He had been travelling for a long time. How long? I don’t believe even he knew. They called him Rook. It wasn’t his name.

​

 The figures in the galley pulled at the oars in perfect silence. The air around them seemed wrung out, emptied of heat, sound, matter. Rook tried his best not to walk in between them. The vacuum made his head spin. As a crew they were efficient, but he could not hold back a shudder every time he passed the open door and saw the lines of identical figures, each one made of darkness and smattered with twinkling stars. They moved minimally, up and down and back and forwards with the oars, never moving from their rowing benches. It was unnerving. He wondered why in a universe without stars, the void people still sparkled.

​

 He never gave a name, so people made up their own names to call him by. People are like that, you know. Rook was the one he least objected to. I knew him by so many names in the end, but for your sake, I’ll call him Rook.

​

 It was probably no coincidence that the void people had arrived in the hold of his ship on the same night that the great rain of stars had begun, the night that he had so desperately needed a crew. He had sailed on under the weeping sky, its luminescent tears leaving streaks across his vision. He hadn’t noticed the light pooling beneath him until the sky was almost empty.

 *