Chapter 2: Standing Up

We sat together through the night, no words spoken, no direction of thought as the sun brought forth a new day. This curiosity compelled me to stay. To wait. To understand more of what this Hul wanted, if he wanted anything at all beyond the stars he would not stop looking at. My creator called this my flaw. I was not supposed to be born with this gift. He built me to hold, to fight, to stand in the presence of forces that would break lesser structures. He did not build me to feel what those forces felt. That came uninvited, like a crack in an otherwise sound vessel, and he saw it for what it was and named it plainly. A flaw. I have carried that word a long time. Longer than the wars. Longer than the silence after. I carried it through centuries of drifting when the gift he called broken was the only part of me still working, still reaching, still pressing itself against the surface of every living thing I passed as though the world owed me an explanation for why I could feel it and no one had asked me to. I considered leaving. I considered it honestly, the way you consider a door you know you will not walk through but must stand in front of long enough to call the standing a choice. I could have risen. I could have let the wind take me south or east or anywhere the pull of that crater could not reach, and I would have drifted, and I would have felt raindrops, and I would have been what I was before. Sufficient. Alone. Unbroken by anything I could not walk away from. _Yet his presence pulls me. It summons me the way autumn summons a leaf…