going to talk about how the Greeks mapped the stars and how those myths became constellations. Should be fun. Don't skip."
A few students groan—guest lectures are usually boring, usually just the professor's friend checking a box for their tenure packet.
Rumi feels something flutter in her chest that might be curiosity.
She hasn't been curious about anything in a very long time.
Thursday, she tells herself, she'll probably skip. Guest lectures are never actually interesting, and she's been in Vermont for two months now. She should start thinking about leaving anyway. Should start looking at maps, picking her next stop, packing her few belongings into her car.
Thursday, she tells herself, she'll start planning her exit.
But Thursday comes, and Rumi is in her usual seat, third from the left, back row.
Waiting.
Not sure what for, but waiting all the same.
The door opens. Dr. Zoey Park enters first, talking over her shoulder to someone behind her.
"—telling you, they're actually interested. Well, most of them. The ones in the back are always more engaged than the ones who sit up front to look engaged."
"I'll take your word for it," a voice says—warm, slightly amused, touched with the specific cadence of someone who spends a lot of time explaining complicated things to people who don't understand.
And then she walks in.
Tall. Elegant. Red hair pulled back in a practical bun that's already coming loose. Warm brown eyes that scan the room with the assessment of someone used to reading data. She's wearing slacks and a blazer over a shirt with tiny stars printed on it—professional enough for a university, personal enough to show she doesn't entirely care about university dress codes.
She moves like someone comfortable in her own body, like someone who's spent time alone with the universe and come away unafraid.
Rumi's breath catches.
"Everyone, this is Dr. Mira Kang," Zoey says. "She's going to talk to us about how the Greeks turned their stories into stars."
Mira smiles at the class, and Rumi feels that flutter again—stronger now, less like curiosity and more like recognition.
Like seeing something she didn't know she was looking for.
She should leave. Should slip out before this goes anywhere. Should protect herself, protect this stranger, protect whatever fragile equilibrium she's managed to build in her twenty centuries of solitude.
Instead, Rumi leans forward.
And listens.
Mira Kang moves to the center of the room with the ease of someone who's done this a thousand times. She sets down a laptop, clicks something, and the projector flickers to life—a night sky, stars scattered across black like spilled salt.
"How many of you have looked up at the stars and seen pictures?" she asks.
A few hands go up, hesitant.
"Don't be shy. We all do it. Humans have been doing it for thousands of years. We look at random points of light and our brains insist on finding patterns. Connecting dots that have no business being connected." She advances the slide—the same stars, but now with lines drawn between them. Orion. "The Greeks did this. But so did the Egyptians, the Chinese, the Polynesians. Same stars, different stories."
She talks for five minutes about pattern recognition, about the human need to impose meaning on chaos. Her voice is warm, animated, the kind of voice that makes you lean in without realizing you're doing it. A few students who'd been slumped in their chairs sit up straighter.
Rumi finds herself leaning forward too.
"But here's what's interesting," Mira continues. "The Greeks didn't just make up random pictures. They put their stories in the sky. Their tragedies. Their heroes. Their warnings." Another slide—Cassiopeia, the W-shape constellation. "This is Cassiopeia. Queen of Ethiopia. Beautiful, vain, stupid enough to brag that she was more beautiful than the Nereids. Anyone know what happened to her?"
A student volunteers: "She got turned into a constellation?"
"She got punished," Mira corrects gently. "Her daughter was going to be sacrificed to a sea monster because of Cassiopeia's hubris. The constellation—that came later. A reminder in the sky: don't piss off the gods." She grins. "The Greeks were very into cosmic consequences."
Laughter ripples through the room. Even Zoey is smiling from her perch on the desk.
Mira advances through more slides—Perseus, Andromeda, Cetus the sea monster. She explains how they're positioned in the sky, how their myths are literally mapped out overhead. When she talks about Perseus rescuing Andromeda, she pulls up an image of the actual constellation positions.
"See how Perseus is right next to Andromeda? And Cetus is below, like he's rising from the water? The Greeks put their entire story in the sky. Made it permanent." She pauses, something shifting in her expression—softer, more thoughtful. "There's something beautiful about that, I think. Making the people you love immortal. Putting them in the stars so they're never really gone."
Rumi's chest tightens.
She knows about immortality. Knows it's not beautiful. Knows it's watching everyone else become stories while you remain, unchanged, carrying their memories like stones.
But the way Mira says it—making the people you love immortal—makes it sound like a gift instead of a curse.
"Now, the science," Mira says, shifting gears. "These stars aren't actually close to each other. Andromeda's stars might be hundreds or thousands of light-years apart from our perspective. They only look connected because of where we're standing. Change your position, and the constellation disappears."
She talks about parallax, about perspective, about how the ancient Greeks understood that the stars were distant but had no concept of how distant. "They thought the stars were painted on a sphere," she explains. "Fixed in place. Eternal. We know better now—stars are born, they live, they die. Some of them died billions of years ago, and we're only seeing their light now."
