Starfall, pt. 2
Starfall
Part 1 | Part 2
The Watcher rose to clear skies.
Blinking away the last traces of sleep, they lifted their gaze to the brilliant blue expanse stretching endlessly above, its crisp edges brushing against the far-off ice fields on the horizon. Clear skies. A good omen. The kind the elders once said meant the gods had not yet turned their backs on the living.
Sitting up, they stretched their limbs, feeling the dull ache of age settle and shift like a slow-moving tide. Their joints protested, but no more than usual. It was the price of years spent keeping vigil, reading the language of sky and earth, weighing truths hidden between shadow and starlight.
A few embers still glowed in the soot-black brazier in the center of the room, buried deep beneath layers of spent ash, pulsing a quiet, steady orange. They had burned through the night. Another good omen. The fire had not died in the night, which meant neither had the Watcher’s task.
Yet beyond the threshold of the Watcher’s modest hovel, the world remained strangely hushed. No gulls wheeled and cried against the cliffs. No distant murmurs of the longhall’s morning stirrings. No bells chimed from the high ridge where the bone markers stood, the wind too still to make them sing. That ever-present sigh of the north wind, which had whispered through these valleys long before A-Dream-Forgotten had a name, had gone silent. Only the slow drip-drip-drip of melting ice betrayed the sun’s patient work.
The Watcher frowned. An ill omen? Or simply a quiet morning?
Too soon to say.
They stepped to the narrow opening in the rock, the carved archway leading out onto the ridge. From here, the village of A-Dream-Forgotten unfolded below, its weathered wooden roofs huddled between the jagged hills and the black cliffs that stretched to the north. A village that once bore a different name, before time and hardship stripped it away, leaving only this. A place more whispered about than spoken of beyond the Shroud’s misted borders.
Those who lived here did not belong anywhere else. The wanderers. The lost. The ones who had slipped between the cracks of the great kingdoms and empires beyond the mountains. They had built their homes in the hollow spaces of the world, clinging to the old ways, the old signs.
The Watchers had always served them. Not as rulers, nor as priests, but as interpreters.
That was the burden.
To read the stars, the sun, the sky, and to know what to tell those who listened. And what to withhold.
Last night, a star had fallen, and the heavens had shifted. The Fallow Wreath had frayed.
That, above all, gnawed at the Watcher’s thoughts.
The Wreath was not merely a constellation. It was a promise. A sign of return. A thread binding past and future. The old songs claimed it would only break in times of great change - when something long forgotten stirred once more.
But change did not come without consequence.
The last time the stars had moved, the last time the signs had whispered of something vast and unseen, A-Dream-Forgotten had nearly lived up to its name. Famine. War. Great storms wracked the earth and swallowed whole settlements along the cliffs, sweeping their histories into the void. The elders still spoke of it in hushed tones, as if speaking too loud might invite it back. Now, the Watcher was faced with the same choice that had weighed upon those before them.
But what did they truly know? A star had fallen. The sky had shifted. The air was still. Perhaps it meant nothing.
Yet, as the Watcher stood on the ridge, looking down on the slumbering village, a new thought entered the back of their mind.
What if someone else had seen it too?
And what if, even now, the star’s descent had already set something into motion - something that would not wait for the Watcher to make up their mind?