I OWE THE STARS A BODY

        They sit in the dark, sleepless and exhausted. Their mind is slow and heavy this night, feeling as if the space between their brain and skull is filled with tar and gravel. Their limbs are no better, anchored to black holes, and their heart—erratic and arrhythmic—might as well be pierced with actual nails, for there is literal difference in the pain the imagined ones inflict. Their lungs expand under the weight of the ocean, and each breath exhaled is like a desert wind across a dry ocean bed. There is no sound, and yet, neither is there silence. A constant ringing fills their mind; a persistent and unpleasant note with an imperfect pitch, echoing eternally inside the tunnels of their ears. Present since birth, such is its nature that it bothers them little, and they notice it little in day-to-day life.

        That is, except in moments like these. Except in the sleepless nights—the many, uncountable nights without rest or reprieve—where their mind and body seem sapped of all energy and will; in the dark before sleep, or the liminal shade between places in waking reality. The biting note, sour and endless, is always there. Were it a night like any other, it might have been the most maddening problem, sometimes even moreso than the pain.

        But for Verika, this would be a night unlike any other.

        The stars have dimmed.

        From where Verika sits—propped up in the corner of their bed—the lone window in their room provides them a clear view of the stars. Verika’s home sits in orbit above Earth, one of many colonies hanging above the blue marble, where they are afforded the grace of the stars’ audience, even as the stars themselves remain oblivious to Verika. A normal restless night would at least give them the satisfaction of contrast, of juxtaposition in the stars. To Verika the stars would seem bright, more full of life, light, and color. They would be as torches to shadows, or as a fire to snow. But now the stars are little more than afterthoughts of themselves, barely perceptible specks of light against a canvas that seem eager to swallow them. If they look closely, Verika imagines a pulsing in the starlight, a kind breathing that—with each breath that passes—takes a bit more of light from the stars.

        But that would be madness.

        It is the sleep deprivation taking hold. Six weeks, each of them with less sleep than the last, causing their mind to fabricate such things. Desperate for rest—desperate to perhaps dream, even if it was a nightmare—Verika’s mind is simply conjuring fantastical things.

        They wonder then, if it is also conjuring the visitor.

        Verika notices them, but only just. In the far corner of the room, they stand in the shadows. A human-shaped thing and yet, somehow, they know distinctly—absolutely—that the visitor is not human. It is strange to Verika just as Verika is strange to it. They turn their gaze, hoping to see more detail in their periphery, of which they are sure will reveal itself to be something innocuous. A pile of clothes draped over a chair or, perhaps more likely, simply a collection of shadows from the dim starlight suggesting the shape of human-shaped things, where in fact there is only the nothing-shaped shadows. But Verika sees only the same thing: an ambiguous, humanoid collection of darkness.

        The visitor grows each time Verika blinks.

        It is imperceptible at first, only discernible when they blink several times in quick succession to clear their blurry eyes that they see the visitor’s expansion. It grows limbs, or things like limbs. Arms like vines; vines that twist together like stands of DNA that form thick trunks. Trunks that press themselves into the spaces of Verika’s room, taking root where a foundation for such things should not be possible. Verika thinks the only thing their foggy and sleep-deprived mind can conjure up: Turn on the light. Light is safety from the dark, as it has been for all of time and all of humanity’s collective existence. It is both the beacon that guides and the roof that shelters, and it is less a thought than a reflex for Verika when she reaches over and flicks on the light.

        The sudden brightness stings and pushes shut Verika’s eyes, weighing on them like fire. When the bite of the bulb’s heat eases, they can look again through strained, narrow slits and into the corner of the room the visitor had been growing from. It is gone now. Verika’s eyes open wider and they see only the room as they had remembered it when they last saw it in light; sparse and spartan, but clean and practical and absent of things growing from darkness.

        But the visitor is still here. Something is here.

        It is now shaped of things that are themselves shapeless, its presence no longer seen, but felt. It takes the form of ideas, memories, nostalgia and even a sense deja vu, and Verika realizes in the pocked crater of their mind the visitor is taking up residence. They can feel the tar slipping in, a pool of alien grease swallowing their neurons and devouring their thoughts.

        They turn off the light.

        The visitor is there again in the shadows, bigger than before. Verika is overcome with the very real sense that—whether from the shadows or from their mind—the visitor is coming to them and there is nothing they can do to stop it. Certainty had once been comforting. It was a thing that informed Verika’s life greatly, allowing them to thrive and move through world, but also to endure the things they suffered by taking solace in knowing what was coming, giving them time to prepare, fight—or in some of life’s crueler cases—accept what was going to happen. Now, the certainty was a hollow pit in their chest, and into it fell everything Verika had learned in their life to protect them from moments like these.

        Verika’s breath quickens. Through gritted teeth, sickly hot air pushes its way in and out of their throat. Their hands curl into fists, gripping tight to their sheets. With a weak effort Verika kicks themself further into the corner of their bed, knocking a pillow off the side and coiling the blankets around their feet. Nothing should be so certain as the visitor’s growth. Nothing should feel so absolute. Death feels easier to escape than this sudden, oppressive occupant in their presence, and Verika thinks then that maybe that is the answer.

