[Gift] The 11th Hour | Wish

Lights smeared the dark canvas of the night sky. At first, they’d been solitary flares, but now there was a steady shower, like a far-off distant rain of fire high above the sparse clouds. Bright, gleaming trails of light that soon dissipated into nothingness.

Orm watched, steady, implacable. His fins and tail moved, pushing him through the still water of the lake. His wings hovered above the surface of the water, the magnetic force within them aching to rise towards the meteorites.

He had no real personal desire to float out in space, to be among the burning debris falling through the atmosphere. But it was pretty to look at, to think about, swimming in their reflection and imagining that he might have something so beautiful to call his own.

“I wish,” he started without thinking, then stopped.

He lowered himself into the water, casting a suspicious eye around. After all, everyone knew if you told anyone your wish, then it wouldn’t come true.

It felt silly, int he first place, having a wish.

But he did.

Quieter, the words rippling on the star-painted water, “I wish… I could have…”

It wasn’t that Orm didn’t know what he wanted; it was that it felt impossible. He wanted to keep a star as it fell, as it called to him, halfway between earth and space. He wanted the living fire, and the cold metal of it—the innate contradiction.

He closed his eyes, and wished for all his might for a miracle. His wings trembled.

There was a sharp whistle, the sound of something cutting through the air. Orm opened his eyes to see fire streaking through the air, an explosion of light and earth as something struck the ground near the shore, and, after a second’s delay, the sound of it landing reached his ears.

With a strange grace, he leaped from the water and went to claim his prize, his entire body thrumming now, attuned to the metal inside the meteorite that he’d called with nothing more than a wish.