Lorelei's Note: While this story is framed as wholesome, the types of 'consent' given are not the sort you can rely upon with a stranger, as these characters do in the fantasy! In the real world, affirmative consent and power negotiations are always critical. Enjoy the kink responsibly, and enjoy the story!
This story is probably unconnected from the lore of my other works.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
In the midst of an endless ocean of black ink, a woman drifted in place and gazed in rapture at nothing at all.
She was dressed in a pale, translucent dress, flowing and insubstantial, ghosts stitched around her tall, slender form. Behind her back fluttered a pair of beautiful moth wings, each one a stained glass window of iridescent indigo, shimmering in the black like mother-of-pearl. Next to her feet rested a large blue silk bag, resting lopsided and lumpy as if filled with a viscous liquid.
Starbloom smiled. This was the last time the universe would ever look like this. She wanted to take her time and make sure she never forgot it, to hold onto the view, because she would be the only being who could. At least, the only being she dared name. Her only other company out here was things that knew to keep their distance.
Those things had been her only company for some time now.
She would have to remember the world like this. Her eyes drifted over the empty expanse, and her smile slowly faded. Lonely as it might be.
She bent to retrieve her bag, twirling a delicate paintbrush between her fingers. She dipped the paintbrush in, and it came out dripping silvery blue.
And she began to paint the skies.
The goddess's paintbrush danced as she flitted through the black. Wherever the brush fell, a bead of brilliant light began to form. Then another. Then another. A trail of birthing stars trailed in her wake.
She laughed and twirled in the air, her wings guiding her in graceful arcs. She did not place most of her stars at random. Her bright beautiful tapestry wove in patterns no one but her would ever know, would ever see.
But every now and then, she snuck in some mischief—three stars right beside one another, a scattering of galaxies casually drawn in the shape of her wings. Private jokes no one but her would ever laugh at.
Starstong had been painting for several hours when she first noticed the lights.
She squinted. At first, she'd assumed it was just some of her stars she'd placed outside the patterns, but she'd noticed something odd. The light wasn't the pale silver of her stars. It was a warm, brilliant gold.
Starbloom's head tilted to the side. She gazed at the flickering light, and realized it was...
... something she'd never seen before.
It was beautiful.
The golden light blazed with warmth—not the nerve-searing heat of her stars, but warmth, passion, welcome. It flickered and burned and pulsed faintly in the distance to a steady, inviting beat.
"... oh." Her lips parted slightly. The light seemed to expand to fill her vision, and suddenly the rest of the world seemed small and unimportant.
She wanted a closer look. She wanted to see more.
The mothgirl's wings fluttered, and she found herself drifting closer.
She wasn't sure why, or why she moved so recklessly. Her only companions out here were horrid things—the Remainders, or the Gray Lady, things she dared not approach. They never showed themselves to her like this, but surely anything she didn't know had to be ten times as bad as the things she did.
And yet the light called to her. Just staring at it from here, from an eternity away, invited that warm, comforting glow into her mind. Starbloom felt kindness in that light, a sweet, enticing invitation. An intoxicating one.
And so she drifted. Her flight was uncharacteristically clumsy and uneven, and she knew she ought to correct herself, but it didn't seem to matter right now. The warmth was spilling over her mind like warm, oozing sweetness, and she wanted more. She craved that mysterious light.
But even as she flew closer, the light seemed to be moving away from her. A soft moan of disappointment came from Starbloom, and she flew faster. She dimly knew her mouth was hanging open, but her gaze was full of golden light, and no thought occurred to her but getting closer, closer...
And gradually, as she drew near, the light blossomed into a person.
Starbloom managed to halt herself, and the effort of doing so made her head slosh forward like a too-full pail of water. She blinked, and tried to shake herself, tried to understand what she was seeing.
It was a woman. A beautiful woman with brilliant bronze skin and hair like... like someone had spun that gorgeous, brilliant orange flame into the finest, softest silk and allowed it to spill down her broad, powerful shoulders. The woman was muscular, fit, buxom, clad in a gown of gleaming silver scales that seemed less designed for protection so much as to remind the viewer that the beautiful lady they were ogling knew how to fight.
It certainly wasn't for modesty.
Behind thee woman rustled a pair of wings, like Starbloom's. These, though, were weighty, feathery, framing the woman's breathtaking form like a cloak of white down. Her lips were full, her ears pointed, her piercing eyes a nebulous blue beneath thick lashes and sculpted eyebrows. Her whole form shone like a star, but a star made of that warm, loving light. Starbloom stared at her in rapture, and briefly forgot not to drift closer.
Then she realized the woman was staring back at her, and she felt her cheeks flushing with clouds of burning stars. She wanted to look away, but... not as much as she didn't.
The woman giggled. She put a hand on her hip and unabashedly looked Starbloom up and down, eyes sparkling. Starbloom felt naked beneath that open, admiring gaze. "Oh, my,
hello
there."
"I... um..." Starbloom's mind was swimming through nebulas trying to catch up to her reality. Every time she thought she was breaking free, the woman's form seemed to flash, to glow brighter, hotter, and all thoughts of pulling her gaze away seemed to melt into a puddle. "H-Hi," she finally squeaked.
