Starlight, Starbright, Page 4

  Chapter 4 – The Story of the Stars

  You will find our story of the stars strange, Ah'Wren. I often wonder where the story truly begins, but I always start by telling this.

  Our planet spun.

  That spin explains the differences between our race and yours. Frelurn does not twirl upon its axis, and so your broods know an eternal day of sunshine. Your kind inhabits Frelurn's side that always faces your solar center. Bathed in sunlight, your scales synthesize your sun's rays to provide your bodies with energy. The broods never needed to roam in order to hunt, and so your earliest peoples were territorial creatures who savagely guarded their nests. Yet unlike our kind, the brood abandoned warfare early in their history, perhaps because the sun and the scale spared your kind the lingering hunger prevalent on our planet.

  The broods know darkness as a place, as a geographic location upon Frelurn. Darkness is a region the broods do not visit. Darkness, to the broods, is a realm reserved for the dead. It is a nation whose borders are defined by the shadow that never moves upon your world.

  But our planet rotated while orbiting our sun. We lived in both light and shadow. Sunshine filled our days. The dark established our nights. Darkness was not a nation we could avoid. The night possessed no fixed border. Darkness visited all of us. We could not hide from it.

  Unlike the brood, our bodies never evolved to develop the ability to metabolize energy from our sun. Hunger focused our minds. We learned to plant and to hunt so that we did not starve. We cultivated fields. We organized hunting groups. We built walls and forged weaponry, and our pursuit of power never abated.

  The hunger focused our will to build and fueled our desire to destroy. Always, we strove to soothe our hunger while our planet twirled us into day and night.

  The night was cold without the sun. Yet the night was also filled with stars and dreams.

  Like the broods, our kind needed a time for rest. Sunlight and warmth made the day a time for labor, and so we slumbered through the cold that descended with the night. We hurdled in blankets against the chill and retreated behind our walls from the things that hunted in night. We closed our eyes and blinded our vision. At such a time, we slumbered and dreamed.

  We dreamed a limitless number of visions. Our world teemed with our kind, and yet, none of us dreamed the same way. Sometimes, we smiled as our dreams filled us with happiness or with pleasure. Sometimes we moaned when nightmares growled at our sleeping minds. There was never an end to the dreams. Dreams were built on figments of the unreal, and so the material required to weave them never emptied.

  But still, the night's stars outnumbered our dreams.

  We miss those stars more than anything else.

  We have been among your kind for so long now, and still we cannot understand how the brood had no concept of the stars before we arrived. After traveling so far for so long, we have realized that, to our kind, it was always about the stars. Perhaps that realization has made the distance and time involved with our coming worthwhile.

  I must first describe the stars in their most narrow terms before I can hope to suggest even a little of what they mean to us. Stars are burning balls of plasma held together by gravity. Thermonuclear fusion at the heart of these stars releases the energy that illuminates the universe. It is the process that warms Frelurn as it warmed our own world. As with dreams, there are more stars than can be counted. There are far more stars than even the grains of the White Shore upon which the brood first strolled.

  Yet none of the broods see the stars. The light of your sun, of your own star, is too strong, and it burns too brightly to allow any other star to twinkle in the sky. The broods know only day, and so you know nothing of the stars that linger behind your vermillion skies. The brood might travel beyond that shadow border on the far side of your planet, and in that dark world might look upward to count the countless pinpoints of light overhead. But the broods do not travel to that far side of your world. The broods do not travel beyond that shadow border, for such a world, among the broods, is reserved for the dead, for the ghosts that remain in the broods’ memory.

  The darkness, however, came to us each night our spinning planet delivered us. The stars came with that night. They filled the vast, deep black. They teased us with winks. We imagined them to be gods and angels, heroes and villains, creatures of any menagerie of which we dreamed. We tracked their movements over time, and we celebrated their positions with sacred ceremony. Before we knew it impossible, we attempted to name them all. We magnified our sight and discovered yet more stars no matter how distant we stretched our vision into the cosmos. No language possesses enough words to name even a fraction of the stars.

  Our dreams drifted to those stars. We wondered if planets like our own might rotate around some small, winking pinpoint of light. We wondered if creatures like ourselves, or perhaps nothing like us at all, might also be gazing upward into that heaven filled with stars. We wondered if that alien kind might look up into the night and, like us, wonder what strange intelligence might answer their summons if only a way could be found to send the words so far.

  Our world teamed with minds dreaming of the heavens. We studied the gravity tying the cosmos together. We found the numbers needed to chart a path through the stars. We were so proud, and we thought the landscape of the stars might be one we could master. We built rockets atop which we escaped our world's pull. In orbit, we built massive arks, spaceships of steel and glass, in which we would live as our kind took their first steps into the heavens.

  We left our families, our friends, and our homes behind as we departed upon our arks. We left in every direction. Each of our arks pointed towards their own distant, destination. The stars grasped the vision of those who piloted our ships, and none of us looked back.

  The stars appeared so crowded, and still, we never seemed to near them. The resources of the ark always replenished as we drifted. Generations cycled as we floated. We drifted until the memory of our home world became so faint. We drifted and grew ancient and old. And still, the stars appeared no closer.

  After so much time, and no matter that they remained so distant, our obsession with the stars never waned.

  Generation after generation lived upon the ark. We slowly evolved. Our ark's gravity was a fraction of that found upon our home planet. Our bodies changed. Our limbs grew long. Our fingers and toes knit together. Eventually, we forsook gravity all together and simply floated. The inner light of the ark was faint, and our eyes grew wide to better see through shadow, until we extinguished our artificial illumination to see only by the starlight seeping through our glass. In time, we became new creatures – beings born for the long trek through the heavens. Our skin and bone shifted into shapes best conducive for the purpose of the stars. We changed into fragile wisps that twinkled not unlike those stars we chased. After so long, our physical forms mimicked the stars.

  We reached the star at which we pointed after we had become creatures of starlight. We had become so different than those creatures who first boarded the arks. We were things of the void, of weightlessness and of shadow. We could no longer live outside of the ark.

  Your planet's gravity forced us downward from the heavens. The ark descended gracefully, just as it was designed to do. Its integrity withstood the heat of re-entry. Its hull did not crack beneath your atmosphere's pressure. Our ark landed softly. Still, the impact pained our fragile forms, and we realized we had little chance of surviving the elements of the wonderful, new world spread before us – no matter that our instruments promised us we could breath the air, no matter that our computers assured us the cold would not freeze us nor that the heat would burn. Those instruments gauged our ancestors' needs. We knew those dials and numbers did not speak for what we had become.

  Terleck's fortune then smiled upon us. Of all the planets orbiting all of the stars, our ark carried us to the broods. The broods watched us descend in their sky. The broods discovered us at our weakest. Fortune favored us further when Un'Yhe was
among the first to find us. Un'Yhe, who had mastered all the tongues of the broods, heard our peril the words he did not yet understand. Un'Yhe understood the sound of our frailty. Un'Yhe broke down our tongue. He understood our frantic cries for shelter. Un'Yhe deciphered our tongue so quickly and learned how the brood could preserve the ark's power that kept us alive. Un'Yhe listened to our tales, and Un'Yhe, the greatest translator to ever walk upon our own planet or Frelurn, heard loneliness. So he built this great museum around us and our ark, filled it with the treasures of your world so that the wonder dulled the ache we felt following our fall from the heavens.

  And still, we yearn for the stars.

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