He had come to the Fiji Islands when everything else in his life had fallen through. With nowhere else to go, nor anyone else to care for, he'd spent the money on a one-way ticket, indefinitely.
For eight months now, every night had seen him sitting on the same cliff, overlooking the same ocean. He thought of Papillon and The Count of Monte Cristo as he sat there, staring deep into the South Pacific, stretching in the night wind and counting the waves.
"Once every year," they had told him. "It happens once every year." He knew what it was like to wait for something.
This night, like all nights, Vauna Levu seemed all quiet and dark. There were no cities nearby, no lighthouses, just about nothing at all to attract attention.

He stretched again, looking along the now so familiar beach behind him. The cliff protruded a good way off the shore. It was too dark for details, but he knew the beach to be a rough one, full of rocks and washed-up seaweed; no tourists ever came to swim here. In the faint moonlight, he could make out the curvature of the bay and the silhouettes of palmtrees.
It started then, as a slight twinkle in the water, a shooting star reflected on the still surface maybe. He turned his head slowly, half-ready to dismiss what he saw. He remembered the first time he'd seen fireflies as a kid and tried passing them off as someone coming through the forest waving a flashlight. He just couldn't imagine what else it could have been.

But this was no flashlight. The twinkle returned, a slightly irregular but continuous underwater flicker. Not right by the surface, but not very deep. Half a metre. Maybe a little more.
Wink. Wink. Wink. He found himself holding his breath. Then a second light ignited, not far from the first. He sucked his breath in, and during a heartbeat there were two of them, flickering on the slow-moving surface, starting to revolve around each other. He blinked his eyes, and there were twenty of them. "Anthill-effect," he thought, and there were five hundred.
With that, all of the night sky could have fallen into the ocean. Ten-thousand million bright spots swirled under him, lighting up the cliff on which he perched.

He slid down on his belly and reached out, holding his arms just above the surface. Like everything else he could see, they were a light, shallow-ocean blue, with dancing white dots reflected on the skin.
They started to merge now, forming clots, nebulae and clusters, constellations against the backdrop of the big blue, and larger, fuzzy lights in the depths. Galaxies. They were bigger than him, bigger than his cliff. He would have liked to think them immense and distant, a hundred thousand metres down, so deep that no one would ever be able to reach them.
He lowered his arms into the water, up to his elbows. It was just as comfortably warm as it looked. A whirling cloud not far away were caught in his ripples and started changing colours, iridescent as a prism in the morning sun. A time rip. A singularity. Aurora Borealis under water.

The water reflected the sky of another world to him. One not so isolated; one closer to others, closer to the centre of its Galaxy, where, when the Sun went below the horizon, a hundred million stars would take its place and night would never truly fall.
He spotted quick, wavy movement. Fish weaving trough the Cosmos, perhaps. Fish feeding on the algae. He grabbed hold of the edge of the cliff and pulled himself along.
Sliding headfirst into the water, he realized he would never leave.