"That's depressing," someone mutters from the front row.
"Is it?" Mira's eyes scan the room. "I don't think so. I think it means every moment of light matters. Every photon that makes it across the universe to reach us is precious because it's finite." Her gaze lands on Rumi, holds for just a second. "Nothing lasts forever. That's what makes it beautiful."
Rumi can't look away.
She's been looked at before—a couple of millenia of moving around means countless faces, countless strangers whose eyes have slid over her and away, forgetting her the moment she's gone. But this is different. Mira isn't looking through her. She's looking at her, really seeing her, and something in Rumi wants to stand up and run and also never move from this seat ever again.
Mira's eyes move on, continuing the lecture, but Rumi can still feel the ghost of that gaze.
The next forty minutes are a blur. Mira talks about the zodiac, about how the Greeks divided the sky into regions, about how sailors used stars to navigate and priests used them to mark seasons. She shows slides of ancient star charts, drawings from medieval manuscripts, photographs from modern telescopes.
"The stories change," Mira says, wrapping up. "But the stars stay the same. Well—mostly. They're moving, but so slowly we can't see it in a human lifetime. From our perspective, Orion will look the same to your great-great-grandchildren as he looked to the ancient Greeks." She smiles. "There's comfort in that, I think. Continuity. Connection to everyone who came before us and everyone who'll come after."
Not everyone, Rumi thinks. Some of us get to watch the whole thing. Lucky us.
The bitterness surprises her. She thought she'd made peace with what she is a long time ago.
"Any questions?" Mira asks.
Hands shoot up. Students ask about black holes, about exoplanets, about whether the Greeks knew about other galaxies. Mira answers each question with patience and enthusiasm, never talking down, always treating the question like it matters.
Rumi doesn't raise her hand. She hasn't spoken in class in over a decade—it's easier to remain invisible if she doesn't give people a reason to remember her voice.
But she wants to. Wants to ask: What do you do when you've seen the same stars for hundreds of years? When you've watched constellations inch across the sky so slowly that no one else notices? When continuity stops being comforting and starts being a prison?
She doesn't ask.
Class ends. Students pack up, cluster around Mira with more questions. Rumi lingers, organizing her notebook with unnecessary care, watching from the corner of her eye.
She shouldn't look, but she does—just for a second, just a glance at Mira's thread.
It's beautiful.
Most human threads are simple—a single line of life stretching from birth to death, sometimes straight, sometimes tangled with other threads in marriages and friendships and chance encounters. But Mira's thread is complex, shimmering with potential, branching with possibilities not yet collapsed into certainty. Threads of curiosity extend from her like solar flares, reaching toward questions she hasn't asked yet, discoveries she hasn't made.
And when Rumi looks closer—she shouldn't, she knows she shouldn't—she can see faint connections to other threads. Zoey's, bright and strong. Students', brief and fleeting. And others, further out, people Mira hasn't met yet but might. Could. Will.
And then, unbidden, the gift shows her more:
Flash: Mira at a podium, older, grey at her temples, a plaque—
Flash: Mira in her sixties, laughing in a kitchen they don't have yet, completely at ease—
Flash: Mira convulsing on a floor somewhere, hands reaching—
Flash: Mira's car crushed against a guardrail, rain, her body too still—
Some visions she cannot hold.That one she pushes away immediately, heart pounding. The visions scatter like startled birds—brief, years away, impossible to hold. She can never keep them long enough to understand context. Just images. Possibilities. Some beautiful, some terrible.
The thread is finite, of course. They all are, except Rumi's. Mira has maybe sixty years if she's lucky, seventy if she's very lucky. Not long at all.
Rumi looks away quickly, before she can see how it ends.
She's gathering her things when she hears Zoey's voice, soft but nit soft enough to escape Rumi's sensitive hearing: "—that woman in the back? She's been auditing. Rumi. Doesn't talk much but she pays attention."
Rumi freezes, hand on her bag.
"She was really engaged during the lecture," Mira says. "I could tell. The way she was leaning forward—you can always tell when someone's actually listening versus just sitting there."
"She's an interesting one," Zoey says, and Rumi can hear the thoughtful note in her voice. "Smart. Really smart. But there's something... I don't know. Sad about her, maybe? Like she's carrying something heavy."
Rumi should leave. Should slip out before this conversation goes anywhere else.
"Well, she picked a good class to audit," Mira says. "Mythology and mortality—heavy topics. Maybe she's just a melancholy person."
"Maybe." Zoey doesn't sound convinced. "Anyway, that was great. The students loved it."
"Thanks for inviting me. I love teaching this stuff—it's nice to remember that astronomy isn't just data and equations. It's stories too."
Rumi moves then, heading for the door, but not fast enough.
"Rumi!" Zoey calls.
