Stars, at their cores, are nuclear reactions.
There is, perhaps, a reason Danny indulges one of his obsessions without thought and is so careful of the other.
The GIW thought that encouraging, promoting the obsession that didn't involve combat would make Phantom easier to contain.
They were very wrong.
.
Stars.
They seem peaceful, from far away. Benevolent. Small. Harmless. Incapable of affecting life on Earth, with its grand and ever-changing rhythms and cycles.
Even the closest, the Sun, which is relied upon, needed, and sometimes cursed for its persistence and burning rays, did not seem violent, did not seem dangerous in and of itself. It was something that nurtured, that helped, that illuminated. It was the origin of light, of life.
The Sun is a natural nuclear reactor that produces 3.8x10^26 joules of energy per second, or 3.8x10^26 Watts.
The 'Little Boy' bomb that exploded over Hiroshima produced approximately 6.3x10^13 joules. Once.
The surface of the Sun is not quiet. Sun spots, solar flares, filaments, coronal mass ejections- The worst conflagration of the Earth is as nothing. Nothing. The Sun is destruction and ruin and violence wearing a crown of light.
In 1895 a coronal mass ejection caused a geomagnetic storm, the most intense in recorded history. It washed the sky in green light from the poles to the equator, and set telegraph wires on fire. Our world is covered in wires, now. All of them so fragile. We live at the mercy of the Sun.
Beyond the veil of the Earth, beyond the atmosphere, those who dare step into the fuller glory of the Sun face also a greater portion of its fury. One hundred times the radiation faced by those still living quietly on the Earth.
The Sun is 2x10^30 kilograms in mass. It is an average star. Sirius, also called Alpha Canis Majoris, the brightest visible star is about 2 solar masses. UY Scuti, the largest observed star in terms of radius, is between 7 and 10 solar masses. Betelgeuse, also called Alpha Orionis, another bright star, is estimated to have at least 16 solar masses. The star Westerhout 49-2 is believed to have about 250 solar masses, although there is a great deal of uncertainty regarding that estimate, and some think it has only 90 solar masses.
These stars are not considered particularly unusual.
In the heart of a city, one might be able to pick out half a dozen of the very brightest stars. Likely less. Far from any cities, a person might be able to pick out 5000 over the course of the year as the Earth marched through its cycle. 2500 in any given night. There are approximately 100 billion stars in the Milky Way Galaxy.
The Milky Way is one of billions of galaxies.
It is a comfort, then, that even the beloved Sun is 150 million kilometers away.
And, so, you begin to the the mistake, the error, the crushing, overwhelming hubris committed by the GIW. That they should not only seek to bind death - for death, in the end, is of the living, for no thing dies that has not lived - but to contain one who could call on the stars themselves, the forges of worlds, the things from whose dust they were made-
They thought the stars peaceful. They thought the child violent.
They thought.
A race of people made of thought and emotion and passion and desire and all the things they love called to them out of time out of space and they thought-
The child wanted this: The safety of his people, their joy, their peace. He pledged himself to fight for this.
The child wanted this: The stars and the worlds they shepherded through the bleak vastness of space. He satisfied himself with longing.
They thought one desire more dangerous than the other. They pushed him to choose one, to choose their choice.
And, so.
And so.
Standing above what could not even be called ruins is the child, the merest touch of stellar lighting that could be held in fragile dust dancing at his fingertips. He burns, he burns.
And he is no longer safe.