Orion Star Quotes

Orion is above the horizon now, and near it Jupiter, brighter than it will ever be ... But i expect you can see it too. Some of our stars are the same.

In the eternal night of the Orion Arm of the Milky Way Galaxy, two civilization had swept through like two shooting stars, and the universe had remembered their light.

My heart is sand and Orion's cruel tide has washed it away from me, scattered it, lost it.

He lay on his back in his blankets and looked our where the quartermoon lay cocked over the heel of the mountains. In the false blue dawn the Pleiades seemed to be rising up into the darkness above the world and dragging all the stars away, the great diamond of Orion and Cepella and the signature of Cassiopeia all rising up through the phosphorous dark like a sea-net. He lay a long time listening to the others breathing in their sleep while he contemplated the wildness about him, the wildness within.

I still love you like moons love the planets they circle around, like children love recess bells. I still hear the sound of you and think of playgrounds where outcasts who stutter beneath braces and bruises and acne are finally learning that their rich handsome bullies are never gonna grow up to be happy. I think of happy when I think of you. So wherever you are I hope you’re happy, I really do. I hope the stars are kissing your cheeks tonight I hope you finally found a way to quit smoking I hope your lungs are open and breathing this life I hope there’s a kite in your hand that’s flying all the way up to Orion and you still got a thousand yards of string to let out. I hope you’re smiling like God is pulling at the corners of your mouth, ‘cause I might be naked and lonely shaking branches for bones but I’m still time zones away from who I was the day before we met. You were the first mile where my heart broke a sweat, and I wish you were here; I wish you’d never left; but mostly I wish you well. I wish you my very, very best

She saw the snowy poles of moonless Mars, That marvellous round of milky light Below Orion, and those double stars Whereof the one more bright Is circled by the other

There is no antidote, he writes, against the opium of time. The winter sun shows how soon the light fades from the ash, how soon night enfolds us. Hour upon hour is added to the sum. Time itself grows old. Pyramids, arches and obelisks are melting pillars of snow. Not even those who have found a place amidst the heavenly constellations have perpetuated their names: Nimrod is lost in Orion, and Osiris in the Dog Star. Indeed, old families last not three oaks.

Winter Stars I went out at night alone; The young blood flowing beyond the sea Seemed to have drenched my spirit's wings— I bore my sorrow heavily. But when I lifted up my head From shadows shaken on the snow, I saw Orion in the east Burn steadily as long ago. From windows in my father's house, Dreaming my dreams on winter nights, I watched Orion as a girl Above another city's lights. Years go, dreams go, and youth goes too, The world's heart breaks beneath its wars, All things are changed, save in the east The faithful beauty of the stars.

He'd turned the room into a planetarium. No, not a planetarium. A virtual galaxy. Brilliant stars splashed across the soaring walls and ceiling and swirled beneath our feet. Constellations dotted the "sky," including Andromeda, Perseus, and a distinctive hourglass shape that made my breath hitch. Orion. My favorite. "You can't see the stars in New York" Dante said. "So I brought the stars to you.

She took a deep breath, inhaling the night air scented with hay, honeysuckle and the rich waters of the lake, listened to the music and laughter coming from the theatre, tilted her head to the the stars. She had never seen them so brilliant and clear. Cassiopeia, Orion, the great girdle of the Milky Way-and her own birth sign, Gemini. With such staggering beauty in the world, how could anyone not rejoice? It seemed however, that 'anyone' could. For at once came the age-old cry of lovers since time began. 'What are the stars if i am not gazing at them with him? What is beauty except something we share?

Rigel, Betelgeuse, and Orion. There was no finer church, no finer choir, than the stars speaking in silence to the many consumptives silently condemned, a legion upon the dark rooftops. The wind came down from the north like a runner in lacrosse, violent and hard, to batter every living thing. They were there, each one alone in conversation with the stars, mining ephemeral love from cold and distant light.

He said, 'Good dog, Beaumont the valiant, sleep now, old friend Beaumont, good old dog.' Then Robin's falchion let Beaumont out of this world, to run free with Orion and roll among the stars.

When mankind ascended to the stars, he came no closer to God.

Janx Spirit : Janx Spirit is a rather potent alcoholic beverage, and is used heavily in drinking games that are played in the hyperspace ports that serve the madranite mining belts in the star system of Orion Beta. The game is not unlike the Earth game called Indian Wrestling, and is played like this: Two contestants sit at either side of a table, with a glass in front of each of them. Between them would be placed a bottle of Janx Spirit — as immortalized in that ancient Orion mining song : “Oh don’t give me no more of that Old Janx Spirit No, don’t you give me no more of that Old Janx Spirit For my head will fly, my tongue will lie, my eyes will fry and I may die Won’t you pour me one more of that sinful Old Janx Spirit” Each of the two contestants would then concentrate their will on the bottle and attempt to tip it and pour spirit into the glass of his opponent – who would then have to drink it. The bottle would then be refilled. The game would be played again. And again. Once you started to lose you would probably keep losing, because one of the effects of Janx spirit is to depress telepsychic power. As soon as a predetermined quantity had been consumed, the final loser would have to perform a forfeit, which was usually obscenely biological.

Are you lecturing me again, Orion? Is that what this is?' ... 'I would never dream of lecturing you. I just thought it was interesting to think about.' 'Mmm-hmm. And how many times did you practice how you'd phrase this little gem of wisdom when you told me/' He runs a had through his thick, dark curls. 'Ah, umm...who says I practiced it?' I raise a single eyebrow at him. 'Two. Maybe three. Five. Not more that five

Most days I live awed by the world we have still, rather than mourning the worlds we have lost. The bandit mask of a cedar waxwing on a bare branch a few feet away; the clear bright sun of a frozen winter noon; the rise of Orion in the eastern evening sky-every day, every night, I give thanks for another chance to notice. I see beauty everywhere; so much beauty I often speak it aloud. So much beauty I often laugh, and my day is made. Still if you wanted to, I think, you could feel sadness without end. I’m not even talking about hungry children or domestic violence or endless wars between supposedly grown men…but ‘you mustn’t be frightened if a sadness rises in front of you, larger than any you even seen,' said Rilke, 'you must realize that something is happening to you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in it hand and will not let you fall.

It’s the most spiritually empowering thing I know, to look up at the night sky and see Orion rising as the autumn closes in at the last moment, and it’s got me through some very hard times. When I had a couple of serious bouts of depression in my life the stars were a big factor in pulling me out. People used to say “What’s your spirituality?”, and I’d say I don’t know, but I found out looking at the stars last night and that’s what it was.

That black, maddening firmament; that vast cosmic ocean, endlessly deep in every direction, both Heaven and Pandemonium at once; mystical Zodiac, speckled flesh of Tiamat; all that is chaos, infinite and eternal. And yet, it's somehow the bringing to order of this chaos which perhaps has always disturbed me most. The constellations, in their way, almost bring into sharper focus the immensity and insanity of it all - monsters and giants brought to life in all their gigantic monstrosity; Orion and Hercules striding across the sky, limbs reaching for lightyears, only to be dwarfed by the likes of Draco, Pegasus, or Ursa Major. Then bigger still - Cetus, Eridanus, Ophiuchus, and Hydra, spanning nearly the whole of a hemisphere, sunk below the equator in that weird underworld of obscure southern formations. You try to take them in - the neck cranes, the eyes roll, and the mind boggles until this debilitating sense of inverted vertigo overcomes you...

Orion. My favorite. “You can’t see the stars in New York,” Dante said. “So I brought the stars to you.

J-just you asking Professor Orion how he gets hard,” he spluttered and I breathed a sigh of relief, hurrying to the door and slamming it in his face. “Thank the stars,” I said heavily. “Oh yes,” Orion said sarcastically as he glowered at me. “Thank the stars.

