Cristo demands, "Tell me exactly what's going on, or I am not going back again. I quit."

There just aren't any words, isn't that why I never told her? Why I had forbidden anyone to tell her? How could I possibly explain? Parts of it I would never understand and would Nova understand or would it kill her? A ghost of a ghost — is still dead. Who's Cristo to demand the truth? Well, he's the only one who gets to choose. Best to make it an informed decision.

I have no gnomon, which would make this more difficult, but Cristo's a good student — he should be able to manage without turning his teacher's brain to mush. "You're going to have to extract the memory from me," I say. "I'll instruct you."

#

100 Years Earlier

Ilan Potestas was dead less than twenty-four hours and Potestas Tower was still as a graveyard. Hundreds came for the wake but they didn't move much more than the boss in his open coffin, though they were more like ghosts than corpses: silent, yes, but not absent of their spirits, and they mourned — some even cried.

It was a grayscale parody of the party last night and most of the mourners had been party guests and witnesses to the murder. The wake was catered but no one touched the food; even if they were hungry all attempts were made not to reenact the celebration of the night before.

The clothes were white, black, gray — there were some veils but no masks. No music, no dancing, no speeches — no sound of any kind — and no stark indigo statue daring them all to try to petition him or duel words against him or in any way attempt to win or hold their own in a conversation with him, although the still man in the coffin was only slightly less verbose than the living man who had invited them all to a masquerade at his home one night before.

Stephen had no intention of breaking the silence, he didn't care who expected him to make a speech. He stood back from his father and let the guests pass in a procession in front of the casket and then come to him to quietly or often wordlessly offer condolences. He didn't want to talk to any of them but he tried not to seem rude; instead he put on the act of his life and pretended to be grieving deeply, incapable of words, insensible with the pain, hardly capable of acknowledging their kind expressions of sympathy when really he was just ignoring them and counting down the seconds to the board meeting at dusk when he would finally be able to cast his vote for Sunyin Aura, and even if his idol didn't become president or anything, Stephen would show his support and undermine President Solin's regime, Constellation would be one fiftieth closer to proper direction in the days ahead and either its leader would adapt and start to listen to Aura, or a year from now maybe she would lose her firm grip on the company as others started to listen.

Today was the cusp of a revolution and Stephen couldn't bring himself to be the least bit sad about it. He was a terrible actor but he could keep the smile from his face — at least as long as he didn't go too far into daydreams about revolutionizing and universalizing the use of star power and the technological breakthroughs that'll come along with more accessible licensing and education and less restrictive research and development policies and more freedoms and fewer rules and regulations.

He was in a good mood. Ancient Laio Cytheria emerged from the throng and scattered everyone else trying to express their commiseration but when she got to him she spoke very quietly and he leaned down toward her — she was a little bit shorter than Stephen — with a goodnatured encouraging smile before he remembered not to smile and made his face grave, or at least less cheerful. Cytheria told him his father was a good man, one of the best in the empire, and we're all doomed without him, and then she wandered off.

Stephen couldn't have disagreed more. He couldn't remember ever in his life feeling more hopeful than today at his father's funeral.

There were hours to go before the election meeting but he worried he still had a hundred more mourners to be comforted by and what if more continue to show up? A combination of worrying anxiety and electrifying hope were combusting in his guts maybe made even worse by the need to keep a straight face, and the need to escape the somber sad crowd overwhelmed him.

He thought of Nova — she hadn't made an appearance yet as far as he could see but she would be much better at being comforted. She was taking it so much harder than Stephen. Hadn't people come to think of her as an adopted Potestas? She could take Stephen's place in a heartbeat, people liked her more and it wouldn't be hard for them to act like she was the boss's surviving daughter.

Only where was she?

The other thing filling Stephen with optimism was that without his father always hovering, glowering, criticizing and making Stephen feel like a complete idiot, it was possible he could actually pull himself together enough to survive a whole conversation with Nova — or at least a few sentences that didn't make him feel stupid. He hadn't attempted to do so yet, but not an hour ago when he'd last seen Nova it had felt like their relationship had a chance for a new beginning, a new, blank page to be written on — the coroners had brought the casket and were setting it up and she hadn't said anything but Stephen had looked from her face, drained of blood, eyes puffy but long past tear stained as if she'd done crying herself out hours ago and was now as calm as the snow on the ground outside, to the men setting down the casket on a pedestal and wondering if it would be tasteless to make the pedestal float because his father always seemed to like making things levitate, when the next thing he knew Nova had her arms around him and her head on his shoulder and she didn't cry or say anything but somehow he managed to analyze the situation and figure out how his muscles worked and decided he should put an arm around her so he managed that and was contemplating what to do next, whether to say something or give her a squeeze or try to look at her face or what it was he should say if he should say something but before he could figure out anything to do next the moment was past, one he could have frozen forever if he weren't so desperate to see what moments were coming next, she pulled out of the hug, took the hand that was around her, his right, in her left, half walking away, wrapped her fingers around it and squeezed, never looking him in the face, and then she wandered out of the room and away. She had yet to reappear.

