the horizon's child

by PreludeInZ

Heavenward is a story about John and EOS. Heavenward returns from the previous installment's nine-year span of flashbacks and back story, to conclude in a series of events that takes place over one or two days. Heavenward is a story about how much time one can fit in a moment. This is the seventh part of Heavenward. It follows vault of heaven.

1. prologue

Zodiacal light is an astronomical phenomenon, a faint column of light radiating upward from the horizon. Sunlight scattering through cosmic dust along the elliptical plane results in a diffuse glow, observable at dusk in spring, and before dawn in autumn, periods of time when the zodiac occupies a sharp angle relative to the horizon. This band of light is best and usually only seen in absolute darkness, in the parts of the world still unpolluted by the artificial lights of cities, by the way humanity spreads the sign of its presence into the very sky. Colloquially, it is known as the false dawn.

This phenomenon was marked by early astronomers as being distinct from the dawn of the sun, and not to be mistaken for the beginning of a new day, so as to keep count of the hours when followers were called to prayer. As the movements of the heavens order the lives of those on Earth, there are still times when truths as immortal and immutable as the paths of the stars and the arc of the sun can be distorted. Sometimes the dawn is not the dawn, but only the light that comes before, that heralds the arrival of the morning to come.

It takes a particular sort of person to be able to tell the difference.