The woman put a finger to her lips. Her eyes flickered in undisguised delight. "Are you seeing something you like?"
The mothgirl swayed slightly and barely held in a whimper. She blinked rapidly. The light was so... so
pretty
...
The woman smirked. Her golden light pulsed once, twice more, and Starbloom felt like her whole being could dissolve.
The woman reached up and, right, in front of Starbloom's face,
snapped
her fingers.
It was like a thunderclap. The spell shattered, and Starbloom suddenly realized the woman had gotten very close. Too close. She reeled back, eyes widening. "I—you—"
"Sorry about that," the woman said smoothly, tossing her shimmering hair back over her shoulder. "It seemed like you were enjoying yourself, but..."
Starbloom's eyes drifted over the woman's ample cleavage. She realized her own nipples were tenting the thin fabric of her dress, and she couldn't help but squirm as she noticed the woman's gaze.
"Um." Starbloom coughed. "S-Sorry, I, um."
Starbloom had no idea how to talk to people. She'd had no idea
people
were even something she might one day have to worry about at all. But she especially had no idea how to talk to, well...
girls.
"I-I'm Starbloom," she managed, avoiding eye contact.
"Starbloom." The woman's smile broadened. "It's
so
nice to meet you. My name is Dawnsong, but you can call me
Dawn
, if you like."
Vocabulary was a strange thing for goddesses at the edge of creation. So many words lingered for things that didn't exist yet—things which had existed in the last multiverse, things that Starbloom remembered the names of but not the forms or meanings.
And yet the word
dawn
made her think of that sweet, enticing warmth. The word
song
made her think of the woman's entrancing, rhythmically pulsing lights. "Dawnsong," she whispered, briefly meeting the goddess's gaze, and immediately ducked her head, flustered, when the goddess returned it.
"You can call me whatever you like, of course," Dawnsong said sweetly, shrugging those beautiful bare shoulders. Her words dripped with suggestion, with invitation, with temptation.
"N-No!" Starbloom blurted. She swallowed. "Um, I-I like Dawn."
What do I say? What do I say? What do I say?
"What are you doing here?"
She flinched, mortified at how that sounded. But Dawnsong only laughed again, that sweet, gentle moonbeam giggle. "I'm sorry if I'm interrupting." Her eyes darted down to Starbloom's bag of paints, then up into Starbloom's eyes. Starbloom struggled to look away, and her struggles again fell short. "Did you make all this?"
Starbloom felt suddenly shy. She hadn't expected anyone else to see... all of this. "S-Sorry, it's—well, I mean to say, I'm still working on it--"
"It's
beautiful
."
Starbloom finally tore her gaze away and barely resisted the urge to hide behind her hands. "Th. Thank you."
"I'm, um, not sure what they are, though." Dawnsong's beautiful clinking-coins laugh sounded a bit sheepish. "I mean, they're breathtaking, but I've never... seen anything like them before."
Starbloom blinked. She looked at her paints, then around them both. "They're
stars
."
"Stars." And Starbloom dared meet those eyes again, and saw wonder in them, and knew that Dawnsong was recognizing the name, just as Starbloom had recognized the word
dawn
. "Yes, of course they are. And you made
all
of them?"
Starbloom nodded proudly. She was still a little shy, and part of her worried Dawnsong was just being polite—that if she started talking about them, she'd only bore the breathtaking goddess. So she carefully held it in, kept herself contained. She could not talk this woman's ear off. She had to make a good impression, keep her head on her shoulders—
"What... are they? How do you know where to place them?"
Starbloom's whole spirit lit up, and before she could stop herself, she was off like a comet.
First, she focused on the literal answers—what
were
stars? Well, it depended on how you looked at them. They could be paint on a canvas, they could be spheroids of molten, glowing plasma, they could be holes in the sky, they could be shards of the previous multiverse slowly burning away, and no answer was exactly right or exactly wrong.
Dawnsong didn't seem bored. She watched Starbloom eagerly, eyes bright, and asked prompting questions whenever the explanations seemed to be slowing. That fascinated gaze would have flustered Starbloom, but she was already moving on to explaining how a star was born, and then she was on a tangent about how slowly light really traveled compared to her—
"Oh, I'm glad those wings are good for more than just being
gorgeous
," Dawnsong murmured.
Starbloom blushed furiously.
"Oh, please," Dawnsong said innocently, "do go on!"
And after a moment's stammering, Starbloom did. She gushed. She was hopeless now, completely drunk on a joy she'd never felt before. She told Dawnsong how she'd put some stars clustered together so they would circle one another, how three stars orbiting one another were so beautifully unpredictable. She even pointed out a couple of the patterns she'd designed, though none of the really secret ones. It took all her restraint not to show those off, too.
When she was talking about the stars, Dawnsong's gaze didn't fluster her so badly. She could almost return it without flinching. Dawnsong asked
such wonderful questions
—questions it had never occurred to Starbloom alone to ask. She was listening, really
listening
.