The sky pulsed with stars. Some people say it makes them lonesome when they stare up at the night sky. I can't imagine why. There's no shortage of company. By now there's not a constellation I can't name. Orion. Lupus. Serpens. Hercules. Draco. My father taught me all of their stories. So when I look up I see a galaxy of adventures and heroes and villains, all jostling together and trying to outdo one another, and I sometimes want to tell them to hush up and not distract me with their chatter. I've glimpsed all the stars ever discovered by astronomers, and plenty that haven't been.

We lay side by side on the extension roof, hands behind our heads, elbows just touching. My head was still spinning a little, not unpleasantly, from the dancing and the wine. The breeze was warm across my face, and even through the city lights I could see constellations: the Big Dipper, Orion's Belt. The pine tree at the bottom of the garden rustled like the sea, ceaselessly. For a moment I felt as if the universe had turned upside down and we were falling softly into an enormous black bowl of stars and nocturne, and I knew, beyond any doubt, that everything was going to be all right.

In winter darkness, the Baghdad Arabian keen blue deepness of the piercing lovely January winter's dusk--it used to tear my heart out, one stabbing soft star was in the middle of the magicalest blue, throbbing like love--I saw Maggie's black hair in this night-- In the shelves of Orion her eye shades, borrowed, gleamed a dark and proud vellum somber power brooding rich bracelets of the moon rose from our snow, and surrounded the mystery.

In an undistinguished part of the universe (the outskirts of the Virgo Supercluster), in an undistinguished galaxy (the Milky Way), in an undistinguished region (the Orion Arm), an undistinguished star (the Sun) was born.

For her next birthday she'd asked for a telescope. Her mother had been alive then, and had suggested a pony, but her father had laughed and bought her a beautiful telescope, saying: "Of course she should watch the stars! Any girl who cannot identify the constellation of Orion just isn't paying attention!" And when she started asking him complicated questions, he took her along to lectures at the Royal Society, where it turned out that a nine-year-old girl who had blond hair and knew what the precession of the equinoxes was could ask hugely bearded famous scientists anything she liked. Who'd want a pony when you could have the whole universe?

The Dog-star and Aldebaran, pointing to the restless Pleiades, were half-way up the Southern sky, and between them hung Orion, which gorgeous constellation never burnt more vividly than now, as it soared forth above the rim of the landscape. Castor and Pollux with their quiet shine were almost on the meridian: the barren and gloomy Square of Pegasus was creeping round to the north-west; far away through the plantation Vega sparkled like a lamp suspended amid the leafless trees, and Cassiopeia's chair stood daintily poised on the uppermost boughs. "One o'clock," said Gabriel.

Between the roof of the shed and the big plant that hangs over the fence from the house next door I could see the constellation Orion. People say that Orion is called Orion because Orion was a hunter and the constellation looks like a hunter with a club and a bow and arrow, like this: But this is really silly because it is just stars, and you could join up the dots in any way you wanted, and you could make it look like a lady with an umbrella who is waving, or the coffeemaker which Mrs. Shears has, which is from Italy, with a handle and steam coming out, or like a dinosaur. And there aren't any lines in space, so you could join bits of Orion to bits of Lepus or Taurus or Gemini and say that they were a constellation called the Bunch of Grapes or Jesus or the Bicycle (except that they didn't have bicycles in Roman and Greek times, which was when they called Orion Orion). And anyway, Orion is not a hunter or a coffeemaker or a dinosaur. It is just Betelgeuse and Bellatrix and Alnilam and Rigel and 17 other stars I don't know the names of. And they are nuclear explosions billions of miles away. And that is the truth. I stayed awake until 5:47. That was the last time I looked at my watch before I fell asleep. It has a luminous face and lights up if you press a button, so I could read it in the dark. I was cold and I was frightened Father might come out and find me. But I felt safer in the garden because I was hidden. I looked at the sky a lot. I like looking up at the sky in the garden at night. In summer I sometimes come outside at night with my torch and my planisphere, which is two circles of plastic with a pin through the middle. And on the bottom is a map of the sky and on top is an aperture which is an opening shaped in a parabola and you turn it round to see a map of the sky that you can see on that day of the year from the latitude 51.5° north, which is the latitude that Swindon is on, because the largest bit of the sky is always on the other side of the earth. And when you look at the sky you know you are looking at stars which are hundreds and thousands of light-years away from you. And some of the stars don't even exist anymore because their light has taken so long to get to us that they are already dead, or they have exploded and collapsed into red dwarfs. And that makes you seem very small, and if you have difficult things in your life it is nice to think that they are what is called negligible, which means that they are so small you don't have to take them into account when you are calculating something. I didn't sleep very well because of the cold and because the ground was very bumpy and pointy underneath me and because Toby was scratching in his cage a lot. But when I woke up properly it was dawn and the sky was all orange and blue and purple and I could hear birds singing, which is called the Dawn Chorus. And I stayed where I was for another 2 hours and 32 minutes, and then I heard Father come into the garden and call out, "Christopher...? Christopher...?

A constellation of stars. “Orion.” “How can you tell?” “Can’t. Just making shit up.

In the eternal night of the Orion Arm of the Milky Way Galaxy, two civilizations had swept through like two shooting stars, and the universe had remembered their light.

Ford stared at Arthur, and Arthur was astonished to find his will beginning to weaken. He didn’t realize that this was because of an old drinking game that Ford learned to play in the hyper-space ports that served the madranite mining belts in the star system of Orion Beta.

And all her unsaid thanks so burned in her heart that all of a sudden she rose and left her tower and went out to the open starlight, and lifted her face to the stars and the place of Orion, and stood all dumb though her thanks were trembling upon her lips; for Alveric had told her one must not pray to the stars. With face upturned to all that wandering host she stood long silent, obedient to Alveric: then she lowered her eyes, and there was a small pool glimmering in the night, in which all the faces of the stars were shining. "To pray to the stars," she said to herself in the night, "is surely wrong. These images in the water are not the stars. I will pray to their images, and the stars will know." And

After 7 or 8 billion years of such enrichment, an undistinguished star (the Sun) was born in an undistinguished region (the Orion arm) of an undistinguished galaxy (the Milky Way) in an undistinguished part of the universe (the outskirts of the Virgo supercluster). The gas cloud from which the Sun formed contained a sufficient supply of heavy elements to spawn a few planets, thousands of asteroids, and billions of comets.

see you Lance Azriel Orion. My eyes are wide open and there you are like a crisp apple balancing upon the bosoms of the stars.” “Thanks,” he forced out. “I mean, not about me being a tit apple, but the other part.

Today is the winter solstice. The planet tilts just so to its star, lists and holds circling in a fixed tension between veering and longing, and spins helpless, exalted, in and out of that fleet blazing touch. Last night Orion vaulted and spread all over the sky, pagan and lunatic, his shoulder and knee on fire, his sword three suns at the ready-for what? I won’t see this year again, not again so innocent; and longing wrapped round my throat like a scarf. “For the Heavenly Father desires that we should see,” says Ruysbroeck, “and that is why He is ever saying to our inmost spirit one deep unfathomable word and nothing else.” But what is the word? Is this mystery or coyness? A cast-iron bell hung from the arch of my rib cage; when I stirred, it rang, or it tolled, a long syllable pulsing ripples up my lungs and down the gritty sap inside my bones, and I couldn’t make it out; I felt the voiced vowel like a sigh or a note but I couldn’t catch the consonant that shaped it into sense.

After nine billion years of such enrichment, in an undistinguished part of the universe (the outskirts of the Virgo Supercluster) in an undistinguished galaxy (the Milky Way) in an undistinguished region (the Orion Arm), an undistinguished star (the Sun) was born.

