The moon shone, a tiny silver sliver outside her window, casting an ethereal glow over the room. The campus outside the window was a nightscape of shades of black, lit here and there with the soft, golden glows of lamplights. Edges of treetops fringed the bottom of the sky in delicate, black lace.
She remembered a night like this, remembered looking into a sky made of indigo velvet and diamonds sewn into the firmament, the sky that stretched out and down, laying peacefully across the rounded hilltops on a warm, July night. Remembered the golden heat of a fire, the fierce amber and vermilion sparks of a firecracker, the arc of a shooting star that traced a silky, powder white edge of diamond dust onto the sky.
Mother and Father holding her hands, hands that engulfed her own tiny ones, swung her into warm arms and laughing faces, hands that caressed her hair and lips, warm lips to call her their darling and kiss her goodnight when it came time for her to be tucked in. Mother with her smooth fingers and warm eyes, her patient smile and gentle, gentle voice, hands that taught her to sew a button onto a tiny fabric bunny. Father and a pinwheel that spun the colors of the rainbow, reflecting each color as shards of light on her face and hands.
Laughter. Loving. Warmth.
Mother. Father.
And now she hated the night, the night that stole them away from her, left her alone and without them. Was there fire when they left? Was there fire on and around them, did they look up into the merciless, brilliant stars as she did? Look at them, as she did now, yes, because there was nowhere else to look? And then bury, bury them in shrouds of thick scented roses and polished mahogany. Covered in perfumed scraps of velveteen flower petals, lost and cold and aching, remembering the stars.
She'd closed her eyes and imagined the dirt piled thick around her, pressing in on each side and trapping her in that tiny space, that tiny garden of plucked flowers, next to her mother and father. Saved by a prince draped in flowing white, purest white as the stars in moon with warm eyes like her mother's…all she remembered, the words and his kind, kind eyes. His face as dark as the night sky, he was the night sky clothed in all the stars.
How she hated the night.
Sometimes…
Sometimes she even hated the prince.