Stellara Drakenmoor had been hunting a dead star for longer than the human race had been upright, and tonight she was going to admit she had lost the last one she knew about. She sat on the rim of the hollow shell she had already built, a tall stone husk with a rounded cavity at its center, waiting for a core she did not have. The shell was finished. The cavity was empty. Without a dead star to weigh the middle, the rock would not hold itself, the gravity would not knit, and the planet she had been promising herself for ten thousand years would stay a husk in the dark above Earth. She climbed down to her work table. The flat stone surface was buried under star charts, route notes, and the small painted disks she used to mark every corpse-star she had ever touched. She picked up the worn wall map she carried from system to system, the one with the inked routes and the cluster pins, and laid it flat over the rest. She crossed out three pins in a row. One star had been swallowed by a younger witch's furnace. One had cracked in her hands a century ago. The last one, the one she had been saving, was gone where she had buried it; something below the surface had eaten it. She sat with that for a long time. She was good at the math. Atmospheres, tides, the curve of a sky. She had built six worlds before this and lost them all to the creatures she tried to seed inside them. Beetles that ate their own eggs. Fish that drowned in their own water. She did not know why life refused her. She knew only that a planet without a dead star at its heart was not a planet, and she had run out of stars. She was folding the map when the woman walked up out of the dry grass. Green skin. Hair that moved like water with nowhere to go. Tentacles where legs should be, dragging a wet trail across dust. The woman was pregnant and dressed in old human lace. She stopped a careful distance from the table and said her name was Thalassa Deepcurrent. She said the locals on this planet ran from her. She said she had heard a dragon was building something in the sky and needed a heart for it. She said she knew where one was. A dead star, buried under a sea that used to be hers, that the dry people here had forgotten. Stellara looked at the empty cavity above them, then at the woman's wet footprints in the dirt. "What do you want for it." Thalassa put one hand on her belly. "Worship. For the child. A temple in your sky when it is built." Stellara thought of the six dead worlds behind her and the empty shell above. She picked up her map and rolled it shut. "Show me the sea."