Ally

“He'd never seen the galaxy like this before, so close, so clear, parallel tracks of stars merging and separating, all of it wheeling as one unit across the horizon. It was a secret, he thought, hidden entirely from view when the sun was up, readily forgotten by day. But it was ever present, dominating reality, determining fate, perhaps, its true nature revealed only when the sun went down, only in the alchemy of night. He looked beyond the nebula, into the emptiness that cradled those blazing suns and galaxies all the way to the beginning of time, but as intently as he stared, he still could not fathom it. Never had he felt like such a single, tiny passenger on such a fragile, spinning, speck of a planet as he did right here, in the middle of a desert miles and miles from anyone else.”
― A.W. Baldwin, Diamonds of Devil's Tail