Chapter 578: Exodus II
The street went dark around us, the pitch darkness of the deepest void wrapping itself around us like a lover.
A single mote of light appeared high up in the sky, rapidly expanding into a single drop of raw starlight. It fell down towards me, landing right in front of me. It was eaten up by the void, the fabric of space ‘rippling’ where the drop fell, reverberating around us.
Like a popping flame shooting out sparks, a thousand, a million, a billion stars slowly lit up around us, bathing us in many-colored starlight. Yellows and oranges, reds and blues, blazing whites and rare greens, all of them shone brightly around us.
I flinched as one moved past my eyes, and the newfound perspective let me see what was going on.
All the stars were converging on the point right in front of me. My target of [A Drop of Starlight in a Sea of Eternity] was being rejuvenated by a billion stars cascading into their body.
One by one, faster and faster, the stars swarmed into her body. She couldn’t contain or hold all the starlight, and it started to leak out of her. First her eyes, then her mouth, then her skin cracked and flaked, revealing the blazing lights underneath. She glowed like a person-shaped star, then slowly transformed in front of our eyes, going from an elderly great-grandmother, down to a middle-aged woman.
It was the age she felt most comfortable at, that she wanted to stay at forever.
The burning light slowly faded away, the rest of the world returning around us. Most of the street had stopped and stared at us and the informal ceremony that had just occurred, and a moment later White Dove fluttered onto my unoccupied shoulder. She nodded to Auri.
“Cousin.” She acknowledged, before giving me the traditional stink-eye. I grinned like the unrepentant reprobate that I was. I’d given away Immortality to hundreds of people, and if I had the chance, I’d give it away to thousands more. I didn’t dare say or suggest that White Dove had done her worst to me - it was always a poor idea to provoke the literal grim reaper - but I wasn’t going to be stopped or cowed. I was going to hold my head up high, proud of my work and what I was doing.