It's early spring, some late or early hour with Orion toppling backward onto the serrated edge of the mountains and not crying out but silent, silent as he tries to shoot the bull before it tramples him. Sometimes he is very peaceful not tonight. Tonight he is fighting for his life.

I’ll love you ‘til the world is dust,” Orion breathed and those words sent a delicious tremor down to the centre of my being. “I’ll love you even beyond then,” I answered and our lips collided as we accepted this bond and a ripple of power blazed through my body as the stars threaded our souls together.

I turn my telescope to Barnards Loop and M42, glowing in Orions sword. Stars are fires that burn for thousands of years. Some of them burn slow and long, like red dwarfs. Others-blue giants-burn their due so fast they shine across great distances, and are easy to see.As they Starr to run out of fuel,they burn helium, grow even hotter, and explode in a supernova. Supernovas, they're brighter than the brightest galaxies. They die, but everyone watches them go.

A kind of northing is what I wish to accomplish, a single-minded trek towards that place where any shutter left open to the zenith at night will record the wheeling of all the sky’s stars as a pattern of perfect, concentric circles. I seek a reduction, a shedding, a sloughing off. At the seashore you often see a shell, or fragment of a shell, that sharp sands and surf have thinned to a wisp. There is no way you can tell what kind of shell it had been, what creature it had housed; it could have been a whelk or a scallop, a cowrie, limpet, or conch. The animal is long since dissolved, and its blood spread and thinned in the general sea. All you hold in your hand is a cool shred of shell, an inch long, pared so thin that it passes a faint pink light. It is an essence, a smooth condensation of the air, a curve. I long for the North where unimpeded winds would hone me to such a pure slip of bone. But I’ll not go northing this year. I’ll stalk that floating pole and frigid air by waiting here. I wait on bridges; I wait, struck, on forest paths and meadow’s fringes, hilltops and banksides, day in and day out, and I receive a southing as a gift. The North washes down the mountains like a waterfall, like a tidal wave, and pours across the valley; it comes to me. It sweetens the persimmons and numbs the last of the crickets and hornets; it fans the flames of the forest maples, bows the meadow’s seeded grasses and pokes it chilling fingers under the leaf litter, thrusting the springtails and the earthworms deeper into the earth. The sun heaves to the south by day, and at night wild Orion emerges looming like the Specter over Dead Man Mountain. Something is already here, and more is coming.

Their house was dying, only an agony went there now. And leaving the burning dream Yvonne felt herself suddenly gathered upwards and borne towards the stars, through eddies of stars scattering aloft with ever wider circlings like rings on water, among which now appeared, like a flock of diamond birds flying softly and steadily towards Orion, the Pleiades …

The sea speaks to a part of his soul he didn't even think existed anymore, as if slowly healing the wounds life left behind.

I really like doing nothing with you, Orion. There aren’t many people you can do nothing with, you know.

Humanity rose to the stars, but never found paradise.

The stars owe you everything.” Orion’s eyes glimmered with that thought.

They had a constellation known as Big Bird, which overlaps our constellations Orion and Canis Major, and they gave the same name to the planet Venus that we give it: Morning Star. Not

But high-mass stars fortuitously explode, scattering their chemically enriched guts throughout the galaxy. After nine billion years of such enrichment, in an undistinguished part of the universe (the outskirts of the Virgo Supercluster) in an undistinguished galaxy (the Milky Way) in an undistinguished region (the Orion Arm), an undistinguished star (the Sun) was born.

With what meditations did Bloom accompany his demonstration to his companion of various constellations? Meditations of evolution increasingly vaster: of the moon invisible in incipient lunation, approaching perigee: of the infinite lattiginous scintillating uncondensed milky way, discernible by daylight by an observer placed at the lower end of a cylindrical vertical shaft 5000 ft deep sunk from the surface towards the centre of the earth: of Sirius (alpha in Canis Maior) 10 lightyears (57,000,000,000,000 miles) distant and in volume 900 times the dimension of our planet: of Arcturus: of the precession of equinoxes: of Orion with belt and sextuple sun theta and nebula in which 100 of our solar systems could be contained: of moribund and of nascent new stars such as Nova in 1901: of our system plunging towards the constellation of Hercules: of the parallax or parallactic drift of socalled fixed stars, in reality evermoving wanderers from immeasurably remote eons to infinitely remote futures in comparison with which the years, threescore and ten, of allotted human life formed a parenthesis of infinitesimal brevity.

But the delight of Earth, the wonder of it; the essential feeling as of the necessity for magic; that juggling with the golden moon and silver sun (such are they) that is man's universal pastime: these are the things to seek in the Kalevala. All the world to wheel about in, the Great Bear to play with and Orion and the Seven Stars all dangling magically in the branches of a silver birch enchanted by Väinämöinen; the splendid sorcerous scandalous villains of old to tell of when you have bathed in the 'Sauna' after binding the kine at close of day into pastures of little Suomi in the Marshes.

He described stars as thin as air, immense clouds of glowing gas; told us about the prestars of the Orion Nebula, just now blossoming into loose knots of warm gas that might in a million years be suns.

The lack of a compass did not seem to concern him, as he would orient himself by the stars, one star in particular. ‘Orion shone brightly,’ he later recalled. ‘Scarcely a year before he had guided me when lost in the desert to the banks of the Nile. He had given me water. Now he should lead me to freedom.’ 79 People often believe in their stars in a general way; Churchill actually specified which one it was.

I used to study the night, the stars, while camping next to my car. I learned names from an old star chart that I carried along with my highway maps. Mintaka, in Orion’s Belt, the bright left eye of the Bull. Sirius. Vega. Trying for a direction beyond anywhere possible, I looked at distant points of bright light. I wished that I could find out where I was going by navigating by the light that had traveled forever.

Bauval found that the Pyramids/Orion’s Belt correlation was general and obvious in all epochs, but specific and exact in only one: At 10,450 BC – and at that date only – we find that the pattern of the pyramids on the ground provides a perfect reflection of the pattern of the stars in the sky. I mean it’s a perfect match – faultless – and it cannot be an accident because the entire arrangement correctly depicts two very unusual celestial events that occurred only at that time. First, and purely by chance, the Milky Way, as visible from Giza in 10,450 BC, exactly duplicated the meridional course of the Nile Valley; secondly, to the west of the Milky Way, the three stars of Orion’s Belt were at the lowest altitude in their precessional cycle, with Al Nitak, the star represented by the Great Pyramid, crossing the meridien at 11° 08ʹ.8

I would get up just to smell you and give you kisses on your back in the shape of what I could remember of Orion. I could remember mostly just the belt, which is dear but not very impressive. Over and over again on your back every night, the belt. One, two, three cosmic smooches from me to you until you died and then I died, but sometimes in the time before I died and after you died I kissed three stars into the air of

Betelgeuse, Achenar. Orion. Aquila. Centre the Cross and you have a steady compass. But there's no compass for my ever disoriented soul, only ever beckoning ghost lights. In the one sure direction, to the one sure end.

These elements would be stunningly useless were they to remain where they formed. But high-mass stars fortuitously explode, scattering their chemically enriched guts throughout the galaxy. After nine billion years of such enrichment, in an undistinguished part of the universe (the outskirts of the Virgo Supercluster) in an undistinguished galaxy (the Milky Way) in an undistinguished region (the Orion Arm), an undistinguished star (the Sun) was born.

