Excerpt:

They had stepped away from the trees that they had been camping in, and walked into a clearing, standing over a huge valley. The moon, which had been previously hidden behind a blanket of trees, lit up the night in an eerie glow, brighter than Noelia had ever known. The stars were like grains of sand thrown across the sky. She gasped when she realized how many there were, how brightly they lit up the entire sky.

"I've never seen anything like this before," Noelia whispered, her eyes shining in the glow of the moonlight.

"There's something to be said about this life of movement," Emy said after a moment, her hands in her pockets and her black hair falling back on her neck. "There are many things that I've never had. A family. A home. A stable place. We're always moving, always leaving, always on the run. We are never the forgotten, always the forgetters, the ones who are running away."

She paused for a second, pushing her hands further in her pockets. "And we are always running away from something." She looked out across the valley. "But, this. This." She gestured to the heavens with one of her hands. "Well. It can make it all worth it."

A silence fell then that Noelia did not want to break. Although, as she looked at her in the moonlight, she realized that Emy was not as old as she had originally thought. She wore the stature of one who had had to age early and quickly, but it was only a shell, something cooked too quickly and too hot, that burns the outside but doesn't quite finish within. All who were forced to grow up too quickly were this way.

Emy was the one who finally broke the silence, pointing to a constellation and telling Noelia what it was. Her stories were different than any that Noelia had heard before. She talked of different constellations, different stories of the stars. She spoke of gods who were birthed from the foam of the ocean, who swelled into great giants and conquered worlds she had never heard of before. She told of a great bull with three heads who guarded the sky, whose mouth was filled with flame. Emy pointed out each other characters in the story as she told about them, showing Noelia the three-headed bull and the man who had helped his neighbor.

"Is that true?" Noelia asked, craning her neck upwards to the sky. Emy leaned closer and pointed to another point in the sky, holding Noelia's arm to point in the right place as well.

"Do you see that star, there?" Emy asked, her breath hot on Noelia's cheek. Noelia nodded, mesmerized by the moment. "That is the star of Truth. Some say that that star can guide you there, and that, once, there was a man who spent his entire life searching for the truth of every story. He went to every person in his village and asked them for the truth. Some told him stories of their childhood, some told him what time the sun rose, some told him stories of infidelity, and others stories of honesty in the face of lies. Sometimes, people would tell two versions of the same story, all trying to tell the truth. He spent two years interviewing every person in his village, from the smallest child to the oldest grandfather, asking them all to simply tell him the Truth. Well, one day, one of gods heard about this man's quest for truth and tried to find out if he knew the answer. So the god came down to the man and asked him to tell him the truth." Emy looked at Noelia, who was listening in rapture. "Do you know what he said?"

"No."

Emy smiled at her. "He said that the Truth didn't exist. There was no such thing as truth, the man said. We make our own truth." She smiled wryly. "Well, the god was so angry that he thought he was a trick. He threw the man up in the heavens, where he got stuck there and couldn't come down for the next thousand years. He has been up there ever since, listening to people's requests to help them to find their own truth. He listens, and guides them, when he can."

There was another silence after Emy finished speaking, a silence of nature, which is not silent at all. The trees moved with the wind, the grasses rustled. Emy looked at Noelia.

"That was a beautiful story," Noelia said finally, looking back at her. She was mesmerized by this girl with black eyes, who was so different than anything or anyone she had ever met before. Emy smiled an odd smile, then broke away, turning her shoulder to look back towards the camp.

"We should go back," Emy said suddenly, leaning down and picking up a long, straight, pointed stick. "They will have wondered where we've gone."