Astrogating Fallen Stars

There’s no help for it. Once the stars grow strange, you’re wholly out of luck.

Perhaps there are starship pilots who grow used to ever-shifting constellations. Perhaps there are other travelers who see peculiar horizons with sufficient regularity to become inured to their oddity.

Most likely, though, if the stars change, you’re not far from a very final nightfall.

What to do?

I’d recommend astrogating.

If the stars shift on you, wrecking horoscopes, unbuckling Destiny, weirding you out, portending ill, summoning the uncanny, then take your revenge.

Shift back on them.

Stand straight-backed in any meadow or any reasonably quiet street, or even indoors, if you’ve a convenient window or rooftop, and stretch out.

Splay your fingers. Stand with legs akimbo, eyes wide, heartbeat aligning with celestial light. Stretch up, and let them pull you in.

Fall right through the path of comets and space junk, breathe without air, become something that lives in vacuum.

Float among the stars for a few Eternities. Become odd. Distend odd shapes from your center of projection. Cast no more shadows.

Thus are Eldritch Things made.

The stars will be no less strange to you, but it no longer matters. You will have become so strange that your own understanding can no longer be measured in human terms, any more than you can be described by the word ‘human’, yourself.

And that’s how you win.

 

Jeff Mach Written by:

Jeff Mach is an author, playwright, event creator, and certified Villain. You can always pick up his bestselling first novel, "There and NEVER, EVER BACK AGAIN"—or, indeed, his increasingly large selection of other peculiar books. If you'd like to talk more to Jeff, or if you're simply a Monstrous Creature yourself, stop by @darklordjournal on Twitter, or The Dark Lord Journal on Facebook.