Blasphemy is more complicated than the simple act of cursing God. It is an attempt to remove our cultural eyeglasses, or at least grind the lenses to make our focus broader, clearer. There are deep strictures against removing these eyeglasses, for without them our culture would fall apart. Question Christianity, damned heathen. Question capitalism, pinko liberal. Question democracy, ungrateful wretch. Question science, just plain stupid. These epithets—blasphemer, commie, ingrate, stupid—need not be spoken aloud. Their invocation actually implies an incomplete enculturation of the subject. Proper enculturation causes the eyeglasses to be undetectable. People believe they are perceiving the world as it is, without the distorting lens of culture: God (with a capital G) does sit upon a heavenly throne; heaven is located beyond the stars that make up Orion’s belt (and, so I was told, you can just see heavens brilliance if you look closely enough); a collection of humans, each acting selfishly, will bring peace, justice, and affluence to all; the United States is the world’s greatest democracy; humans are the apex of creation.

Diego caught my arm and led me away, not even noticing Orion there. Because to him it meant nothing. It wasn’t the sky falling down, but to me it felt like every star in the heavens were descending and crashing into the earth around me.

Epistle to Be Left in the Earth ...It is colder now, There are many stars, We are drifting North by the Great Bear, The leaves are falling, The water is stone in the scooped rocks, To southward Red sun grey air: The crows are Slow on their crooked wings, The jays have left us: Long since we passed the flares of Orion. Each man believes in his heart he will die. Many have written last thoughts and last letters. None know if our deaths are now or forever: None know if this wandering earth will be found. We lie down and the snow covers our garments. I pray you, You (if any open this writing) Make in your mouths the words that were our names. I will tell you all we have learned, I will tell you everything: The earth is round, There are springs under the orchards, The loam cuts with a blunt knife, Beware of Elms in thunder, The lights in the sky are stars— We think they do not see, We think also The trees do not know nor the leaves of the grasses hear us: The birds too are ignorant. Do not listen. Do not stand at dark in the open windows. We before you have heard this: They are voices: They are not words at all but the wind rising. Also none among us has seen God. (...We have thought often The flaws of sun in the late and driving weather Pointed to one tree but it was not so.) As for the nights I warn you the nights are dangerous: The wind changes at night and the dreams come. It is very cold, There are strange stars near Arcturus, Voices are crying an unknown name in the sky

It's true,' he begins, 'that the universe is this big, vast thing, and humans will probably never explore even a tiny fraction of it. But that doesn't mean we're alone or we're displaced from it. All these elements, everything around us, the building blocks of the Earth and life -- even the very air you're breathing -- originated from those stars. We're a part of them. Orion, Draco, Sirius . . . they're a part of us, too.' Just like that, I can't keep my eyes off Chance. Even Rachael is momentarily entranced, looking bewildered and amazed all at once. I can't help thinking about it, how we could've all come from different stars, light-years away. Wondering, maybe, if Chance and I came from the same star. If that's what they mean when two people feel they've known each other in a past life. No, not in a past life -- but that the building blocks of one person's existence could have originated right alongside that of another's. I wonder if that's why I can't seem to shake him. Why so much of my life has been focused on someone like him. 'So we're all made of stars,' I murmur. So much for not opening my mouth. Chance twists around, a sad smile on his face as his eyes meet mine. 'We're all made of stars,' he agrees. 'We burn bright, then we flicker away.

Betelgeuse. Sirius. Orion. Antares. The sky is very large, and you are very small. Let the words wash through him, the voice and its memories pass over him, shivering his skin like the touch of a ghost, vanishing into darkness. The Pleiades. Cassiopeia. Taurus. Heaven is wide, and you are very small. Dead, but none the less powerful for being dead. He spread his hands wide, gripping the fence—those were powerful, too. Enough to beat a man to death, enough to choke out a life. But even death was not enough to loose the bands of rage. With great effort, he let go. Turned his hands palm upward, in gesture of surrender. He reached beyond the stars, searching. The words formed themselves quietly in his mind, by habit, so quietly he was not aware of them until he found them echoed in a whisper on his lips.

It seems a miracle that we should last so much as a single day. There is no antidote, he writes, against the opium of time. The winter sun shows how soon the light fades from the ash, how soon night enfolds us. Hour upon hour is added to the sum. Time itself grows old. Pyramids, arches and obelisks are melting pillars of snow. Not even those who have found a place amidst the heavenly constellations have perpetuated their names: Nimrod is lost to Orion, and Osiris in the Dog Star. Indeed, old families last not three oaks. To set one's name to a work gives no one a title to be remembered, for who knows how many of the best men have gone without a trace? The iniquity of oblivion blindly scatters her poppyseed and when wretchedness falls upon us one summer's day like snow, all we wish for is to be forgotten.

To him it seemed a miracle that we should last so much as a single day. There is no antidote, he writes, against the opium of time. The winter sun shows how soon the light fades from the ash, how soon night enfolds us. Hour upon hour is added to the sum. Time itself grows old. Pyramids, arches and obelisks are melting pillars of snow. Not even those who have found a place amidst the heavenly constellations have perpetuated their names: Nimrod is lost in Orion, and Osiris in the Dog Star. Indeed, old families last not three oaks. To set one’s name to a work gives no one a title to be remembered, for who knows how many of the best of men have gone without a trace? The iniquity of oblivion blindly scatters her poppyseed and when wretchedness falls upon us one summer’s day like snow, all we wish for is to be forgotten.

Every night, after Robert had retired to his bedroom, I would lie on the patch of kweek grass in the garden, searching the night sky with my field glasses, a thrill bolting through me whenever I saw a dislodged star streaking across the heavens. I learned their names and their shapes: the Southern Cross; Auriga; Coma Berenices; Horologium; Orion; Circinus; Apus; Andromeda. I soon knew them all, these constellations in the night sky, constellations that had, since the beginning of the world, been sinking into the earth each morning, to rise again the next night.

Craning his neck, the Count tried to identify the few that he learned in his youth: Perseus, Orion, the Great Bear, each flawless and eternal. To what end, he wondered, had the Divine created the stars in heaven to fill a man with feelings of inspiration one day and insignificance the next?

The Orion constellation was very significant to the ancient Egyptians. Years earlier, a construction engineer, Robert Bauval, had noticed that the three pyramids at Giza, including the great pyramid, were aligned in a fashion that looked similar to the way that the three stars of Orion’s belt were aligned.

The Congregating of Stars They often meet in mountain lakes, No matter how remote, no matter how deep Down and far they must stream to arrive, Navigating between the steep, vertical piles Of broken limestone and chert, through shattered Trees and dry bushes bent low by winter, Across ravines cut by roaring avalanches Of boulders and ripping ice. Silently, the stars have assembled On the surface of this lost lake tonight, Arranged themselves to match the patterns They maintain in the highest spheres Of the surrounding sky. And they continue on, passing through The smooth, black countenance of the lake, Through that mirror of themselves, down through The icy waters to touch the perfect bottom Stillness of the invisible life and death existing In the nether of those depths. Sky-bound- yet touching every needle In the torn and sturdy forest, every stone, Sharp, cracked along the ragged shore- the stars Appear the same as in ancient human ages On the currents of the old seas and the darkened Trails of desert dunes, Orion’s belt the same As it shone in Galileo’s eyes, Polaris certain above The sails of every mariner’s voyage. An echoing Light from the Magi’s star, that beacon, might even Be shining on this lake tonight, unrecognized. The stars are congregating, perhaps in celebration, passing through their own names and legends, through fogs, airs, and thunders, the vapors of winter frost and summer pollens. They are ancestors of transfiguration, intimate with all the eyes of the night. What can they know?

Above Ania, the moon is nearly full and the stars are as bright as always. Cassiopeia, Orion, Arachne...The names of the constellations return to her in her father's voice. They are all in their places, a buffer against the chaos and indifference of the universe. It is what is down here below them in the mud that is all wrong.