        Death. It seems so simple, so obvious to them as it had years before. Verika thinks then—calmly and without pause—of how simple stumbling to the kitchen would still be even in the dark. Even in their exhausted, ill-functioning state they could find a knife or anything sharp and simply breach the barrier of their own skin, and let flow the ruby fluid of life. If death isn’t needed, perhaps then it is just their eyes that Verika can rid themselves of. It cannot be so hard to gouge out such fleshy marbles, can it? But Verika is quickly reminded in that moment of the pain.

        Pain is how they got where they are. Sick, tired, seemingly fated to live without rest. Pain is why they struggle now to remember that even when they could not see them just moments ago, the visitor was still impressing itself upon their mind. Already Verika was forgetting things they should be remembering, and already foolish and nonsensical thoughts were entering their mind.

        I will not blink.

        For a few moments they attempt this, and it seems to keep the visitor from growing. The shadows no longer continue to stretch and expand, but Verika notices now the breathing, the gentle undulation and sway of the shadows, further separating the visitor from the darkness around it. The visitor is patient, and already Verika knows far moreso than them. Verika is not possessed of patience. Patience has long been a virtue they no longer possess, lost years ago to the pain and exhaustion. People have called them patient—called them strong even—but Verika is neither, they think. Verika was stubborn and relentless, and felt neither patient nor strong.

        The stars are dim, growing dimmer.

        Yet when Verika focuses on even the faintest speck of their light, their eyes feel as if they stare into the sun. They cannot resist blinking, and do so many times before they keep them shut, rubbing their palms into them back and forth as if they were cleansing them of sight. Again they feel the craters in their mind slowly filling up with the visitor, and Verika opens their eyes again to gaze into the dark, their vision spotted with the faint impressions of color.

        The visitor has detached itself from the wall.

        Still they grow.

        But now they move, ever closer.

        With each blink they grow.

        With each blink they move.

        Minute and slow; assured and palpable.

        Verika considered why they had not tried to run, but in truth it is of no surprise they have no will to fight. For what are they even fighting against? The visitor strikes fear and uncertainty into them, terror of the unknown and the incomprehensible and vast, but nothing of violence; it strikes them with nothing of evil or malice, nothing with even appreciable intent. The visitor simply is. Verika is scared that something is certain and she does not understand it well enough to prepare for such a thing. What is so certain and yet understood so poorly? Another thought enters their tired mind.

        Perhaps this is how humans die.

        If so, then Verika is ready, uncaring even. They have tried to reach that threshold of their own accord before, and despite being unsuccessful, they were only made too tired to try again—the emotional well in them too dry to summon up the conviction, but their mind as accepting as it had been all those years ago. If this is how humans die, then Verika’s only complaint is perhaps the same any living creature has: they simply wish it was more peaceful. What final gift could life give if not the peace of passing from it? But no, life was not a thing with intent anymore than this visitor seemed to be, and it was as indebted to give kindness as it was to cruelty.

        The visitor made a noise now.

        Verika winced at the sound. A growling utterance, as if something spoken through water. A terrible, indiscernible cascade of phonetic congregations that were to them as human language might be to ants. They wanted to pull back into their corner, but that was simply the fear racing through them. Verika instead—wide-eyed and dazed—slowly moved toward the side of the bed and stood to their feet. They blinked and moved toward the visitor, not so much stepping as they were sliding their feet against the carpet. The strength to raise their legs up would not come to them for many more hours, and so a meandering shuffle across the respectable breadth of their room was all they could manage.

        The visitor was now a pillar of ineffable, unfathomable shapes before them, looming as tall as it could in their room. The room itself had seemed to grow, expanding to give way to this visitor for whom existence itself owed obeisance. Their limbs seemed as mountains now, hands like forests with digits like vein or vine, stretching across the walls. When Verika blinked the collection of unmemorable shadows and darkness simply pulsed inwards, as if the force of Verika’s eyes closing was pressing upon it a great wind. They stared up at the visitor, mouth agape, tears in their eyes and wondered if their hallucinations had simply become more real than ever before. But no, Verika did not feel this was a hallucination, and when the visitor seemed to turn what might have been its head—or perhaps its eye?—toward the single window in Verika’s room, they felt upon their cheek the gentle press of soft, thread-like shadows urge them to do the same.

        The stars were gone. The Earth was gone.

        Shuffling towards the window, they saw only an expanse of darkness more vast than infinite, more old than timeless, and yet it was anything but empty. In that unending and vaster-than-infinite darkness there slept a great thing. A thing coiled unto itself as if a fetus in a womb. Whose many heads were larger than worlds, whose bodies might fill a galaxy and whose uncountable limbs might stir the stars like a person swimming through a lake. A tail, furled in upon its body that might lash through the universe like a blade against skin. A thing that to understand would be to die. Verika had been uncertain of any malice or evil in the visitor, and while they did not equate this to kindness or benevolence, they felt certain—like a prey seeings its natural predator for the first time—that this vast slumbering thing was the closest to the natural presence of evil that the universe could conjure.

        But it was not the universe.

        They were looking at something else.

