it starts with just a glimmer
They have always been watching him. They are his mother, his father, his siblings as countless as every grain of sand on every beach; near-infinite and never forgetting that he is theirs and they are his.
Perhaps they are too patient; but what is time, to a star? To a constellation that has shone bright as singing voices for a million years? They are far beyond nights and days and so, one day, will Sirius be. When he comes home.
Always they have been whispering to him, longing to share their stories. It is in darkness that they first reveal themselves (when else can you see the stars?) There in the small-darkness of the boy’s hood they shine, leaving star-trails on his eyelids, pinpricks in the black. A trail home, and the first story.
There is a star, they say. One of the brightest of us. Wordlessly, soundlessly, written only in light, they show him.
Sirius.
Outside of the hood (outside of his mind, and imagination, and memory) the world is unquiet. It is dusk, the world falling off in darker and darker shades of bruised blue and deep purple. The others in their tresses and hoods are dozing, or eating, or pacing paths they have cut in the grass. Once in a while a guard walks through, and the ground trembles beneath his heavy-shod feet. The crickets and frogs all sing of coming summer.
And around the boy who is not only a boy, the air begins to glimmer.
It is like fireflies, if you have never seen them before - like telling a child about fireflies. Tiny points of light, only they don’t ever fade, hung suspended in a faint cloud of silver-dust. There is nobody to see them but the owls and the foxes and the rabbits, and they know too much of these training-grounds to dare come close enough to investigate.
Yet for all the strangeness of that little dim-galaxy around him, the shine that makes the fireflies jealous, oh! It is so much more marvelous, so much stranger, what they paint for him directly in his mind. Such brightness, and calm; they would be singing, if they had mouths, they would be humming a melody as eternal as themselves. Maybe he can feel it, for they are made up of the same stuff.
Something makes the guard turn back - an itch at the back of his mind, or something he forgot. From across that dim and lonesome place he sees light where there should be none. His steps are quicker now, and not only the earth trembles at his passing, for he is big, and suspicious, and wears a whip he is well-practiced at using. With his eyes narrowed he stalks to the end of the row, where there is a light - a light - a trick of the mind -
“You, boy!”
And the stars have a thousand more things to say, but they all sound like Sirius.
@Sirius might have always thought he was alone and that the dark was only the dark. But maybe he was wrong...
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