It had been fifteen years since the sun had last risen.

Eyes reflecting no light, the girl looked out upon the cold, distant stars of a planet flung from its orbit. She was not human, too strange to even be alien— no, she was far stranger and more horrible than that. She was Death and the Void Itself. Her white, wavy hair was held back by two sun-shaped pins above her rounded ears… the irony.

Shifting her heavy white robes around her, entrancing like a jellyfish, she sighed as if her heart would break (she had no heart to speak of.) Her diaphanous hair floated angelically in a nonexistent breeze.

“O little world,” she half-whispered, “What hath come of thine suffering? Thine lamentation ceased at last; thou hast made a mess of thine self...”

She kneeled to run a tender hand upon the frozen rock, caressing it. She was not the force who had drawn the planet astray, but Death and the Void Itself had laid claim to the land soon after.

The astronaut clenched her fists from behind an outcropping of stone. Her hair was bluntly cut into a thousand different lengths beneath her golden visor, sticking out wildly like an earth-brown dandelion. Her gloves were thick and rough, preventing her hands from closing all the way, but nonetheless she rose and staked her saffron-yellow flag into the soil of the vagrant planet.

Death and the Void Itself turned around, baring her round white teeth at the intruder. “Thou dares set foot upon mine own domain? Hark!— and I shall show to thee: mine is the glory here, forever and ever and ever for ALL TIME.”

The astronaut was all freckles and tattoos and smoldering eyes, her teeth a little crooked and her chest a little narrow and her feet a little large— she was radiantly, unshakenly alive; thus unspeakably beautiful. Her flag bore the stylized rays of a rising sun, the same symbol crudely stitched onto her antique pressure-suit and inverted upon Death and the Void Itself’s hairpins. This was The Light of Day, standing tall and brazen at the zenith of her distant cousin’s power.

“I dunno what’s gotten into you,” she started, placing her hand on her hip, “But don’t you remember who ruled this place? They were small, and they lived for such a short time, but that was the nature of their beauty.”

“Thine words make light of pestilence long departed— thou art treading on mine last nerve,” Death and the Void Itself warned, narrowing her black-hole eyes.

“As I do. Life dwelled here once, and it was dirty and loud and never got along with itself— but never as cruel and dark as silence used to be. Time that Starts Again, I command you to torment this place no longer. There is no star to guide us, but if I must be that star I will. We will not be extinguished.”

“No one has called me that name,” Death and the Void itself whispered, “Since the universe was very young.”

Then she unclipped her hair, which swung into a feathery wave of pure white, and unbuttoned her robes, which revealed a vermillion caftan beaded with the golden image of a sundial. She walked away barefooted into the distance, disappearing over the horizon of a dormant world.

“I don’t know how,” the astronaut reassured her flag like a child, “But I promise— the sun will rise again, because life is far too precious for Time to hinder long: regardless of which name she goes by.”