He could still feel the pressure of her fingers on his right hand or at least imagine it. Stephen never knew what to do or say around Nova, but now that he thought about it and forgot about magic and the company and the future while he looked for her among the faces of the mourners it became clear as everything else faded away.

She hadn't needed him to say anything.

She came to him for comfort because he shared her grief. Or pretended to. Or should have. But he refused to be sad today. Ilan Potestas had been a great man but he wasn't a good father.

It seemed Stephen had two clear choices; where before there had always only been a hundred blurry wrong answers, today there was a decision he had to make. He could find her and comfort her. Everybody he had ever met lied. He wasn't good at it but one thing he know about people was that they saw what they wanted to see, which was exactly why Nova had held his hand. He could put on an act as if he were in so much pain — he could go to her and comfort her, and even be comforted in return. She was vulnerable and finally he had a way to get close to her. 

Or he could tell her the truth: that the only feeling his father's passing evoked in him was a pure and overwhelming relief. She would hate him. Yet maybe that wasn't true. Stephen didn't really know how she would react.

He didn't really know Nova. But he wanted to. And he wanted her to know him — not just another Soliari behind a mask but the real person with real thoughts and feelings — ugly ones. And some redeeming ones too.

Now he had to go find her before his courage evaporated and while he was full to bursting convinced and optimistic that he could finally talk to her, even if it was going to be hard, he knew what to say: he just wanted to get to know her.

From the queue of mourners Ignatius Varian was next to say he was sorry for Stephen's loss. Stephen took the man's hands in both of his and thanked him, and said he had to leave.

Without giving an excuse he left the wake, walking not running, and went through a link to the hall outside Nova's door. He knocked and waited, and knocked again, but she wasn't there.

A matter of seconds later through a link to the inside of the solarium he saw her between the rose bushes and hedges crumpled in a heap on the stone ground — why was she crumpled on the ground? His heart bounded out through his chest and to the pit of his stomach and into his throat simultaneously as if it had exploded in every direction inside him; unsure whether he had any reason to be afraid he took a deep breath and sprinted. He was to her, instantly the steps his feet pounded on the pavement erased from memory and forgotten as if he'd teleported, and he knelt in the blood seeping from her and splashed in it with his fingers searching for what — life, a wound to hold closed, breath, her pulse? In her face he could see death, she was long gone, he touched her cheek anyway and left red fingertips on it before he crumpled down with her and cried.

#

Cristo was crying too. "Stop," he said. "Make it stop just for a second, please." Stephen stopped his memory recounting though Cristo controlled replay spell. He sat back in his chair and watched Cristo take it all in.

"There's still more," said Stephen. "It's getting late."

"Sorry. I need a second. You couldn't have just told me she died? I didn't need to see that. Feel that, it was so much pain. She's standing right outside. I'm sorry you lost her, but do you want me to save her?"

"You can't save her," said Stephen. "You'd know that if you'd finish the memories."

"Was she murdered?"

"Yes, she was murdered."

"That woman standing out there is going to die? And we're not going to change it?"

"That's right."

"But you love her—"

"If there's one thing you should have learned from that memory it's that I hardly knew her. I didn't love her. I loved the idea of her, and I wanted to marry her. But that's why you never should have brought her here, it offers me a choice, and I'm weak. I needed you to see that. You never should have brought her here, do I win that argument?"

Cristo shuddered. "You got it, Pop, I concede." He wiped his cheeks and took a deep breath. "I don't know if I want to see the rest."

"I promise the worst is over. After the darkness there's hope."

"There was hope before the darkness too but that just got snuffed out and crushed into nothing."

"You'll feel much better when you see what happened next. Promise," said Stephen. "But let's speed it up, there's about a hundred years of memories to get through, so I'll only show you the highlights."

Cristo nodded and plunged back in.

#

Stephen had lost track of the days since she left him, knew vaguely that Justin Marius had become president of Constellation after Stephen sent a delegate to vote for Sunyin Aura. That didn't matter. How could it possibly matter?

