The girl ran.
Her slippers beat against the cut rock of the road, but the pain was only an accompaniment to the shaking destructions she was fleeing. The words of her mother rang through her mind as the blasts and clatters of weaponry echoed against their floating cousin islands. Shrieks of alien beings, loud and exultant, covered the terrified cries of her family-colony.
She wanted to go back, to help, to not run as she was. Father would stay! Father would have stopped them!
But her mother had told her to run to the gate, touched her with the blood that was so hot on her hands and her heart. By her mother's blood, she would listen and go.
There was nothing else she could do.
The sharp edges of her asteroid home jarred through her legs as she left the cut path, passing the last structures of her village. She scrambled over the low wall she had watched her father build only months before. An explosion bloomed, casting orange and blue lights around her, and two alien craft roared above, blasters firing down to destroy the homes she had just passed.
The shockwave pushed her to the ground, and her small noise of pain went unnoticed by the universe.
Father had told her that something out there cared for them, that had saved them from the Dark. That was the reason they had left the Bright Place, she remembered him saying, to repay the debt they owed to that Traveler. He had told her that he would go, to help protect it and it's people while it was weak and fragile. And then he had.
She rose, stumbling, but clinging to her backpack. She could not leave that.
Get to the gate.
She kept rising screams and the reverberating deaths pushed her onward, and still her mother's voice rang.
The gate, my love. The gate.
Wet fist clenched, the blood burning her further.
She must go to the gate.
The top of its circle came into view first. The eons-blank ring of metal reached all the way to the island above them. Though scarred and pitted by time, it was not bent, a stalwart sentinel of things long dead, and it shone with the orange and blue of the fires behind her, the revenant of silent steel watching unfeelingly the razing of her family-colony.
And she stopped running, because it had seen her coming.
The gate watched her. The small desperate Awoken-child stepped forward, closer to the towering dead ring.
This was the gate.
She had come.
Rising shrieks from behind. She spun, her dripping blood cast on the stones that the shadows danced on, very much still tied to their monstrous owners. Too many eyes, too many limbs. She cried out in fear and an anger that could not be properly felt, and turned to look at the thing before her.
She reached out to the gate, warm blood falling.
She touched it.
It then touched her.
The primordial cold halo of star-metal opened.
White space yawned before her, divided by grids that shimmered and spoke wor[l]ds. She could almost hear them.
Then the cries came again, savage and full of hunger.
With a final cry, she tightened her grip on her backpack, stepped into the grids, and left her burning world behind.