Romulus and Remus were the kind of twins who were already fighting in the womb. Not like Castor and Pollux, the other famous pair—bound by a love so strong they became a constellation. Sometimes orphans turn feral. Sometimes they are suckled by a she-wolf. Sometimes they acquire a taste for wild milk. Sometimes one must die for the other to live. Then the survivor must spend the rest of his life trying to outrun his brother’s ghost. Even death is not an end, not a true victory. The one who survives will always be haunted. No one can ever bury his own shadow.

When you look into the night sky, the stars you see are billions of years old. It takes that long for their light to reach you. By then, the star could already be dead. What you are seeing is only a memory. All stars die eventually. If it is big enough, it will collapse into itself and form a black hole. It will suck in everything around it. The bigger a star gets, the messier its downfall, the more it takes down with it. But before that, it will explode in a supernova. Before it retreats into the graveyard of the universe, it will light up the sky in one last gasp of beautiful violence.