She stops, turns. Zoey and Mira are both looking at her. She keeps her face neutral, pleasant, forgettable.
"Great lecture," she says, directing the comment vaguely toward Mira.
"Thank you." Mira's smile is warm. "You're auditing the class, right? I'm doing a public astronomy night at the observatory next Friday. You should come—we'll be looking at some of the constellations we talked about today."
Rumi should say no. Should make an excuse. Should protect this woman from the disaster of knowing her.
"I'll think about it," she hears herself say.
"It's open to everyone," Mira continues. "Starts at seven. The observatory's on the east side of campus—big dome, can't miss it."
"Okay." Rumi adjusts the strap of her bag. "I should—I have to go. Thank you. For the lecture."
She leaves before anything else can be said, taking the stairs two at a time, pushing through the building's front doors into the October afternoon.
Her hands are shaking.
She walks across campus without seeing it, past students and trees and buildings that all blur together. She doesn't stop until she reaches the parking lot, finds her car, sits in the driver's seat with her forehead pressed against the steering wheel.
What is wrong with you?
She knows better than this. She's spent twenty centuries learning how to be alone, how to pass through people's lives without leaving a mark, how to never want anything she can't have. She's been so careful. So disciplined.
One lecture. One woman with red hair and warm eyes and a voice that made stars sound like home.
And Rumi is undone.
She should leave Vermont. Tonight. Pack her things, get in this car, drive until she hits another state, another town, another university where she can audit classes and disappear and never risk feeling this pull toward another finite life.
She should.
She starts the car. Drives to her apartment. Parks. Sits in the car for another twenty minutes, staring at nothing.
Finally, she goes inside. Opens her laptop. Types "Dr. Mira Kang astronomy" into the search bar.
The university website lists her credentials: Ph.D. from Cornell, specialization in stellar formation, currently working on data from the ALMA Observatory.
Published papers, grants received, courses taught. A professional headshot that doesn't quite capture the excitement in her face when she talks about stars.
Rumi clicks through to Mira's personal website. It's simple, professional, but there's a blog section—"Thoughts on Stars and Stories." The most recent post is from last month, titled "Why We Look Up: Finding Connection in an Infinite Universe."
Rumi shouldn't read it. She reads it.
"I've been thinking lately about why humans care about space. We're never going to visit most of these stars. We're never going to meet aliens (probably). We're never going to escape the basic fact of our mortality—we live, we die, and the universe continues without us.
So why do we look up?
I think it's because looking up reminds us we're not alone. Every photon of starlight that hits our eyes has traveled for years, sometimes millions of years, to reach us. We're connected to those distant suns by light itself. And every person who's ever looked up at the night sky has seen the same stars we see (more or less). We're connected to them too.
Astronomy is the study of distance. But maybe it's also the study of connection. Of how things that seem impossibly far apart are actually bound together by forces we can measure and forces we can only feel.
I don't know. It's late, and I'm writing this after a long night at the telescope. But I think that's why I became an astronomer—not to feel small, but to feel connected. To feel like I'm part of something continuous and vast and meaningful.
Even if I only get to be part of it for a little while."
Rumi closes the laptop.
She sits in her silent apartment, in the dark, listening to the sounds of other people's lives through thin walls. Someone cooking dinner. Someone watching television. Someone laughing on the phone.
All of them temporary. All of them connected to other temporary people in temporary ways.
And Rumi, permanent and unconnected, sitting alone in the dark because it's safer than being seen.
I don't know, she thinks. Maybe just once. Maybe just this once I could—
No. She knows better. The rule is there for a reason.
But Friday comes, and Rumi finds herself checking the university events calendar. The astronomy night is listed: Public Stargazing - 7:00 PM - University Observatory - All Welcome.
Saturday, she walks past the observatory building. It's closed, dark, the dome sealed shut against the October sunlight.
Sunday, she reads through Mira's other blog posts. They're all like the first—thoughtful, vulnerable, reaching toward something larger than data and equations.
Monday, she skips Zoey's class for the first time. Sits in the library instead, pretending to read, actually just staring at the same page for two hours.
Tuesday, she's back in her usual seat. Zoey raises an eyebrow but doesn't comment.
Wednesday, Rumi lies awake in her apartment at 2 AM and admits to herself the truth she's been avoiding: she's going to go to the astronomy night.
She's going to go, and it's going to be a mistake, and she's going to go anyway.
Because two thousand years is a long time to be safe.
And maybe—just maybe—she's tired of it.
Friday evening, Rumi drives to campus. Parks in the lot nearest the observatory. Sits in her car for fifteen minutes, giving herself every chance to back out.
At 7:05 PM, she gets out of the car.
At 7:07, she walks across the dark campus toward the lit dome on the hill.
At 7:09, she opens the door and steps inside.
And finds Mira Kang waiting, surrounded by stars.