Chapter 5: Ink and Starlight

Chapter 5: Ink and Starlight

The world outside Leo’s bedroom window ceased to exist. There was only the white circle of lamplight on his desk and the impossible poem lying within it. The shimmering, weeping ink was a beacon, a signal fire lit across an unimaginable distance, and he was the only person on Earth who could see it.

For hours, he worked with a feverish intensity he hadn’t felt in five years. The hollow-eyed ghost who haunted Red Horse was gone, replaced by an obsessive investigator on the edge of a breakthrough. He pulled out a magnifying glass, the kind he used for poring over old maps, and held it over the first line of the poem.

The view through the lens was breathtaking and utterly useless. The tiny points of light resolved into more detail, revealing intricate, microscopic structures. Some pulsed with a soft, steady rhythm, while others flickered like dying embers. They swirled within the blackness of the ink, forming miniature nebulae in the loop of a ‘p’, a galactic cluster in the cross of a ‘t’. It was beautiful, mesmerizing, and completely chaotic. There was no discernible pattern, no code to crack. It was like trying to read a message in a handful of thrown glitter.

Frustration clawed at him. The answer was right there, staring him in the face, written in a language of light he couldn't comprehend. He leaned back, the wooden legs of his chair groaning in protest. He ran a hand through his unkempt hair, his gaze drifting across the cluttered walls of his room, his self-made prison of memory.

His eyes fell on a photograph tacked to his corkboard, faded by the sun. It was of him and Emilia, taken four months before she was stolen. They were wrapped in winter coats, their breath pluming in the frigid night air. Behind them, silhouetted against a field of stars, was his old telescope.

The memory ambushed him, so vivid it was almost painful. It was a clear, moonless night, the kind of night where the Milky Way was a bright, shimmering smear across the sky. He had been trying to show her the rings of Saturn, fumbling with the focus knob with frozen fingers.

“It’s not working,” he’d grumbled, pulling away from the eyepiece.

Emilia had laughed, a sound like tiny bells in the cold air. She’d taken a sip from her thermos of hot chocolate and looked up, not at the telescope, but at the vast expanse of the sky. “Maybe you’re looking too closely,” she’d said, her voice soft and thoughtful. “You’re trying to find one tiny thing, but you’re missing the whole picture.”

She’d pointed a gloved finger upward. “Look. All those stars are just random points of light. They’re chaos. But we see a hunter, a bear, a queen in her chair. We connect the dots. We tell a story. You have to change your perspective to see the real shape of things.”

Change your perspective.

The words echoed in the silence of his room, a message from a ghost delivered by a memory. He wasn't looking at random glitter. He was looking at stars. And he was looking at them all wrong.

He scrambled from his chair, a surge of adrenaline making his hands tremble. In the back of his closet, buried under a pile of old jackets and forgotten dreams, was the telescope from the photograph. It was a cheap department-store model, dusty and neglected, but it was his. Theirs. He hauled it out, the metal cool and solid in his hands.

He didn't set up the tripod. He didn't need to look at the sky. He needed its lens.

Working carefully, he unscrewed the eyepiece from the focusing tube, setting it aside. What he wanted was the primary optic, the large lens at the front designed to gather and focus faint, distant light. He propped the telescope tube on a stack of books, aiming it at the poem on his desk like a strange, scientific cannon. He adjusted the desk lamp, angling the beam so it hit the paper just right.

Then, holding his breath, he peered through the open end of the tube, his eye where the eyepiece should have been.

For a moment, all he saw was a blur of light and shadow. He adjusted the focus knob, his heart hammering against his ribs. The image swam, tightened, and then snapped into a clarity so sharp and profound it stole the air from his lungs.

The chaos was gone.

The lens had gathered the microscopic points of light and resolved them into a single, cohesive image. The shimmering specks were no longer random. They were stars. Suns. And they were connected by faint, pulsing lines of silver light, forming constellations that had never known a human name.

He was looking at a map.

A wave of vertigo washed over him. The familiar confines of his bedroom felt thin and unreal, a fragile bubble in an ocean of terrifying immensity. This was a chart of three-dimensional space, rendered onto a two-dimensional surface with an elegance that defied human science. There were impossible geometries, star systems linked in patterns that should not exist, and at the heart of it all, a single, glowing symbol—a circle with three equidistant lines radiating from its center. A destination.

His mind raced. With trembling hands, he grabbed one of the star charts from his wall—a detailed map of the Northern Hemisphere's celestial sphere—and laid it beside the poem. He tried to find a single point of reference, a familiar cluster, the anchor of a known constellation. The Big Dipper. Orion’s Belt. Polaris.

There was nothing. Not a single star, not a single shape, matched any known celestial body visible from Earth.

The crushing, exhilarating truth landed on him like a physical weight. Emilia hadn't just sent him a message. She had sent him a chart of the void itself. This wasn't a map of a place you could find by looking up from Pearsons Park. It was a map of the place she was taken to.

He stared at the alien constellations, their cold light a testament to her captivity in a room of silent glass. He traced the silver lines that connected them, the pathways of her captors. He was looking at a cartography of the abyss, a map drawn in the ink of another reality.

The grief in his heart did not vanish, but it was joined by something new and sharp: purpose. For five years, he had been staring at an empty spot in the sky. Now, Emilia had given him a place to look. He had a map to a place that shouldn't exist, a place where faceless Gardeners tended to stolen lands. The first step was complete. He knew the where.

The next question, however, was a chasm of terrifying impossibility.

How in the hell was he supposed to get there?