He cranked the lever, and I gasped, my head turning wildly.

The entire room was peeling apart. Cold air rushed in, but I barely felt it through the shock. The top of the tower split, more than a dozen pieces opening until they came to rest in a flat ring, jutting outwards like the petals of a frozen flower.

We were no longer in a room but on a roof.

The view was incredible. It wasn’t obscured the way it was in the tunnels. From here, I could see the dark stretch of forest, the jagged wall of mountains, and, God, the stars.

Light pollution apparently wasn’t a thing on Sionnach. I tilted my head back, dizzy and humbled at the glorious spray of light overhead.

“Amazing,” I breathed. I’d almost completely forgotten Wylfrael was there until he answered me.

“You were here for more than thirty days before I got here. You never once looked at the stars?”

I shook my head, still looking upward. “We were inside the ship at night. I studied them on the computers, using human data and maps, but I never got to...”

To stargaze. The way I’d done since I was a child, looking ever upward, awe-struck and aching to know more. My dad’s house in Northern Ontario was in a rural area, and the stars were almost as bright as these ones now.

I thought of my first telescope, the one Dad had bought me when I was twelve. He’d run a small hardware store in Thunder Bay, and though he worked incredibly hard, money was always tight on his single income. I’d relied on scholarships and income from part-time jobs to go to university. Even at twelve, I knew that the gift had taken him all year, if not more, to save for. Though I’d wanted it desperately, I’d tried to tell him to take it back, that it was too much. Nothing’s too much for my star girl, he’d said with that gruff, almost shy smile of his, like he was embarrassed by the simple act of being happy.

My dad loved everything to do with the Earth. Hiking and fishing, snow and dirt and trees. My obsession with space had always perplexed him, but he’d honoured it anyway, with trips to the Toronto Science Centre and, when we could afford it, visits to the Cosmodôme in Montréal. And then, on my twelfth birthday, with the telescope, painstakingly wrapped but still somehow looking like a mess, a giant tube of crumpled, starry wrapping paper held together with about two hundred strips of clear tape. It had been a monumental gift – a message in layers of sparkly stars. Telling me that even if he didn’t understand the things I loved, he loved me, and that was enough. I thought of that telescope gathering dust in my childhood home, no one to take care of it, no one to claim it, and grief struck me like a blow.

I breathed in sharply, reeling, cold burning my lungs. Wylfrael was at my side in an instant. He pulled the flaps of my robe closed so forcefully I thought that he might rip the fabric.

“You’re too cold. We’ll come back another time. When you’re more appropriately dressed.” There was something in those last words, something about the way his fingers lingered at the base of my throat, that distracted me from the pain of the past and dragged me back into the shattered present.

“I’m fine,” I said, though my teeth were chattering now. “Show me the starfinder.”

I wouldn’t leave until he showed me what it was. For some reason, I needed this. More than I felt like I needed air.

I thought he’d argue with me, but he didn’t. Instead, he grasped my shoulders and spun me, walking me back into the tube. It was tight with both of us in here, and Wylfrael’s bulk crowded against my back. His heat curled powerfully around me, warming my back and expanding in the tube until it almost felt downright cozy in there. Cozy. With a moody alien god I’m about to fake marry... Good grief.

“How did you know I was up here?” I asked. I couldn’t see him like this. I stared straight ahead, through the transparent tube.

“It wasn’t exactly difficult to find you,” he replied. “You left a trail of open doors up the stairs in your wake.”

“Oh.” Subtle, Torrance.

Wylfrael’s hands were still on my shoulders, solid and heavy and so warm I had to fight the urge to nuzzle into him like a kitten.

“Besides,” he added, his hands smoothing inwards over my silk-clad shoulders until they came to rest nearer my neck. “Even if you hadn’t, I’d have just followed your scent.”

“My scent?!” I gasped. “Are you serious?”

He had a sense of smell that strong? Did he have a single physical ability that was merely mediocre?

“Of course I am,” he said, bending, his words stirring my loose hair. “Especially when you wear something as flimsy as this.”

“You’re the one who got it for me, so don’t you dare complain about the clothing!” I said, temper rising. “Especially after you disappeared the way you did! You still haven’t explained that to me, by the way. Why you left.”

Wylfrael tensed. I felt it all down my body, from his fingers on me to his chest and abdomen against my back.

“You were doing that human thing. Your eyes getting all wet and shiny.”

“You mean crying?” I huffed. “So? Humans can cry for a lot of reasons, you know. Not just when we’re sad. Anytime we’re overwhelmed with emotion. Even joy. So, you can’t get mad at me for that. I wasn’t failing at playing a good fiancée. Many humans even cry at their own weddings, so you should have considered it a rehearsal run.”

“But it wasn’t a rehearsal, was it? And you weren’t crying for joy, were you?”

“Well, obviously not,” I snapped. “But the Sionnachans don’t know that, so why does it matter?”

“I do not know why it matters,” he said in quiet consternation. “It shouldn’t. But I saw you standing there in my chamber, about to weep all over what will become your wedding dress and I... I found I couldn’t stand it.”

“You couldn’t stand it... So, you just left. Well, lucky you! There have been many things I’ve barely withstood here so far, and I’ve just had to endure them, not outrun them.”

“What about when you tried to get down the stairs past me the other night, and I took you outside for the sontanna ride? You were running then. At least away from your room.”

His fingers were winding in my hair, now. So slowly I almost didn’t notice him doing it, and I wondered if he even realized, or if it was some unconscious movement.

“Fine, I’ll give you that,” I said. “But I can’t go very far. You can fly off to a whole other world if you want to! And by the way, I’d like a thorough explanation of that phenomenon.”

“An explanation of opening a sky door?”

“Yes! What is that? How do you do it? How do you travel through space without any protective gear? How long does it take to get from one world to another that way? Is that why you didn’t come attack the ship for more than a month of us being here, because it took you a while to come back?”

“You have a lot of questions,” he murmured. He was still playing with my hair, winding it into a thick knot around one of his hands. I would have told him to stop, if not for...

Well, if not for how nice it felt.

“I do have a lot of questions,” I admitted. “I always have, since I was a kid. Questions about everything that’s out there. This is what I studied back on Earth. Stars. Space.”

“I’m not sure how much there is to explain,” Wylfrael said, as if opening a door into another corner of the universe was as simple as flipping the page in a book. “I fly high into the sky, turn the sky to stone, crack it open, then step through to wherever I want to go.”

“But how?” I pressed. “Is it literally like a door? You step in on one side and step out immediately on the other?”

“Essentially, yes.”

My mind whirled. I would have shaken my head in disbelief if not for the firm grip Wylfrael had on my hair at the nape of my neck. Turning the sky to stone... Somehow, he was transforming gas from the atmosphere into a solid material, and that material became a door?