Bethany never felt more at home than she did while she churned her butter, that is to say she never felt further from the village she actually called home. Sure, it had never been her dream, like many in her village she had started off with lofty goals of being a knight and serving the kingdom in whatever way she could. In that sense she felt almost lucky she was a girl and so unable to enlist. Having her dreams crushed was better than having her skull crushed as her mother had often unhelpfully reminded her. No, her fate was to remain in the small village and to provide the villagers with butter until she settled down and provided a man with a wife. This wasn’t the life she wanted but again better that than dead. At least that’s what her mother told her. At times it was hard to believe.

But when Bethany churned butter, she could be anywhere she wanted. It wasn’t a complicated process; the important stage of the work being done before the cream had been added to the churn. As such she could close her eyes as she systematically churned, and imagine she was somewhere else. Nobody could take or ruin these dreams for her because she picked a dream too extreme to ever come true. She wasn’t thinking about fighting knights or marrying a prince or being at a fancy ball, the kind of thing that could technically come true but won’t. No, she imagined herself among the stars. Flying past them and through the cosmos, dancing on the moon and chatting to the people who she assumed resided there. Obviously, nobody could be among the stars there was no wagon that could fly and the rumours she’d heard of crafts getting and staying off the ground struck her as merely flights of fancy as it were. But the fact it was impossible made it all the sweeter for her. Bethany knew that she was as likely to fly among the starts as even the fanciest of nobles or richest of traveling merchants and in that way, they were all equal.

She didn’t talk of this little daydream of hers, not anymore. Once when she was still young enough to trust people and still wanted people to like her, she shared her dream with her closest, and only friend at the time, Mandy. Mandy had seemed intrigued at the idea and had extracted as much of her dream from Bethany as she could, and young naïve Bethany had just been delighted to find somebody who she thought understood her. That was until it all crashed down as Mandy told the mayor’s son, Lewis, all about Bethany’s wish.

Lewis was a complete and utter asshole, as was his father, and though Bethany had never met him she was confident his father’s father would also have been an asshole. In fact, she reckoned across all of history they had been a family of powerful assholes. Lewis already hated Bethany as a year or so prior she had turned down his crude ‘invitation’ to sleep together. Feeling humiliated and not the kind of person to use such an opportunity to grow Lewis instead decided to sink even lower and start spreading the rumour Bethany had asked him several times to sleep together and that he had in fact rebuffed her! This combined with Bethany not wanting anything he could offer, and so him having no actual power over her lead to him spreading the cruel nickname Solarslut. It was in fact crueller than that because he paid off the other kids in the village to call her the same thing. He wasn’t stupid mind you and would only refer to her as Solar when the adults were around. But he and Bethany both knew what he meant when he said Solar and he would often mouth the slut to make sure she really got the message. The worst thing of it all was the fact that the adults of the village didn’t question the nickname and were seemingly deaf to the few times they heard the full nickname. Within a month the whole village was calling her Solar. Some did it out of true ignorance, but people talk and her so called ‘sluttiness’ had spread around the whole village, after all there weren’t exactly a lot of people there. As such occasionally even the adults would call her Solarslut, ignoring the fact she was 16 and they were full grown adults who should have better things to do.

Not everybody called Bethany Solar or Solarslut though. Her mother for one didn’t use either name and always corrected anybody who didn’t call her by her full name. Bethany assumed this had more to do with ensuring Bethany was a proper civilised member of society rather than being out of any actual affection. While others may have been read bedtime stories or played games with their parents she was learning proper posture, how to correctly eat at a table like the most nobly born and to always address people with their parent given name and relevant titles if applicable. Bethany recalled one time when she tried to go by Beth and her mother had simply refused to talk to her until she told everybody to call her Bethany again. The only other person who spoke to her using her actual name was Steven, the butcher’s boy.

Bethany didn’t have feelings for Steven, despite what others may have thought, and he didn’t have feelings for her. They just both wanted similar things, somebody willing to talk about things that had nothing to do with the village. The two of them instead discussed the wider world, allowing them both to pretend for a short while that their futures weren’t already locked in place, they could pretend they had some wiggle room in who they would become. Yet even to Steven Bethany didn’t talk about space or the stars, she always kept that part back, having been burned too much once before. In that sense they weren’t true friends, couldn’t be until Bethany was actually willing to open up.

Despite the cruelty of the village Bethany didn’t hide from it. She didn’t want to become a shut in or for Lewis to think he’d won. Still Bethany still churned all day every day, sitting on her small house’s patio so she was out of her mother’s way and could be in the sun’s rays, something she believed made the process faster. This morning was no different she dragged her churn out in front of her house and grabbed her small stool to place next to it. As she adjusted it, she felt a small stone smack her in the arm, drawing blood.

“hey Solarslut how goes building your spacewagon? You ever going to do us all a favour and leave this village?” Shouted Lewis, to the guffaws of his lackies around him. As mayor’s son he unlike Bethany had no real work to do and generally spent his time making his father’s job harder and making life in the village harder for a number of the residents.

As always Bethany tried to ignore Lewis, she couldn’t exactly do anything about him and fighting wouldn’t get her anywhere. Instead, she turned back to her churning and tried not to even glance his way in the hopes he would get bored and leave. Unfortunately, he did not.

“Oi Astrocunt I asked about your spacewagon, are you deaf as well as stupid?” Lewis shouted a bit more angrily. Again, Bethany attempted to ignore him.

“Okay shit for brains since you are clearly a little distracted, how about I help you out with that” Lewis shouted again, spittle flying from his mouth as he did so. He reached to the ground and picking up a much larger rock in both hands he heaved it over his head and threw it directly at Bethany’s churn smashing a huge hole in the base causing all the unchurned cream to pour out and causing a crack right up the middle of the churn.

“Now you can focus on listening, right Solarslut?” asked Lewis smugly.

This was so beyond the last straw for Bethany, the churn was how she provided for herself and her mother and with it that damaged she would have to pay buy a new one. This meant spending her winter savings and waiting an indetermined amount of time until a travelling merchant appeared so she could place an order and again return with a new butter churn. Time she would have to spend begging for jobs to eat.

She bellowed a roar and ripping the plunger out of the destroyed butter churn leapt at Lewis knocking him to the ground. From there she straddled him to stop him from being able to stand back up and began to swing the plunger wildly at him, smacking him across the arms, chest, and head. This was not what Lewis, or his lackeys expected, and his friends began to scatter, not wanting to be hit by a widely swung plunger. Lewis covered his face as Bethany attacked, too shocked to try to push off the fairly light girl on top of him. She wasn’t exactly trained in such a weapon, but she was filled with a righteous angry and that can cover for a lot of weaknesses, as such she was managing to get some good hits in, colliding well with his head and causing him to cry out in pain more than once as he struggled to defend himself. Bethany was so overcome with rage that she didn’t even notice when the space underneath her shifted and Lewis vanished. In fact, she swung for almost a full thirty seconds at somebody who was no longer there before even noticing he had vanished and that she was somewhere completely different.