The cottage was exactly as she had left it. That was the first thing Astra noticed, and the thing that hit her hardest, because she had half-expected it to be different. She had half-expected the world to have rearranged itself in her absence, the way worlds were supposed to when something fundamental changed. The chairs should have been moved. The light through the window should have come from a different angle. Something should have shifted, some small ambient acknowledgment that the thing that had happened had in fact happened.
But the cottage was exactly as she had left it.
The brushes were still soaking in the jar by the window. The one she had been working on before everything, a piece she hadn't named yet, sat on the easel with its cloth half-draped, the way she always left it when she stepped away to do something she expected to return from. The fireplace held the cold ash of the last fire she had made. The cup she had forgotten to wash was still on the table. She stood in the doorway for a long time.
She did not take off her coat.
Eventually she moved to the chair by the fire and sat in it, not because she was tired, or rather not only because she was tired, but because her legs had made a quiet decision on her behalf and sitting seemed to be what they had chosen. She sat. The cottage held its silence around her. Outside, the late afternoon was doing what late afternoons did, moving slowly toward dusk without asking anyone's permission.
She looked at the easel.
The cloth was pale and slightly paint-stained at its lower edge where she'd been careless with it once. She remembered being careless with it. She remembered the specific afternoon, the specific color, the way the light had been coming in sideways from the west and she'd been talking while she worked, which was something she only did when she was comfortable enough not to think about what her hands were doing.
She remembered who she had been talking to.
She stood up. She crossed to the easel, took the cloth from the half-finished piece, and folded it. She set it on the table. Then she took the piece itself, the canvas, not yet finished, not yet named, and she turned it to face the wall.
She didn't want to look at it.
She went to the shelf above the worktable next, where she kept the ones she'd finished. Six of them, small and medium, stacked with their faces inward the way artists stored work that wasn't meant for display. She'd been meaning to hang some of them. She had never gotten around to it. She turned the ones that were facing outward to face the wall as well.
Then she stood in the middle of the studio, and the light came through the window the same way it always had, and the brushes soaked in the jar the same way they always had, and everything was exactly as she had left it.
Her hands were at her sides.
She looked at them.
Astra's light had always lived in her hands first. It was the way her power worked, or the way she experienced it, a warmth that started at the center of her palms and spread outward, into her fingers, into the air around her if she let it, into paint if she chose. She had never had to summon it deliberately. It came when she worked. It came when she was moved by something. It had always simply been there, the way warmth was simply there in sunlight, a property of the thing rather than an effort of it.
She looked at her hands.
There was nothing.
She turned them over. Looked at the backs of them. The lines of her knuckles. The faint old scar on her right index finger from a piece of glass she'd picked up without thinking when she was very young. Everything looked exactly as it always had.
She pressed her palms together and held them there, the way she sometimes did when she was trying to center herself before a difficult piece. She waited.
Nothing.
She tried to remember the last time she had felt it. At the grave, there had been nothing. On the road back there had been nothing. She had assumed, not quite consciously, that it was grief doing what grief did to the body, shutting things down, conserving. That it would come back when she got home, when she was somewhere familiar, somewhere her hands knew. But she was home now and her hands were cold and the light was not there.
AST: Oh.
She said it very quietly. To no one. To the studio. To the brushes in the jar and the canvases facing the wall and the unnamed piece and the cold ash in the fireplace.
AST: Oh.
She stood there for a moment longer. And then, not with any plan, not with any destination in mind, she picked up the jar of brushes and set it down too hard on the worktable, and the sound of it was loud in the small cottage and she did it again, and then again, and then she picked up the jar and threw it properly and it hit the far wall and shattered and the brushes scattered across the floor and the water spread dark across the stone and she stood there breathing.
She picked up the palette from the table. She threw that too.
She swept the smaller brushes from the shelf. She knocked the jars of pigment, one after another, the colors she had mixed and stored and labeled in her own handwriting, and they fell and some shattered and some didn't and the colors spread across the floor in long slow pools, blue and ochre and a deep almost-black green that she had spent three afternoons getting right.
She was crying by then. She was not sure when that had started. It did not feel like a beginning. It felt like something that had been happening for a long time already and was only now visible, the way a river was always moving even when the surface looked still.
She sank down onto the floor among the scattered brushes and the spreading colors and the broken glass and she put her hands over her face and she cried in the way that people cried when they had been holding it for too long, not elegantly, not quietly, but with her whole chest, with the kind of grief that did not care about dignity because dignity required energy she no longer had.
The light did not come back.
The cottage held its silence around her, exactly as she had left it, and the colors spread slowly across the floor, and the dusk came in through the window the same way it always had, and Astra sat in the middle of all of it with her hands over her face and her light gone, and outside the world continued with the same indifference it always had, patient and unhurried and entirely unmoved.