09 Jan Starless Sky Preview #2 – “The Zorganer Fragments”

This week’s preview from Starless Sky is from one of several stories in the collection that examines why the Starfall came as a surprise to even some of the most learned scholars of Aventuria. Many of them failed to foresee the catastrophe, and there are usually very specific reasons for those failures.

Here is an excerpt of “The Zorganer Fragments” by Alex Spohr:

The Ogre Cross is shining especially brightly today. Wait a moment, something is wrong with the course of the wandering star. The Daughter of Niobara compared her records with the Zorganer Fragments and saw that the great prophetess, who was also said to be a great mathematician, had obviously made a mistake. Her information had to be wrong; Lajella could see it clearly through her telescope.

She had observed several anomalies over the past few days. Either some stars had vanished from two constellations, or else those stars were temporarily visible for some reason. The courses of the wandering stars no longer matched Niobara’s calculations, and horoscopes were imprecise as never before. Surprisingly, all of these changes appeared in alʼAlam’s writings. The Selemer astrologer was generally considered a madman who created beautiful maps but had little knowledge about astronomy. Anyone who ever looked at the sky could tell this at a glance.

Although Lajella focused hard on her work, she heard the creak of the door. She was looking through the telescope and didn’t see who entered the chamber, but she was certain it had to be Khelbara.

“I have to tell you something!” Lajella said excitedly. “Something very—”

That’s as far as Lajella got. Something struck her in the head and sent her off to Boron’s realm of dreams.