Starfall, pt. 1
Starfall
Part 1
The night cloaked the northern expanse in its usual thin pall of fog, a veiled quiet that blanketed The Shroud and encroached on the sparse clusters of pines clinging to the jagged hills. Above, the heavens were an unfamiliar canvas of muted light and void, the stars appearing more distant than usual. Yet the Watcher sat unmoved, perched atop the frost-slicked stones of a ridge overlooking the village below. The air bit at exposed skin, and the silence stretched, heavy and timeless.
Then it came.
A streak of light burned across the sky, brilliant and sharp, its path cutting through the slight haze. The Watcher’s breath caught, stolen by the sight. The star did not fade into the expanse. It fell. Downward, swift and certain, its glow diminishing until it vanished into the yawning blackness of the Far Lands.
For a moment, there was no sound, no thought - just the weight of the world suspended on the edge of something vast and unknowable.
The Watcher rose, leaning heavily on the gnarled stave and turned toward the faint glimmer of the distant longhall. There was no need to speak of what had been seen. Not yet. Words would come later, when the sky’s language had been translated, and the patterns discerned. For now, there was only the weight of purpose.
The Watcher stepped into the narrow sanctuary carved into the earth beneath the longhall. The chamber was cold and dim, lit only by a low brazier filled with moss and fatwood, its smoke curling in lazy ribbons. Charts and runes adorned the walls, etched into wood and stone, worn smooth by generations of hands. A single hide stretched taut across a frame bore the Star Chart, its inked constellations faded but unmistakable.
With precision, the Watcher traced the patterns, one hand brushing over the sigils, the other steadying the stave. The markings whispered their secrets, each line and point a story etched across the firmament. But something was missing.
The gap was small, subtle - a space where a star had once anchored the heavens. Its absence was silent but unmistakable. The Watcher drew back, lips pressed into a thin line.
The patterns were still there, of course. The Hunter’s Bow arched toward the west, its curved stars sharp and steady, and the Frost Bear loomed low on the horizon, claws outstretched as if raking the edge of the world. The Twin Flames, faint in this season, flickered faintly near the top of the chart, their alignment ever so slightly different than the Watcher had last seen. These were old friends, reliable in their constancy, yet there was a dissonance now - a fracture in the rhythm that had always been.
Tracing their fingertips across the hide, the Watcher paused at a cluster marked by tight, precise sigils. The Fallow Wreath. A constellation said to bloom fully only in the season of thaw, when the tundra surrendered its frost to fleeting fields of green. But even now, as the snow held firm, the Wreath should have been whole, its arcs and loops unbroken.
It wasn’t.
The Watcher tilted their head, studying the faint smudges where ink had once marked stars that no longer shone. No elder had spoken of this, no song had woven these absences into its verses. The Wreath had always been an oath, a promise of life returning to a land where it so often fled. Had a promise been broken?
The Watcher leaned closer, the brazier’s low glow casting flickering shadows over the stretched hide. The gaps were not random. They had an almost deliberate quality, as if the heavens themselves had carved out these stars with careful precision. The constellations still told their stories, but the words were fewer.