Jessica Nwaigbo

Celestial Chapter 1

I used to believe that the stars were always easier to see with my eyes closed…In the recesses of my dreams, the lights were always so much brighter. Nanna used to take us to the edge of the scared aqueous caverns to watch the falling stars. According to the legend, shooting stars were regarded as the rejects of the Constellations; beings that have lost their earned divinity because they couldn’t play by the rules. Lots of the civilians of the Pi would take this legend for verbatim; using it as a justification to hide themselves and squash the dreams of rambunctious little ones that hoped to spend just one more hour outside their sublimity ponds, just before bedtime peaked over twilight. I never believed in that though. The people of Pi were always so suffocating. Nanna always worked to calm the condemnations of the masses down in our household. Regardless, of what the Diviners had told us during lectures, their tales were always washed away by the smell of Nanna's baked honey poppy seed loaf. As we laughed and joked over her homemade sea-salt caramels, she would always help take the edge off the divining process; a process created to help prime pre-residents of Pi for the upcoming ascendency trials that would approach with our coming of age. Even though it was our duty as pre-residents of Pi to take up the challenge of bringing glory and fame to our land. A drawn-out journey that was crested by earning eternal divinity among the constellations through the ascendency trials, I never really saw it that way. The passing periods of divination school were always spent with tales of the riches and notoriety that would come if we were lucky enough to be chosen. No resident of Pi had earned the title in 350 years. Such a prize (once upon a time) brought wealth and riches to our land (for resource allocation was often unfairly distributed to lands that produced beings of higher merit and ascendancy). As the 12th and final nation of Zodai, we were always placed at a disadvantage but with this year being my year of entrance into the contestant pool there was an extra special hopefulness budding in the air. Blame, it on the begrudging title of being the abandoned offspring of Pi’s last constellation earners…