When the Stars are Right

By

Timothy C. Phillips

Somewhere, in the ancient night, black tide laps black stones. A steep and windswept

strand looms upward from the black sea, under the eternal and implacable stars that have kept

their watch since the wheel of the sky was young. Rocks, water, eternal pale and flickering light;

unchanging things in the unchanging secret of night. Night; that is the time when on earth the

codex of the deepest universe stands revealed to those who would stare into the heavens and

study and record its most worrying enigmas, it is then that certain truths might be guessed at, by

the ever-grasping and restless mind of Humankind.

Down the black rocks in the darkness, there comes a slip of white, a girl, just becoming a

woman, naked, gliding down the step-like stones, her hands held up before her in supplication,

her eyes turned up to the wheeling deathless glare of the stars, heedless of her danger. Her feet

know the way, and she steps down, down, without fault or fail, to the ceaseless and churning

edge of the eternal waters, watched over by the cold and eternal parliament of a million stars, her

only shield the ebony cloak of night.

She reaches the water’s edge and takes yet one more step, out onto the a jutting rock, the

last call of land, an obsidian outcropping that comes straight up out of the sheer drop off, naked

slippery feet finding purchase where none should be, the water a hundred feet deep and waiting

for her on every side, still she stares at the sky and first her lips begin to quiver without a sound

and then there is a sound, faint and trembling, then rising to a ululation, as she opens her throat
and begins to sing a hundred names, the names of her lover, the names of her master, the names

of He Who Sleeps Beneath the Waves.

They are names taught her by her mother’s, mother’s, mother, a thousand generations

handed down; sounds and words and ideas a million times repeated since a time that has passed

from living memory. Tonight, tonight, and only tonight, the song must be sung without falter

from beginning to end. Naked, on the edge of the merciless, ceaseless battering of the sea.

Tonight; because, tonight, Most Revered and Awaited Night, for the first time in a thousand

thousand lifetimes, the stars are right. She sings.

The sounds from her youthful throat are the pollen to the pistil of a long dormant flower

that sleeps in soil old when the reptile eyes of earth’s first masters opened to regard fens and

tropics long forgotten in the long march of time. There is an awakening, somewhere, of

something, a little thing, a subtle shift; but it is enough that the stars, the sea, the sound of a

young song, are changed.

Somewhere in the ancient, delving dark, something has not quite awakened or even

stirred; but a token has been offered and somehow on the plaintive unseelie wind, in response to

the evocation has come a convocation, somehow, from somewhere, by means unknown.

Something will stir. Something that has changed will change anew. Ancient things, long

dormant, will know motion. Something will awaken. The call has been sent forth, and the call

has been heard.

The stars are right.