Author's Note: Written for 100moods, prompt #70, Optimistic. Incidentally, I own all of the necklaces mentioned, including a silver pentacle.
Little Maggie dreamed of stars.
She dreamed of the silver star around her father's neck, the one wrapped in a shining circle that kept it from expanding to its fiery true form. Her father could open that circle, though, and let the light of the star inside out. She'd seen him do it. She was wary of touching that star, afraid she would burn up. She was too young to touch a star like that.
She had her own star, of course. Hers was smaller, with no circle; a quieter star, a more protective star. When she was born, her father had brought down a star from the sky and cast it in silver, like his, and put a little of the power of his star into it. He'd told her that her star would keep her safe, and it had. Her star didn't burn, though, or if it did she did not know how to open the silver and let the burning out. Her father told her someday he would show her how, when she was older.
Even though she was sleeping, her hand stole up to touch the silver star, in its place on her chest. She never took it off.
Her mother had a star, too, on a golden chain. Her mother's star was the same bright gold as her hair, the same sharp-pointed prickliness as her manner, and the same graceful beauty as her life. It made sense that her mother's star would be different, because her mother's power was different too. But in the same way, it made sense that her mother should have a star, because her mother was as infinite as her father. It just made sense.
Maggie's new little sister had a star too. Hers was sort of like Maggie's, made of clean, bright silver, but Julia was not old enough to wear her star yet. Julia's star, four rounded points and a sparkling central crystal, dangled above her crib at night, and above the doorway to the room the sisters shared during the day. Sometimes, standing in the sunlight, Maggie thought Julia's star was beginning to turn gold. It should, she thought idly. Julia was already the sunny golden shine to their lives, the bright happiness neither of her parents really possessed yet.
The stars watched over them.
She grew older, and understood the stars a little more. Magic made the stars that hung over her life, and magic gave them power; not the stars themselves. Her father's star (his pentacle, rather, for she knew the proper name for it now) was not the source of his magic, only a talisman from his mother. It didn't make sense when she saw him use it, but she could accept one or two things that did not, living in the family and house that she did. Her mother's star was not even a star at all; more a snowflake cast in gold, a creation of incredible delicacy and complexity and yet far stronger than it looked.
That made sense, when she thought about it.
Other things made more sense, too. The way her father's pentacle and her mother's snowflake seemed to belong together, for example. Maggie rarely saw the necklaces off, but one time that she had, they had fallen together in such a way that they interlocked. From then on, any time she saw those necklaces together, she arranged them with the golden snowflake safely atop the silver pentacle, the smooth silver lines of the pentacle softening the snowflake's spikes, and the spikes protecting the pentacle from any dimming hands. Perfect.
She understood, too, that her sister's star and her star were just protection charms, wards and spells designed to keep the both of them safe. Her father would not risk them in a dark and dangerous world that Julia was totally innocent of and she was only beginning to comprehend. Her mother too kept them safe, but in a different way, a more grounded way. Both girls practiced aikido every night, and knew exactly what to do if someone bigger than them grabbed them or tried to hurt them. Maggie watched her mother demonstrate, watched her hands blur into circles and stars, tried to make her own hands follow her mother's and knew that the stars still kept her safe.
In school, she dutifully copied down and memorized the definiton—a star is a gaseous mass in space such as the Sun, which generates energy by thermonuclear reactions—but she never really believed it.
On Maggie's eighteenth birthday, she finally understood.
There was a fight. No one had seen it coming. Vampires, or black mages, or maybe both, or maybe one and the same; she didn't really know, she still didn't know. They'd gone for the Wardens.
More specifically, they'd gone for the Wardens' families.
Her mother had been at work, and the mage who'd hurt her hadn't stood a chance against thirty of Chicago's finest, all heavily armed and all very angry indeed. They'd only barely kept her father from killing that mage with his bare hands. They hadn't kept her mother from lapsing into a coma triggered by shock.
Poor Julia—her fifteenth birthday was lost in the struggle and the fear. Intermittent attacks that neither Maggie nor Julia was strong enough to stand off alone knocked against the house wards and once almost broke through, repelled only by bright bursts of energy that sparked from the shields and threw the vampires spiraling away. Their parents lay in the bed they shared; their mother outwardly uninjured but her face blank and closed, and their father, battered and bruised into unconsciouness. He held her hand tight in his, and neither of them woke. So the girls waited. That was all they could do in the end, wait.
Her father had brought her mother home, and nearly collapsed himself. He'd driven himself too far too fast, to save her mother. And Maggie understood why his pentacle and her snowflake fit together so perfectly.
It was over before anyone knew it. Her mother woke first, in a tangle of confused words and movements, and her father a dozen minutes later, crying out her mother's name. Another Warden dropped by, weary circles under his eyes, to tell them it was all right, all clear, they'd ended it. Julia collapsed in bed, exhausted by the worry, and did not wake for nearly eighteen hours. Her parents held each other on the couch; her father brushed a kiss across her mother's brow every so often, and her mother pressed her cheek to his shoulder. Maggie could almost hear their thoughts—they were safe, their children were safe. The stars had kept them all safe. The rest of the world could wait.
It was nearly nine o'clock at night before Maggie remembered it was her birthday.
She opened the door and peered out—saw no one, for which she was grateful, and slipped into the yard, turned her eyes to the sky instead. The stars were so bright and friendly, little clear diamonds on black velvet, or pinpricks through a dark sheet set before a brilliant light. Maggie wanted to reach up and tear the sheet away, expose the light, let the world shine or wither under its brilliance as it would.
She had a sudden conviction that beyond the night sky, there was perfection. Beyond the night sky, everyone was loved as much as her parents loved each other, as much as they loved her and her sister. Beyond the night sky, everyone had someone who fit them as well as Harry Dresden fit Karrin Murphy; everyone had their other half. Everything was right. Everything was safe and perfect and infinite. She touched the star around her neck.
Salvation lay in the light behind the darkness. In the stars.