For the first billion years, the universe continued to expand and cool as matter gravitated into the massive concentrations we call galaxies. Nearly a hundred billion of them formed, each containing hundreds of billions of stars that undergo thermonuclear fusion in their cores. Those stars with more than about ten times the mass of the Sun achieve sufficient pressure and temperature in their cores to manufacture dozens of elements heavier than hydrogen, including those that compose planets and whatever life may thrive upon them. These elements would be stunningly useless were they to remain where they formed. But high-mass stars fortuitously explode, scattering their chemically enriched guts throughout the galaxy. After nine billion years of such enrichment, in an undistinguished part of the universe (the outskirts of the Virgo Supercluster) in an undistinguished galaxy (the Milky Way) in an undistinguished region (the Orion Arm), an undistinguished star (the Sun) was born. The

Dr. Lecter touched his pen to his lips. He looked out at the night sky and smiled. I have windows. Orion is above the horizon now, and near it Jupiter, brighter than it will ever be again before the year 2000. (I have no intention of telling you the time and how high it is.) But I expect you can see it too. Some of our stars are the same. Clarice. Hannibal Lecter

He disappeared inside and I leaned back on the seat to stare straight up the star-crazed sky. It seemed about 6 feet above my eyes. Or maybe 60 feet, or 600. I couldn't be sure, and it didn't matter, anyway, because by that time I was convinced I was in the cockpit of a 727 coming into LA at midnight. Jesus, I thought, I am ripped straight to the tits. Where am I? Are we going up or down? Somewhere in the back of my brain, I knew I was sitting in a Jeep in the parking lot of a night club on an island off the Mexican coast - but how could I really be sure, with another part of my brain convinced that I was looking down on the huge glittering bowl of Los Angeles from the cockpit of a 727? Was that the Milky Way? Or Sunset Boulevard? Orion, or the Beverly Hills Hotel? Who gives a fuck? I thought.

The breeze was warm across my face, and even through the city lights I could see constellations: the Plough, Orion’s belt. The pine tree at the bottom of the garden rustled like the sea, ceaselessly. For a moment I felt as if the universe had turned upside down and we were falling softly into an enormous black bowl of stars and nocturne, and I knew, beyond any doubt, that everything was going to be all right.

I always thought I would have to change myself wholly to be accepted. But then you came along, and you made me realize that I don’t have to change or be perfect to be loved. I just have to want to be better. So, Orion, see me as I am now, and tell me. Can you love me truly? Can you love me even when I’m cruel and wicked and violent? Can you love me even when I’m small and fearful and tender? Can you love me when I hate myself? Can you?

She blessed and thanked and praised those bright reflections shimmering down in the pool, and bade them tell her thanks and her praise to Orion, to whom she might not pray. It was thus that Alveric found her, kneeling, bent down in the dark, and reproached her bitterly. She was worshipping the stars, he said, which were there for no such purpose. And she said she was only supplicating their images. We may understand his feelings easily: the strangeness of her, her unexpected acts, her contrariness to all established things, her scorn for custom, her wayward ignorance, jarred on some treasured tradition every day. The more romantic she had been far away over the frontier, as told of by legend and song, the more difficult it was for her to fill any place once held by the ladies of that castle who were versed in all the lore of the fields we know. And Alveric looked for her to fulfil duties and follow customs which were all as new to her as the twinkling stars. But Lirazel felt only that the stars had not their due, and that custom or reason or whatever men set store by should demand that thanks be given them for their beauty; and she had not thanked them even, but had supplicated only their images in the pool. That night she thought of Elfland, where all things were matched with her beauty, where nothing changed and there were no strange customs, and no strange magnificences like these stars of ours to whom none gave their due.

In two days they began to come upon bones and cast-off apparel. They saw halfburied skeletons of mules with the bones so white and polished they seemed incandescent even in that blazing heat and they saw panniers and packsaddles and the bones of men and they saw a mule entire, the dried and blackened carcass hard as iron. They rode on. The white noon saw them through the waste like a ghost army, so pale they were with dust, like shades of figures erased upon a board. The wolves loped paler yet and grouped and skittered and lifted their lean snouts on the air. At night the horses were fed by hand from sacks of meal and watered from buckets. There was no more sickness. The survivors lay quietly in that cratered void and watched the whitehot stars go rifling down the dark. Or slept with their alien hearts beating in the sand like pilgrims exhausted upon the face of the planet Anareta, clutched to a namelessness wheeling in the night. They moved on and the iron of the wagontires grew polished bright as chrome in the pumice. To the south the blue cordilleras stood footed in their paler image on the sand like reflections in a lake and there were no wolves now. They took to riding by night, silent jornadas save for the trundling of the wagons and the wheeze of the animals. Under the moonlight a strange party of elders with the white dust thick on their moustaches and their eyebrows. They moved on and the stars jostled and arced across the firmament and died beyond the inkblack mountains. They came to know the nightskies well. Western eyes that read more geometric constructions than those names given by the ancients. Tethered to the polestar they rode the Dipper round while Orion rose in the southwest like a great electric kite. The sand lay blue in the moonlight and the iron tires of the wagons rolled among the shapes of the riders in gleaming hoops that veered and wheeled woundedly and vaguely navigational like slender astrolabes and the polished shoes of the horses kept hasping up like a myriad of eyes winking across the desert floor. They watched storms out there so distant they could not be heard, the silent lightning flaring sheetwise and the thin black spine of the mountain chain fluttering and sucked away again in the dark. They saw wild horses racing on the plain, pounding their shadows down the night and leaving in the moonlight a vaporous dust like the palest stain of their passing.

He lay on his back in his blankets and looked out where the quartermoon lay cocked over the heel of the mountains. In that false blue dawn the Pleiades seemed to be rising up into the darkness above the world and dragging all the stars away, the great diamond of Orion and Cepella and the signature of Cassiopeia all rising up through the phosphorous dark like a sea-net. He lay a long time listening to the others breathing in their sleep while he contemplated the wildness about him, the wildness within.

For three days and two nights I drift up the Nile along Lake Nasser. The sunrises and sunsets are so extraordinarily beautiful that my body turns inside out and empties my heart into the sky. The stars are close enough to grasp. Lying on the roof of the ferry at night, I begin at last to know the constellations, and start a personal relationship with that particular little cluster of jewels called the Pleiades, which nestles in the sky not far from Orion's belt and sword. Really, those stars, when they come that close, you have to take them seriously.

And so he lay, the moonlight washing over the incomparable smooth white of his back, its brilliance highlighting the graceful lines of his body to reveal the subtle but persuasive hint of firm masculinity that made it clear that this was the flesh not of a woman but of a still immature young man. The moon shone with dazzling brightness on Kiyoake’s left side, where the pale flesh pulsed softly in rhythm with his heartbeat. Here there were three small, almost invisible moles. And much as the three stars in Orion’s belt fade in strong moonlight, so too these three moles were almost blotted out by its rays. (p.43)

The name typically translates into an anatomical part of the constellation being described. Famous ones on the list (along with their loose translations) include: Rigel (Al Rijl, “foot”) and Betelgeuse (Yad al Jauza, “hand of the great one”—in modern times drawn as the armpit), the two brightest stars in the constellation Orion; Altair (At-Ta’ir, “the flying one”), the brightest star in the constellation Aquila, the eagle; and the variable star Algol (Al-Ghul, “the ghoul”), the second brightest star in the constellation Perseus, referring to the blinking eye of the bloody severed head of Medusa held aloft by Perseus.

In spring the meadow that ran down from the cliff to the beach was all foam-white and sea-blue with flowers; the hunter looked at it and it was beautiful. But when he came home there was no one to tell what he had seen―and if he picked the flowers and brought them home in his hands, there was no one to give them to. And when at evening, past the dark blue shape of a far-off island, the sun sank under the edge of the sea like a red world vanishing, the hunter saw it all, but there was no one to tell what he had seen. One winter night, as he looked at the stars that, blazing coldly, made the belt and the sword of the hunter Orion, a great green meteor went slowly across the sky. The hunter's heart leaped, he cried: "Look, look!" But there was no one to look.

