Kiva went out from the village to watch the Great Mother set in a blaze of red on the horizon, then wait for the Three Sisters to blink on in the night sky. This was her tradition, her private ritual. She allowed no one to see her, no one to follow her as she slipped away from her father’s hut on the edge of the village. As she came over the rise, a lip of rock separating the village from the surrounding plain, she paused to watch the wind ripple over the grass, a sudden tessellation of lines dancing in shifting patterns across the prairie before disappearing once more as the air went still. She walked down into the low, flat expanse, her fingers trailing in the purple and brown grasses, clutching at the tips. She lay down in her favorite spot, against the cleft swell of a small hillock, and waited.
Waited for the time that was neither night nor day. A thin cusp between the light and the darkness.
This was her favorite time—a secret she kept with herself. It was hers and hers alone.
As the Great Mother inched toward the horizon, Kiva felt the stirrings of something she couldn’t quite name welling up inside her. It began in the back of her mind as a sort of itch, a tickle, the ghost of something she once knew but had long since forgotten. Then it—whatever it was—began to gain strength, like a light breeze growing to a mighty wind. Slowly, an image began to take shape in her mind: a blue orb, cloud-dappled, suspended in deep blackness.
And then, at the moment that the last red-rimmed sliver of sun fell below the curve of the planet Gle’ah, a sharp agony seized Kiva at the root of her torso. Her body convulsed with the force of the pain; her stomach and back clenched tight, and her heels ground deep into the grass.
Kiva’s eyes clamped shut as, above, the Three Sisters—the moons of Gle’ah—began to glow in the darkening sky. In the far distance, Vale and Dalia, the Twins, had entered into the part of their orbit where they appeared to dance together, their two white orbs seeming to merge into a single elongated mass. Ao, the third moon of Gle’ah, passed by on a closer orbit, near enough to the planet that, had her eyes been open, Kiva could have traced the moon’s path with her finger as it spun across the sky.
As it was, Kiva merely felt her hair float next to her ears in the pull of Ao’s gravity as the moon passed overhead—and when the pale white sphere was directly above her, nearly lifting her entire body off the ground, the pain sharpened to an agonizing point in her chest as images fluoresced on her eyelids.
An explosion of light and fire.
A sea of stars elongating and whizzing past in the blackness.
A huge bird made of polished stone, coming through the clouds to land on the prairie.
And three dark silhouettes standing shoulder to shoulder on the horizon.
Then the moon spun on, releasing Kiva’s body from its grip. The strands of her hair fell and pooled again on the ground. When Ao had disappeared over the horizon, the images on Kiva’s eyelids faded, and the pain loosed its hold on her body. Her eyes snapped open, her lungs gasping for air. In the now-dark sky, the Twins went wobbly in her vision as tears brimmed at the edges of her eyes. She blinked away a single tear; it ran down her cheek and dripped in her ear.
Strangers.
The word came to her unbidden.
They’re coming.