He hardly ever left the solarium except to sleep, though he had slept there too, right on the ground, and attendants brought him new bottles and cleared out the old ones.

Food and water, too, although nothing but alcohol really appealed to him the first few days.

The day Justin Marius came to see him, though, he happened to have sobered up some and eaten a good meal and he'd dragged a bench over to where the blood stain had been instead of sitting on the ground.

He was considering living. He also considered cleaning himself up, getting his head together and facing the brutal truth instead of drowning insensibly in drunken fantasies because he probably deserved to suffer, and Nova deserved for someone to solve her murder, so he was going to investigate even if it felt like digging through shards of glass with his bare fingers in search of a razor blade.

He was upright and feeling his head clear and his vision sharpen and his stomach settling down although it was hard, full and dense as a rock now struggling to digest breakfast when Justin Marius marched out into the solarium and across to Stephen.

"You don't look so good," said Marius. "I've come to offer my sympathies. I'm shocked that tragedy has struck Invernali twice in so short a time. I respected your father immensely. And Nova Dasilva was an incredible woman by all accounts. I didn't know her well, but she was beloved by many, wasn't she?"

Stephen was grateful when it turned out to be a rhetorical question because there were no words. Marius went on speaking. "I know this is a difficult time for you, but I have something for you, and I think in time it'll help you recover from your loss. That sounds insane, right? What could possibly heal the suffering you feel right now? I know first hand that time does nothing to alleviate the agony. You'll grieve less and less, you'll return to the normal and the everyday, it'll seem as if the wound has begun to heal because its outward signs will dissipate, you'll cry less, you'll get your life back together. But you've lost her and nothing can change that. Every day you'll want her. The pain dulls but the longing only ever grows stronger — no one will replace her and you'll spend the rest of your life alone. Your life is ruined, you may as well curl up and die.

"I'm sorry for saying it, but that's how I felt. First I planned vengeance for the people I hold responsible for my wife's death — isn't that the phase you're on? But it wasn't enough, it didn't stop the longing, questioning why, wondering what would have happened were she still here — would we live happily forever? The solution is so obvious, though, isn't it? We're paralyzed by one flawed assumption when we lose someone, Stephen, I just said it myself even though I learned it's not true: 'nothing can change it.' But you're such a great mind, you understand what the stars can help us to achieve. Nothing is fixed. What we once thought were the rules of reality can be rewritten. You prefer Sunyin Aura to me because you've been told she's the only one who will dare to break the universe if she has to to unlock the secret of what magic can really do — but I too believe the possibilities are endless.

"It's my fault, however, that you've been pitted against me. I didn't advertise my true beliefs. I want to push the boundaries beyond anything anyone thinks is possible — in fact, I already have. President Gaia Solin never came close to the impossibilities I have already achieved. I wanted my wife back. I couldn't live another day with the lie that time heals all wounds — in fact, I can break time into tiny pieces and bend it into fascinating shapes, I think. Unfortunately, that's not enough to bring her back, not without losing my son. But I found another way. Slower. Much, much slower. But I brought her back." Marius's eyes brimmed with joy, almost tears.

"I'm not sure if you'll believe me. It may take a decade or so." He snapped his fingers twice and Stephen looked up to see his friend Franco coming toward them — carrying a bundle in his arms that was squalling at the top of its lungs. When Franco got to them he held out an infant to Stephen. It was crying with its eyes screwed closed. Franco thrust the baby out for Stephen to take, looking like he really wanted to get rid of it, and Stephen took it and bounced it gently, making shushing noises with a mind that was completely numb and as insensible as it had been at the deepest depths of his intoxication.

"I'm sorry she's only just been reborn," said Marius. "I know it's strange. The researchers on the project insist the only way to reincarnate was more akin to rebirth than reanimation. You might not believe me, but I assure you, she is Nova."

The baby stopped crying, comforted by Stephen, and she opened her eyes. Looking into the irises, Stephen believed him, but he didn't say so.

"My wife Aurora is back with her family. They're raising her. Again. Consider this a reward, Stephen."

"For what?" Stephen found his voice. "I voted against you."

"An attempt to earn your loyalty, then. Sometimes the most worthwhile loyalty is the hardest to earn. I've accomplished something great, but with a mind like yours on my team, imagine what we'll be capable of. I don't expect you to change your mind overnight . . . But I won't wait forever. I have projects for you to work on, and you'll be rewarded for your work."

#

Apologies for the scene break, but an intermission seemed necessary due to length. This chapter is over twice as long as the usual for Stars Rise. Please enjoy part two, out now :)