That—this—is Orion’s secret. It’s not that the ship isn’t working, that we’re never going to make it. It’s that the ship has already arrived. We’re already here! There—there—is the planet that will be our home! It floats, so bright that it hurts my eyes. Giant green landmasses spread out across blue water, with swirls and wisps of clouds twirling over top. At the edge of the planet, where it turns away from the suns and starts to darken, I can see bright flashes of light—bursts of whiteness in the darkness—and I think: Is that lightning? In the center, where the light of the suns makes the planet seem to glow from within, I can see, very distinctly, a continent. A continent. On one edge, it’s cracked and broken like an egg, dark lines snaking deep into the landmass. Rivers. Lots of them. Maybe something too big to be rivers if I can see it from here. Fingers of land stretch out into the sea, and dots of islands are just out of their grasp. That area will be cool all the time, I think. Boats can go along the rivers, up and down. We can swim in the water. Because already, I can see myself living there. Being there. On a planet that looks up at a million suns every night, and at two every day. I want to scream, shout with joy. But the air is so thin now. Too thin. I’ve spent too long looking at Orion’s secret. The boop . . . boop . . . boop . . . fades away. There’s nothing to warn about now. Because there’s no air left. My sight is rimmed with black. My head pulses with my heartbeat, which sounds as loud to me as the alarm once did. I turn from the planet—my planet—and start pulling, hand over hand, against the tether, toward the hatch. The ship bobs in and out of my vision as my whole body jerks. I’m panicked now and fighting to stay awake. I try to suck in air, but there’s nothing there to suck. I’m drowning in nothing.

Out in the terraria one lived free, like an animal—one could be an animal, make one’s own life one way or another. Live as naked as you wanted. On the God-damned Earth the accumulated traditions and laws and habits made something that was worse than any body bra; it was one’s mind that was held in place, tied in straitjackets, obliged to be like all the others in their ridiculous boxed habits. Here they were, on the only planetary surface on which you could walk freely, naked to the wind and the sun, and when they had a choice, they sat in boxes and stared at littler boxes, just as if they had no choice—as if they were in a space station—as if the bad old days of the caged centuries had never gone away. They didn’t even look up at the stars at night. Walking among them, she saw that it was so. Indeed if they had been people who were interested in the stars they would not have still been here. There overhead stood Orion at his angle, “the most beautiful object any of us will ever know in the world, spread out on the sky like a true god, in whom it would only be necessary to believe a little.” But no one looked.

I got you these.” I flipped open the satchel again, offering him the book on gemstones first and Orion’s jaw went slack as he took the book from my hand, turning it over gently like it was the most precious thing in the world. “Oh my stars,” he gasped, grabbing the bag from me and rifling through the books with a youthful smile on his face. I snorted a laugh as Darius gave me a pointed look, realising I’d just lost myself fifty auras, but the look on Orion’s face was definitely worth it. “I’m afraid Highspell had some of your other ones burned,” I said with a frown and I immediately regretted saying that as Orion looked like I’d just told him I’d murdered his puppy. “Burned them?” he rasped and I nodded, offering him an apologetic look as he hugged the bag of books to his chest like he didn’t want them to hear what had happened to their friends. “Sorry, man.” Darius rested a hand to Orion’s shoulder and he growled. “I’ll murder that fake-faced witch,” he snarled, his fangs on show as he held onto his books even tighter and I was pretty sure he was making that promise to them. Dude would definitely kill in revenge for those books.

He lay under the great bearskin and stared out of the window at the stars of spring, no longer frosty and metallic, but as if they had been new washed and had swollen with the moisture. It was a lovely evening, without rain or cloud. The sky between the stars was of the deepest and fullest velvet. Framed in the thick western window, Alderbaran and Betelgeuse were racing Sirius over the horizon, the hunting dog-star looking back to his master Orion, who had not yet heaved himself above the rim. In at the window came also the unfolding scent of benighted flowers, for the currants, the wild cherries, the plums and the hawthorn were already in bloom, and no less than five nightingales within earshot were holding a contest of beauty among the bowery, the looming trees...He watched out at the stars in a kind of trance. Soon it would be the summer again, when he could sleep on the battlements and watch these stars hovering as close as moths above his face and, in the Milky Way at least, with something of the mothy pollen. They would be at the same time so distant that unutterable thoughts of space and eternity would baffle themselves in his sighing breast, and he would imagine to himself how he was falling upward higher and higher among them, never reaching, never ending, leaving and losing everything in the tranquil speed of space.

Toward an Organic Philosophy SPRING, COAST RANGE The glow of my campfire is dark red and flameless, The circle of white ash widens around it. I get up and walk off in the moonlight and each time I look back the red is deeper and the light smaller. Scorpio rises late with Mars caught in his claw; The moon has come before them, the light Like a choir of children in the young laurel trees. It is April; the shad, the hot headed fish, Climbs the rivers; there is trillium in the damp canyons; The foetid adder’s tongue lolls by the waterfall. There was a farm at this campsite once, it is almost gone now. There were sheep here after the farm, and fire Long ago burned the redwoods out of the gulch, The Douglas fir off the ridge; today the soil Is stony and incoherent, the small stones lie flat And plate the surface like scales. Twenty years ago the spreading gully Toppled the big oak over onto the house. Now there is nothing left but the foundations Hidden in poison oak, and above on the ridge, Six lonely, ominous fenceposts; The redwood beams of the barn make a footbridge Over the deep waterless creek bed; The hills are covered with wild oats Dry and white by midsummer. I walk in the random survivals of the orchard. In a patch of moonlight a mole Shakes his tunnel like an angry vein; Orion walks waist deep in the fog coming in from the ocean; Leo crouches under the zenith. There are tiny hard fruits already on the plum trees. The purity of the apple blossoms is incredible. As the wind dies down their fragrance Clusters around them like thick smoke. All the day they roared with bees, in the moonlight They are silent and immaculate. SPRING, SIERRA NEVADA Once more golden Scorpio glows over the col Above Deadman Canyon, orderly and brilliant, Like an inspiration in the brain of Archimedes. I have seen its light over the warm sea, Over the coconut beaches, phosphorescent and pulsing; And the living light in the water Shivering away from the swimming hand, Creeping against the lips, filling the floating hair. Here where the glaciers have been and the snow stays late, The stone is clean as light, the light steady as stone. The relationship of stone, ice and stars is systematic and enduring: Novelty emerges after centuries, a rock spalls from the cliffs, The glacier contracts and turns grayer, The stream cuts new sinuosities in the meadow, The sun moves through space and the earth with it, The stars change places. The snow has lasted longer this year, Than anyone can remember. The lowest meadow is a lake, The next two are snowfields, the pass is covered with snow, Only the steepest rocks are bare. Between the pass And the last meadow the snowfield gapes for a hundred feet, In a narrow blue chasm through which a waterfall drops, Spangled with sunset at the top, black and muscular Where it disappears again in the snow. The world is filled with hidden running water That pounds in the ears like ether; The granite needles rise from the snow, pale as steel; Above the copper mine the cliff is blood red, The white snow breaks at the edge of it; The sky comes close to my eyes like the blue eyes Of someone kissed in sleep. I descend to camp, To the young, sticky, wrinkled aspen leaves, To the first violets and wild cyclamen, And cook supper in the blue twilight. All night deer pass over the snow on sharp hooves, In the darkness their cold muzzles find the new grass At the edge of the snow.

