You don’t want to mess with the Star Eater. Better go home now, kid. Tell your parents you love them, give your sheep a taste of the grass of the town you were raised in, drink the water from the streams you were washed in as a babe, for Capra’s sake. Watch the sky fire up like a sea snake’s trove of gold and aquamarine and topaz and baby’s pink quartz meeting the infernal death in the sky, and see the heavens bleed out in a mountain of roses and marigolds and fuschia. Or a thing just like that, I think. I can’t imagine it, but either way we won’t be wondering long.

I’m not being absurd. Leave me in peace, kid, I have to deliver this cheese to Dr. Pila. Don’t give me that face, I still have brie to deliver. Just because the big blue above will be boiling us any day now is no excuse to break down into lawless incivility. I need to eat, little one, so I suggest you put down my cart and head home or make yourself… Huf. Useful.

Hm. Maybe I was wrong about you. You’re not going to quit, are you, even when you don’t know the half of what you’re doing. You can’t fight the Star Eater. You haven’t the faintest where to start.

Did you know Sitnalta Lake used to be Sitnalta Valley? A great city was built there in its folds, all towering brick and gleaming oak, iron joints and prosperous heart. Well the mayor was a man of science. Under his direction the city’s laboratories had flourished like onions in an undignified ditch, starting first with the crops and the livestock, scrutizining them until the shyest mitochondrium couldn’t avoid their precise understanding. Then the laboratories moved to the buildings, the clay and grained wood that their breath was built upon. When they’d turned the city over again, the good scientists set their sights on the dark skies above them. And the Star Eater did not like that.

She’s a solitary entity, you know that. She lives up in the sky in a palace of intergalactic membrane and dust. She sits by herself on a throne of sapphire and mercury, the Queen of Diamonds, and feasts on gravity and time. She’s the Wyrm at the End of the Universe, Lady Eclipse, Regina Tenebra.

When the mayor lay an observatory in the nook of the valley, her infernally dark eye turned toward him. The scientists marked out the glimmerous points in the sky with more clarity than ever, losing themselves in nebulae and asteroids and every which wavelength of light. They were enthused; they wanted more. Never so plainly had the spine of physics began to unravel before them. So the mayor lay stone for another observatory. Greater. Taller. More penetrating into the stitches of the universe than anything had dared to be. It was a great arm into the sky, a granite column spiraling up and up and up, culminating in five spindling fingers of steel and knuckles of mechanical wonder to aim the observatory at the shyest toes of space, and in the entire contraptions arm was the great, glass orb of an eye.

The day the observatory was finished was a windy day. Do you know your meteorology, kid? Wind is the token of change, that restless shifting of the air towards something different. The sun blossomed across a clear sky. As it unfurled itself to its full height, a breeze began to stir. While Sitnalta was bathed in the golden syrup of evening, then draped in shadows, the breeze turned to gales. The mayor ascended the observatory while the city watched from the streets as the first star winked to life in the sky, as the great spindle-fingers of the eye swiveled and set, adjusted, twitched. The wind screamed like a militia of flutes and whistles.

The observatory opened its big glass eye and blink. What did it see? I can only guess. An infinite cosmos, the great sea-swirls of the universe, and the Star Eater staring right back at it.

It only saw for a moment, for a storm passed over the city.

A dark knot of storm unfurled across the crystal night sky, seeping ink over everything. Wind howled for mercy, rain flew down like screaming minnows escaping the shark, immaculate little daggers of ice penetrating sharp into trees and upturned faces and earth. Clouds are petrified of the Star Eater. While the mayor was preparing to take the first good inspection of the heavens, she grabbed a fistful of them and squeezed them until they burst, and the rest coalesced together and ran. They fled shrieking for help across the wide earth until they blew over Sitnalta Valley. There, the Star Eater reached through physics and time, and held them there, suspended, over the dark crevice of vale.

They rained. And they did not stop.

You needn’t hear the rest. What do you think you’re going to do against an entity that can hold time itself in the palm of her hand? The land’s clearest minds are nothing against her. What have you got, a sheep and a sloppy haircut? I don’t mean to be cruel. I only imagine that you’d rather be anywhere else when the world ends.