sades' short stories

The Last Star

Tags: paranormal, sci-fi, space, short story, 1k words

It happened on the night of August fifth last year. Or, more likely, it started long before that, but it was first noticed that fateful night. The sky was clear, and those with a passion for charting the galaxies had their sights up.

I was among those few, glancing off at the many constellations that freckled our atmosphere. It was a night unlike any other—a clear view of the heavens across the horizon. Every single one of the countless stars had been up there, blazing away at us.

Or so we thought.

Nearly two hours into that particular night, one of the stations on the other side of the country called to tell us that a star in the Orion constellation had all but disappeared with no warning. We chalked it up to poor eyes or poor weather conditions until we found the same through our own telescope.

The middle star of his belt had gone missing.

We all had realized the truth at that moment: the death of the star, Alnilam, had taken two thousand light years to make its display in the Earth's night sky. Maybe the most notable of stars to have gone missing in the history of astronomy.

And so we prepared statements and bulletins discussing what we knew about the blue star, and not long after headed home to enjoy some sleep for the rest of the night. Come the next morning, the world would know of Orion's missing belt buckle.

And so it was. The Greek hunter no longer had a way to hold his pants steady, and astronomy was in the public eye for nearly a week. All the while, nothing notable had happened, curled away each night in our observatories.

That was, until the second star in the belt disappeared. On a cosmic scale, an event like this was unheard of. Even my wife had an interest in what we had to say. A fluke? A mystery? One destroying the other? It was impossible to know for sure. But Mintaka was the one that remained, furthest west, and stayed in the night sky for the moment.

Another week had passed, and after extensive scannings of the sky, our computer printed out a very interesting display highlighting a string of anomalies nobody was prepared to see. The two stars of Orion's Belt were far from the only masses missing in the night sky. There were a potential forty gone, each having been there a previous night and a previous year and a previous million years, but gone the next.

This research had been done to view the true rate at which stars died out, and in a sky of roughly 4,500 stars at any given moment, forty disappearing was worrying.

Our friends in the southern hemisphere had reported findings almost the same. None of the other major constellations had missing stars yet, but a cluster most visible from the South Pole had gone inky over the span of three days.

There was a long conference I attended that would normally have been way above my pay grade discussing the implications of this and whether the public should know. Worst-case scenarios were a dime a dozen, spelling out everything from aliens harvesting hydrogen to the universe dying out abruptly. In the end, it didn't matter what decision the talking heads came to, as it was leaked the next morning to the presses.

Despite the talk from politicians, words from experts, and cries of the end times, the stars kept on pace, and we lost anywhere between ten and forty a night from the hemispheres. Sometimes it was random, and other times clustered. The moment we thought of a potential cause, a set of stars would disappear that threw the theory out the window. I don't even remember when we lost Mintaka.

And so it continued. We woke to our new normal, after having seen less than one hundred in the sky last night, and sat waiting on the front porch outside. It's all anyone could bother to do anymore. I sat for three hours with my wife, trying to find a way to stare at Her. The sun.

It would be my last chance.

The light flickered at first, as if an eclipse were happening, before completely consuming us in darkness. At the same moment, the Earth shifted beneath our feet, tottering us a little.

Complete and utter darkness welcomed my eyes. A darkness you could not adjust to. One that knew what sort of somber, lethal change it brought. As the air grew colder, I scanned around, unsure if anything was out there, and found my wife's hands, embracing her deeply. We had long been prepared for the moment. It was almost peaceful.

And then I saw it. There was one last star. If I hadn't known any better, I might have thought it was the North Star, or any star of significance to us. One given a name or constellation. But it was just as likely to be nameless.

It hadn't winked out yet when my eyes closed, and they stayed that way, savoring one last victory over the empty Universe before the cold became too much.