It got to the point where he didn’t even look up at the sky any more as he blundered back and forth. The human mind had evolved for just one universe, he thought. How much of this crap was he supposed to take? He felt exhausted, resentful, bewildered. “Wait.” He paused. He had loped out of the portal onto another stretch of scuffed, anonymous regolith. She was lying in his arms, her weight barely registering. He looked down into her face, and pushed up her gold sun visor. “Emma?” She licked her lips. “Look. Up there.” No Galaxy visible, but a starry sky. The stars looked, well, normal. But he’d learned that meant little. “So what?” Emma was lifting her arm, pointing. He saw three stars, dull white points, in a row. And there was a rough rectangle of stars around them—one of them a distinctive red—and what looked like a Galaxy disc, or maybe just a nebula, beneath … “Holy shit,” he said. She whispered, “There must be lots of universes like ours. But, surely to God, there is only one Orion.” And then light, dazzling, unbearably brilliant, came stabbing over the close horizon. It was a sunrise. He could actually feel its heat through the layers of his suit. He looked down at the ground at his feet. The rising light cast strong shadows, sharply illuminating the miniature crevices and craters there. And here was a “crater” that was elongated, and neatly ribbed. It was a footprint. He stepped forward, lifted his foot, and set it down in the print. It fit neatly. When he lifted his foot away the cleats of his boot hadn’t so much as disturbed a regolith grain. It was his own footprint. Good grief. After hundreds of universes of silence and remoteness and darkness, universes of dim light and shadows, he was right back where he started.

He watched her, as she looked up at the sky, her hair curtaining her face. Orion glowed softly above. He remembered that was the title of her favorite poem. Orion. She wasn’t a sentimental sort, but she had moments of deep feeling. There was a curious kind of romance about her, not the florid descriptions of poetry. But some of the stripped-down simplicity of prose clung to her, some grace. She crossed back to the trailer entrance

38 Then the Lord spoke to Job out of the storm. He said: 2 “Who is this that obscures my plans with words without knowledge? 3 Brace yourself like a man; I will question you, and you shall answer me. 4 “Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation? Tell me, if you understand. 5 Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know! Who stretched a measuring line across it? 6 On what were its footings set, or who laid its cornerstone— 7 while the morning stars sang together and all the angels[a] shouted for joy? 8 “Who shut up the sea behind doors when it burst forth from the womb, 9 when I made the clouds its garment and wrapped it in thick darkness, 10 when I fixed limits for it and set its doors and bars in place, 11 when I said, ‘This far you may come and no farther; here is where your proud waves halt’? 12 “Have you ever given orders to the morning, or shown the dawn its place, 13 that it might take the earth by the edges and shake the wicked out of it? 14 The earth takes shape like clay under a seal; its features stand out like those of a garment. 15 The wicked are denied their light, and their upraised arm is broken. 16 “Have you journeyed to the springs of the sea or walked in the recesses of the deep? 17 Have the gates of death been shown to you? Have you seen the gates of the deepest darkness? 18 Have you comprehended the vast expanses of the earth? Tell me, if you know all this. 19 “What is the way to the abode of light? And where does darkness reside? 20 Can you take them to their places? Do you know the paths to their dwellings? 21 Surely you know, for you were already born! You have lived so many years! 22 “Have you entered the storehouses of the snow or seen the storehouses of the hail, 23 which I reserve for times of trouble, for days of war and battle? 24 What is the way to the place where the lightning is dispersed, or the place where the east winds are scattered over the earth? 25 Who cuts a channel for the torrents of rain, and a path for the thunderstorm, 26 to water a land where no one lives, an uninhabited desert, 27 to satisfy a desolate wasteland and make it sprout with grass? 28 Does the rain have a father? Who fathers the drops of dew? 29 From whose womb comes the ice? Who gives birth to the frost from the heavens 30 when the waters become hard as stone, when the surface of the deep is frozen? 31 “Can you bind the chains[b] of the Pleiades? Can you loosen Orion’s belt? 32 Can you bring forth the constellations in their seasons[c] or lead out the Bear[d] with its cubs? 33 Do you know the laws of the heavens? Can you set up God’s[e] dominion over the earth? 34 “Can you raise your voice to the clouds and cover yourself with a flood of water? 35 Do you send the lightning bolts on their way? Do they report to you, ‘Here we are’? 36 Who gives the ibis wisdom[f] or gives the rooster understanding?[g] 37 Who has the wisdom to count the clouds? Who can tip over the water jars of the heavens 38 when the dust becomes hard and the clods of earth stick together? 39 “Do you hunt the prey for the lioness and satisfy the hunger of the lions 40 when they crouch in their dens or lie in wait in a thicket? 41 Who provides food for the raven when its young cry out to God and wander about for lack of food?

When you believe, beautiful things will happen if you have the faith of a bird seed, or believe in parrots who talk!

Say farewell to the Twins. Krakoya system has already fallen to Jahandar’s vanity and Pyotr’s cunning. All that’s left to do is the killing and the dying, as the last tiny warships in the system, four old frigates and 10 jury-rigged police boats, rise to meet the whole Dauran battle fleet. They’re going to sing about this for centuries. They’ll call the ballad, “Death Ride of the Bantams.” They’ll sing sorrowfully and heroically, all together and all at once, of white tokamaks that tore apart the sky. They’ll sit all night in exile until the rise of alien dawns, playing dirges into the night of unfamiliar stars, mourning tens of millions taken by the storms. And hundreds of millions more taken by Shishi to far-off prison moons, or buried in long lime-pits astride killing fields of raped and murdered worlds. So do say a sad farewell to the Twins. Their fate is sealed. Daura is here. Jahandar is here.

It got to the point where he didn’t even look up at the sky any more as he blundered back and forth. The human mind had evolved for just one universe, he thought. How much of this crap was he supposed to take? He felt exhausted, resentful, bewildered. “Wait.” He paused. He had loped out of the portal onto another stretch of scuffed, anonymous regolith. She was lying in his arms, her weight barely registering. He looked down into her face, and pushed up her gold sun visor. “Emma?” She licked her lips. “Look. Up there.” No Galaxy visible, but a starry sky. The stars looked, well, normal. But he’d learned that meant little. “So what?” Emma was lifting her arm, pointing. He saw three stars, dull white points, in a row. And there was a rough rectangle of stars around them—one of them a distinctive red—and what looked like a Galaxy disc, or maybe just a nebula, beneath … “Holy shit,” he said. She whispered, “There must be lots of universes like ours. But, surely to God, there is only one Orion.” And then light, dazzling, unbearably brilliant, came stabbing over the close horizon. It was a sunrise. He could actually feel its heat through the layers of his suit. He looked down at the ground at his feet. The rising light cast strong shadows, sharply illuminating the miniature crevices and craters there. And here was a “crater” that was elongated, and neatly ribbed. It was a footprint. He stepped forward, lifted his foot, and set it down in the print. It fit neatly. When he lifted his foot away the cleats of his boot hadn’t so much as disturbed a regolith grain. It was his own footprint. Good grief. After hundreds of universes of silence and remoteness and darkness, universes of dim light and shadows, he was right back where he started.

An Emergency Medical Holographic Program?” Juanita smiled, thinking of the doctor on Star Trek: Voyager.

Despite the hour, the Kremlin shimmered with electric light from every window, as if its newest denizens were still too drunk with power to sleep. But if the lights of the Kremlin shimmered brightly, like all earthly lights before them they were diminished in their beauty by the majesty of the constellations overhead. Craning his neck, the Count tried to identify the few that he had learned in his youth: Perseus, Orion, the Great Bear, each flawless and eternal. To what end, he wondered, had the Divine created the stars in heaven to fill a man with feelings of inspiration one day and insignificance the next?

There’s no one star called Orion. That must have confused them. Deep within the data banks of the Acheron lie all the star names and designations, but not the constellations, as they’re meaningless in terms of astronomy.

