Dark Swan Astronomy was a military treatise and text of subterfuge set during the Great Zodiacal Wars. It tells the tale of an interstellar siege of the dust cloud known as the Dusk of Cygnus by a coalition of astral states, and has had an influence on Eastern Nyx martial logic, celestial combat, twilight defense and beyond.
According to canonical star charts, after a unsuccessful blockade of the Dusk of Cygnus, the survivors of Nyx constructed a dark nebulae in the shape of a swan (the swan being the silhouette and namesake of Cygnus), and hid a cache of incendiary constellations inside. An initial stratagem called for a single constellation to remain outside the structure; acting as though the siege forces had abandoned it, leaving the nebulae as a gift. An inscription was also to be engraved on the volunteered constellation reading: "For their place in the never-ending night, Nyx dedicates this offering to Dusk of Cygnus."
When the fixed stars appeared to retreat, the dust cloud pulled the nebulae into it's walls as a victory trophy. That night the hidden constellations exploded from the dark swan and opened a hole in Dusk of Cygnus for the procession of asterisms, which had returned under cover of night. The remaining variable light and celestial remnants entered and destroyed the dust cloud from within, thereby decisively ending the conflict.
There has been modern speculation that Dark Swan Astronomy was a veritable arcana of astral fraud tactics and stratagem, and could be thought of as an military discipline alongside Rayleigh Manipulation, Light Pollution, and Averted Vision. In part this was due to the general mystique that accompanied constellation warfare in an era where much of the population was star chart illiterate and relied upon the naked eye to trace the course of conflict within a claustrophobic, nearly charcoal sky.
The sky was so small that only scattered light could leave the splint. We stayed out, half awake, until the constellations were corrected again.
Every survival was between exposures. It took us three lives to give a corresponding image.
Jillison counted south. Unarmed and poorly defended, without serious resistance.
We slept with sixteen windows along each spine. If the Zodiac was our size now, I saw no compass arrived, no scar tissue, no scale. If a redshift was still under our skin, it was the furthest anyone looked for a while.
Jillison understood the curvature of carrying nothing, back starting to bleed, an accuracy of the dark. Our eyelids shed by example, observing distant supernova as standard candles, almost close enough for the swan's light to show. The present often meaning a single event being considered, infinity is not that which has nothing beyond itself, but that which always has something beyond itself.
Time becomes ambush and ambush becomes time.
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