In the blackness, two stars battled. One, aged and close to death, sought the fire of a younger sun nearby. Though the younger star bore more fire and energy, the elder star was wiser, cleverer, and thus held its own in the battle. As the conflict wore on, both lights thrust debris in the space between them in the hopes of distracting the other.
With one cosmic clap, both stars flung comets at each other, and from their force sprung water. So angry were both stars that this ploy hadn’t worked to their respective advantages, each flung their fire at each other, crashing over the dying comets. As they wrestled, both stars sunk towards the broken rocks, melting the water that had formed them. As they fell, the elder star felt its life finally ebbing, and, remorseful, sought to send the younger star back to the sky with its last energy. It was too late; the younger star fell, engulfed in the elder star’s black corpse, into the waters of the comets, now melted by their heat. The waters engulfed the starfire, and as the ebbing star fell to the ocean floor, it wept, filling the water with salt.
Stars across the sky, whose eyes had lain upon the battle as it had raged, howled into the abyss as they watched two stars blink out of existence. In its martyrdom, however, the younger star grew into something different. Starfire never was an idle force; on the bottom of the sea, it waited, and it recovered.
The sea quieted for many long years; it remained oblivious to the heat in its depths. As the starfire waited, it transformed, burrowing into the earth, flickering into the soil, creating and embedding and sowing a force that had never before left the heavens. As the heat of the younger starfire’s energy transformed, so too did the death of the elder star, still resting in its shared watery tomb.
Between the fire and its absence, a longing grew. The water that had grown and melted and slipped across the face of the stars did not curl around the starfire like the empty abyss had. In the sky, the younger star had felt as though it was endless, there was nothing that could have ebbed its fire. Its starfire, its energy under the water, still ached for that freedom, though it no longer claimed the name of star.
Finally, one moment like the ones before it, the submerged starfire couldn’t take the pain any longer. It sought the sky once more, springing from the sea, glowing upward, sprouting a wildfire in its desperate attempt to throw its arms once more into the depths of the blackness above. Flying as hard as it could, the starfire thrust itself towards the stars, its former family, but with a blue scream, the starfire could not reach its home.
The starfire was no longer a star; it had grown into the soil, becoming something new, something that belonged now with the water and the earth. The earth and the water loved the starfire, and in this love, grew gravity. Too much gravity and not enough starlight, the earth and starfire collapsed back to the sea, wending and building and holding shape as peaks that still cast their eyes to the heavens. Across the sea, the earth pooled, remnants and memory of the starfire’s last attempt at resurrection. The earth itself spread from the peaks, settling slowly, into the outline of a continent.
Across the land, the starfire still infused the soil, bringing a new force to life, small beings set out of time, like the memories of stars. They grew and developed and evolved, becoming beings with minds and memories of their own.
Even as the starfire gave rise to the Fae, the darkness from the old, dead star, had animated others, sneaking into other small specks of life, gifting them a fear of death. These tiny lives would become humans, slaves to time even as the elder star had tried to escape from its grasp; a universe’s punishment for trying to take the life fire of another being.
In the shadow of this history, both life forms began to evolve, growing with every passing year into more complicated beings, animated by different forces, very different in their perception of the world. Across the continent, the Fae grew into different forms, shaped by the face of the earth, moved by the force of the stars. Humans grew into a singular identity, shaped by an ache not theirs, moved to take and survive and remain. Their paths, ever tied together, would twist and entangle fire and darkness, life and death, and the dusky nostalgia of an ongoing memory.
Between the mountains in the east, deep underground, simmered the last vault of energy, waiting, now not with hope to return to the heavens, but perhaps hope for something else. In the space where the stars first fell into the comets they had slung at each other, the earth still reaches towards the sky, a last hope of a transformed starfire still trying to return home.
~.~
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