What started as a simple game had become a grand adventure for the girl. Far below, Yggdrasil is sleeping peacefully, bathed in the bright glow of moon and stars, and beside her the crushed grasses hint at someone missing. A spindly-legged someone with more wonder than sense, whose grey eyes are gleaming with the starlight under her feet.

Mama doesn't know she can do this.

Shipka has been careful not to do it when her dam is looking, careful not to hint at this strange ability. She calls the shimmering and inconstant light down around her and it hardens, its glow increasing ever so softly when her little hooves press down upon it. When she climbs it, stair-like, into the sky.

But she hadn't meant to come this high, and now, with the wind growing stronger around her and the cold chill seeping into her bones, the filly knows she is much, much, too high. She can't even see the dark shape of her mother curled and dreaming back on Earth, but the sky feels closer than the ground, now, and despite the way her belly quivers, she nickers to the stars and begs for yet another step, another stair, and from the boundless, spangled, blackness, of night, it comes at her lilting request.

The girl does not know where she is going, but she hopes to get there before the sun leaks over the distant horizon. Mama told her the sun was like the stars, but infinitely larger, the King of the stars, but she can do nothing with his light that any other horse cannot, and so she is sure this is not true. His light dims hers, and the prospect of falling... No, she will not fall. She will be swimming in that milky river of stars long before the sun rises, and when she has reached the point where the river touches the sea, she will swim back to the Cove and find her mother once again.

You are going to be in so much trouble, Shipka!

The thought brings a grimace to her lips and her small ears fall sideways. Distracted, she forgets about her stairs and steps into darkness. Shipka tries to pull herself back too late and a squeal rips from her throat as her momentum thrusts her beyond the edge of her light, but her fall into oblivion is interrupted suddenly by something dark and solid. Something that bruises her shoulder and hip and makes her grunt. The rocky mountainside leaves her breathless when she drops down onto it from the small height. Shipka lifts her head to peer out over the edge at her silver staircase. The steps are disintegrating; they fall like glitter and fade into nothing ,and she could rebuild them but she has already climbed so high and the eastern sky has already lightened from pitch black to a deep, dark blue.

"The King of the Stars is coming." She sighs wistfully into the cold mountain air, watching the stars thin at his advance and wishing that she could always see them.