        No, Verika realized, turning their gaze for a brief moment to the hulking body of the visitor—who now loomed behind them, their shadows slowly wrapping themselves around Verika’s limbs—they were not looking at something outside the universe. They were outside the universe.

        And not just the universe, but reality as best as Verika’s sickly, fatigued mind could understand it. Their tears were rivers now, soaking the land of their cheeks, flooding places that had never lacked for water. The visitor uttered something incomprehensible, and its voice—if thats what it was—pressed itself upon Verika’s neck, showing things with its incomprehensible noise that Verika wished they could unsee.

        Spots of light, slowly orbiting the sleeper. Spots which Verika thought at once were surely, undoubtedly the stars themselves again, returning to their brightness. But it was not the stars, and the spots of light were revealed to them to be people.

        People.

        Uncountable.

        Unknowable.

        Billions—trillions of people.

        To Verika it seemed the whole of humanity was there. Bodies suspended as if on their backs, limbs hanging below them and heads lulled back without support. Bodies with an ethereal, incorporeal nature to them, naked and unadorned. The plane of sleep; of nightmares, dreams, and afterthought. Each point of light a body, each body a human dreaming, and each dream or nightmare drained from the minds of their hosts and fed into the great sleeping thing which they orbited. Pacify the eternal; make sleep the undying. Verika could only sigh, tears entering their mouth. They tasted the salt and felt then the implication the visitor impressed upon them. Make real the destroyer’s sleep; make infinite the slumber. Honor the evolution of sleep in life; to create guards against its antithesis.

        It seemed at first a punishment. Verika had so long fought for sleep, for rest. To be rid of weariness and exhaustion, to feel again the joy and energy of life. But a sentient thing could only go so long without sleep. Not because it was dangerous to them, but because it endangered everything.

        Sleep. A defense.

        A defense against the natural predator of life. Developed in a cauldron before time began. Only so much of the timeless sounds of the visitor could Verika even pretend to understand, the things it seemed to suggest of time, cycles, birth and rebirth—it made little sense to them. If the whole of sentient life in the universe had developed sleep as a tool for placating the greatest predator to their existence, then Verika felt as if they were not doing their part in the fight.

        They laughed then, amused and horrified. Sleep would vanquish this monster, but I cannot sleep. And now I owe the stars a body.

        Verika looked down at their body. It wasn’t there. There was only the silhouette of its shape, enshrouded in shadows. The shadows were not a thing at all, and Verika had been right to not see intent in them, for they were merely a tool. Something else—someone else perhaps—who held the knowledge of the Sleeper had merely sent it to Verika, puncturing through its reality and into theirs in the brief, fleeting moments when Verika was not gazing upon their own. That presence in their mind, filling the craters made by a life of sickness and fighting, had always been there since the visitor’s arrival. It had been filling up their mind this entire time, using the blank spaces carved out to fill it with the knowledge of why what was going to happen next had to happen.

        Verika understood. Verika accepted.

        Sleepless nights meant little to the sleeper, meant little to the being or beings that had imprisoned it here, guarding this terrible and unknowable secret; to those shadows who had set upon Verika an armor of darkness to take them here and show them this truth. These shadow guardians had offered the universe their eternal waking lives to protect it from its natural predator, and in return, humanity—in some long forgotten pact—had offered up not just its sleep and its dreams, but their lives.

        The guardians, eternal and dreamless; forever and few.

        Humanity, the dreaming and dying; finite and many.

        What then of the humans who could not offer their dreams? What turbulence would such things create for the guardians of the sleeper? What happens when a mind is starved of the rest that keeps the universe going?

        Craters filled with waking thoughts; holes for which to fill full the destroyer’s mind.

        Verika cried then, not because they had to die, but because the tar-like presence filling up their mind was not what they had felt it was. It was not the guardians, finding their way into their mind to give them the knowledge, the truth of the universe. It was the sleeper—the destroyer—pushing at the weakened barrier of Verika’s body and filling it full of its horrible, ageless conscience. The guardians had not sent the armor to haunt them, but to save them, and now in this moment that would be all too cruel and brief, Verika had to reconcile with the fact that their entire life’s struggle had been against this undying destroyer with a hatred for life. The visitor had not always been there, but the destroyer had been for longer than Verika realized.

        Had they ever stood a chance?

        A pact made; unbreakable; a thing the destroyer cannot breach; death, the barrier.

        Cycles; birth and rebirth; born anew and dead again.

        Maybe there was comfort in the visitor’s indiscernible utterances, a promise to be reborn. But Verika cared little to figure it out. They accepted their fate with little protest, and accepted it quickly.

        Verika floated by the enviable forms of their dreaming kin, for whom they realized now would never know the truth of their fate. Perhaps some—knowing the history of their previous attempts at crossing over death’s threshold—would think that was all that happened of them, and even without a body there would be little mystery or wonder. It was not entirely untrue, and it bothered them little. Verika would miss many of them and, they hoped, some would miss them.

        “I owe the stars a body.” They spoke softly to themselves, their body fading into dust as it dispersed into the prison of the destroyer, feeling in the moments before their own death the recession of the destroyer’s grasp on their mind. “But the stars owe me rest.”