She stood for a time, still and meditative, with her face held up to the arch of sky, seeking a shooting star in that illimitable field above her. The stars glittered and winked as if they were live, sentient beings, the angels themselves, watching the doings of earth, not in the serene manner of celestial beings but excited and interested in what they saw below. Their colours flashed in red and ice-blue and dazzling green and amber. There was Auriga with its bright Capella, a star Susan always recognised since her father long pointed out its bright flame. "That's the one I knows well. It's always been in the sky. I've watched it when I've been going to milking and coming home on winter nights, and it's been a kind of companion to me." The Great Bear swung over the house top, guarding Windystone from harm. Orion was hidden, but if she walked along by the yew trees, she could see his fiery stars and steel-green Riga, and the belt like a jewel. But she stayed where she was, alone, quiet, giving herself up to the movement of the rolling heavens, and she was caught up in that heavenly motion and whirled like a dark atom with the swinging earth.

Punarpusha star, I represent Orion in western astrology, star child, I remember palm leaves always, I can change the universe if i want to, so kindly do not make me to repeat it again and again

I slid a hand up her spine, moving it towards the back of her neck as I watched her mouth and prepared to claim it. Claim her. Claim everything that went with that choice, because it didn't even feel like a choice at all, more like an urgent need which demanded to be answered. “Drink!” Caleb demanded suddenly from beside us, snapping the tension that had been building and destroying the moment before I could claim her in any of the ways I ached to. Roxy turned away from me to accept the shot he was holding out for her and I took mine without once looking away from her face, tipping it down my throat and wishing something else was gracing my lips. There was a question hanging between me and her. A want which we both felt and ached to satisfy. But there was a whole chasm full of reasons for us to deny that need too. Not that I gave a shit. Because every fibre of my being was screaming for me to claim her and make her mine with an urgency that made my head spin. I swear I could practically hear the universe holding its breath like there was so much hanging on the choice we made now. But before either of us could make it, Caleb interrupted again. “Orion’s looking for you,” he said to me, pointing back over to the bar where I had to assume Lance was. “Something about an assignment you haven’t handed in. I told him to chill the hell out and enjoy his drink but he gave me that look, you know the look where you’re not sure if he’s trying to set you alight with the power of thought alone or if he’s just super constipated, so I said I’d tell you.” Roxy snorted a laugh, and as she looked away to search the crowd for Lance, the spell between us was broken. I scrubbed a hand down my face, wondering what the hell I'd been thinking. The girl might have been hot. Scorching fucking hot and endlessly intoxicating. And I might have wanted to fuck her more than I think I'd ever wanted to fuck any girl I'd ever met. But she was a star damned Vega. And that meant me and her were over before we could ever even consider beginning. “I guess I’d better see what he wants,” I said, knowing that the moment I stepped away from here would be the moment this opportunity left us. I cast a final look at Roxy, not really knowing what I expected to find there but she seemed to have forgotten me already as she moved away to place her empty shot glass down on a table. A growl rumbled through my chest and Caleb grinned widely, slapping me on the shoulder as I passed him and making me want to punch his fucking face all over again. No doubt Lance's appearance had made his fucking night. And it had definitely ruined mine.(Darius POV)

I haven’t been drained that low in a long time. I shouldn’t have tried to take so much all at once,” I muttered, wanting to apologise but not quite finding the right words beyond that statement. “Well feel free to just steal all of mine then,” Darcy spat icily, clutching her neck tighter. I had the urge to heal her, but knew if I tried to touch her again, she’d only recoil. The ambulance pulled away and I glanced around, double checking Darius wasn’t here and I was glad to find he’d listened to me for once. That was something anyway. “Come on, I can drive you girls back in my car,” I offered. I’d left my Faerrari parked at the Acrux Hotel when I’d last visited Tucana, opting to stardust home because I’d been too drunk to drive. But I hadn’t had any magical drinks tonight, so I’d healed myself of the effects of the whiskey I’d consumed before coming to get Darius from the nightclub. Tory’s lip curled back as she glared at me with poison in her gaze. “We’re not going anywhere alone with you,” Darcy said bitterly, distrust in her eyes. “Don’t be ridiculous,” I snapped, stepping forward to get hold of her. I’d protect her tonight whether she liked it or not. Tory moved to intercept me and Caleb joined her too like a prime asshole. “You don’t fucking touch her again,” Tory growled. I narrowed my eyes at her, about to object, but as my gaze slid to Darcy over her shoulder and I saw the wall in her eyes that told me to get fucked, I knew I wasn’t going to win this fight. “Bastard,” Darcy hissed at me, looking woozy. Shit, I needed to heal her. And I could get her a blood replenishing potion back at the academy. “Come on, girls. The bus is gonna leave soon,” Caleb said, tugging Tory after him but she dug her heels in, waiting for Darcy. I opened my mouth to try and find the words that would convince Blue to stay with me, but she walked straight past me with her cheek turned and Tory threw me one more filthy look before they all headed down the street to the bus stop where mountains of students were gathering. Professors were among them and I knew they were safe enough in numbers, but my feet were still rooted to the pavement as I watched Darcy leave. You drank way too much. You have to get a grip. How are you going to keep feeding from her if you act like a monster every time your teeth are in her? I’d never had this problem before. The only thing I could compare it to was when my magic had been Awakened and my Order had Emerged. That first feed had made me feel like a ravenous beast with a bottomless stomach, and yet it still didn’t have a pinch on what it was like to feed from Blue. Caleb led Tory and Darcy past the queue straight onto the bus and my hackles rose as they joined Max and Seth on the back seats. And as Seth pulled Darcy close to him and nuzzled against her cheek, that feral animal in me awoke once more. I took out my Atlas and shot an update to Francesca, anxiously scoring my fingers through my hair. Just as the bus pulled away and rounded a corner, the FIB appeared on the street and I was immediately surrounded by three agents with dark frowns on their faces. “Lance Orion, you need to come down to the station and make a statement,” Captain Hoskins said and I sighed, knowing it was going to be a long ass night. I agreed and as I was stardusted away to the precinct, my heart was tugged in another direction, nearly forcing the stars to guide me elsewhere. But the captain ensured I made it to where he wanted to take me and I made a silent prayer to the stars that Darcy wouldn’t end up in Seth Capella’s bed tonight. Because I wasn’t sure I could control the demon in me who’d want his head for that. (ORION POV)

The cat’s soft appearance is deceptive,” Worf had told her in a recent letter. “Spot is in fact fierce, cunning, uncompromising, and supremely self-assured. What she wants, she demands, or simply takes. She has the heart of a warrior,” he had concluded—high praise indeed from him.)

A cold east wind wailed over the waste; a white fog like curd lay on the water, and the surface of the saltings, clinging to the surface and rising scarce above three feet from it. Here and there it lifted itself in a vaporous column, and moved along in the wind like a white spectral woman, nodding her head and waving her arms cumbered with wet drapery. Above, the sky was clear, and a fine crescent moon sparkled in it without quenching the keenness of the stars. Cassiopeia was glorious in her chair, Orion burned sideways over Mersea Isle. No red gleam was visible to-night from the tavern window at the City, the veil of fog hung over it and curtained it off. To the north-west was a silvery glow at the horizon, then there rose a pure ray as of returning daylight, it was answered by a throb in the north-east, then it broke into two rays, and again united and spread, and suddenly was withdrawn. Mehalah had often seen the Aurora, and she knew that the signals portended increased cold or bad weather.

One night when I had convinced her to take yet another respite, I pointed up at the stars as we crossed the quad. “Do you see that?” I said. “That’s the Big Dipper.” Putting my arm around her to direct her vision, I added, “And that over there is Orion.” She glanced up in the sky and then back at me and said, with mock outrage, “No, it’s not. Orion is not visible this time of year.” “Well,” I replied, laughing, “I was only half paying attention in astronomy class.