Aster

Magpie #23

Aster looked to the stars.

The wide universal sky was the bluest of blues tonight.

How beautiful, she thought. Earth used to be like that. A very long time ago, Yuri Gagarin said the world was a perfect blue and white marble in space.

Aster was a foundling. She arrived in a bubble - a perfect baby in a crib with star chimes. When she was little, the chimes above her crib would suddenly tinkle and turn. After great debate, Aster was adopted by the City Creche where all the Children were raised by the City Council. She amazed her teacher in class one day when she wrote a poem on the grayboard, the chalk spewed white words across the smooth asphalt surface seemingly on its own. Then it drew flowers and fairies. That was when her teacher knew it was Aster channeling the chalk. No other child knew what flowers and fairies were...

Outside her class, the walls were gray, the city was gray, the world beyond the City was gray. Even the overpopulated beaches were gray. The air was still, and the gray smoke from Factories in the distance slowly disappeared into the gray air. Gray was the colour of the world’s death...

During the day, the sky was gray, but in the evening, the sky turned crimson, then darkened to a lovely deep blue expanse in the night.

Aster was a channeler. That meant she could draw pure energy from deep inside her to move things a great distance. The catch? There was no catch except at the end of her task, she suffered from great exhaustion. The greater the task, the more she suffered, and took longer to recover. Lately, she even bled from her efforts. Aster knew no one else like her. No one knew anyone quite like Aster.

And today, the City Councilors had ordered Aster to channel the elements that make the world gray into space. Fire. Toxic. Acid. Aster would love to see the world beautiful again. As she alone remembered it.

Even if she would have to die for it.

This is a Magpie Tale. Weekly host Willow continues to draw poets from around the world to her wonderful poets' sanctuary.