“When stars fall, heroes rise.” - Galaean proverb

Nysa’s screams shredded the silence in a grove filled with shimmering orchids resting under a cloudy night sky. The resplendent clearing had long been a favorite spot for her, but she’d never imagined filling it with such sacred pain. The dim purple light cast by shining flowers was just enough for her to see her feet as her heels dug into the tender earth.

Nysa was no stranger to the struggle of childbearing. Yet, she found herself alone in the middle of the night rather than depending on the support of her husband and the village. Some voice, some… thing had called her there; yet without the aid of the goddess Zoatroche, she was afraid. More than once, she nearly gave up, embracing an end beneath the elder tree instead of fighting on.

Still, she pushed. Gods, she missed the old days when she’d given birth to Phaea at the temple, with Haemon and the priestesses there to share in the burden. Back then, the gods still answered prayers and guided their servants. Their temples were places of common miracles. In the Era of Chaos, dreams no longer bore messages from the gods, but her dreams had summoned her to an empty grove resting under silent heavens.

She poured every drop of her willpower into continuing on, clenching cold dirt and bright flowers between her fingers so tightly that blood mixed with earth where her nails pierced skin. For a moment, a desperate but dangerous moment, she let sagging muscles rest. The bite of the cold breeze shook her like an eager child ready to wake her for a new day. A shooting star pierced the night’s tapestry. A star that burned a gleaming silver, and was visible even where the rest of the stars were not.

Stars moving in the realm above was no strange sight in Galae. It was never known if a constellation would be present for years, months, or minutes. Even ever changing, stars always stayed in the sky. This bright star dipped below the clouds as if guided by a divine hand. It captivated Nysa, whose eyes widened in rapturous awe.

Her gaze chased the star’s descent, its graceful arc becoming more erratic with each passing second. Profundity gave way to panic as it headed straight for her. Her eyes squeezed shut, bracing for impact, but a warm sensation enveloped her body instead, the hot breath of life soothing torn muscle. Slowly, she opened her eyes. There was a luminous purple orb hovering inches away from her stomach. It was pulsing with an intense energy that tore the fabric of the world to strips and stitched them back together with the same beat. Before she comprehended what was happening, the orb fell into her stomach like a drop into water, flooding her with mystical power. Her cheeks flushed, and the sweat coating her body began to evaporate. Her muscles spasmed, and as she threw her head back she would have sworn that each and every star in the night’s sky pierced through the clouds in their brilliance.

She screamed, in fright and pain, as her unborn child once again insisted upon its freedom. She pushed, roared, and pushed some more; a tuft of hair crowned, then the lively cries of a baby captured her heart. Her skin took on a glow to match the purple flowers all around. With one final screaming effort, her son was born.

Like torchlight receding into a deep tunnel, the radiance of her skin faded. She deflated, each limb sinking heavily onto crushed flowers, but she forced shaking arms to embrace her boy. The memory of the orb of light and its effect on her began to fade from her mind until she could not recall it at all. Her thoughts drifted to how happy Haemon would be to have a son. She needed to return home with her child. She looked to the sky. The clouds had parted and the brilliant starlit expanse was once again proudly displaying its full splendor. She named her son Aster in honor of the resplendent sight.

✹✹✹

Aster’s eyes traced the swirls of color that swam in defiant contrast of the clear blue sky they split. Chaos storms, they were called. For as long as he’d been alive, the valley he called home had been surrounded on all sides by them. Chaos storms raged wherever there were voidlands, and voidlands marred the earth like barren scars. As empty of life and color as the voidlands were, the chaos storms they were home to were their precise opposite.

The tempests of inky clouds and gleaming light of every color screamed danger to any who dared get too close. To Aster, they were the borders of a cage preventing him from ever knowing the rest of Galae. Yet, as his Father was so fond of reminding him, they were also the walls that kept Karipos safe from foreign dangers.

There were several people in Karipos who claimed to be from distant lands, swept to their humble village by the unguided winds of Chaos. Despite having survived the endeavor, not one of them was willing to entertain the idea of a second trip.

“Hey Asteeeer, are you in there?” Phaea sang, dragging out his name and waving her hand in front of his face. “Daydreaming yet again, probably,” she muttered.

“Dreaming? No. At least I don’t think so... Not paying attention? Yeah, that I’m guilty of.” Aster flashed her a guilty smile as she playfully gave him a shove.

“Don’t I know it?” Phaea retorted, laughing to herself. “You’re nearly twenty, and yet still can’t keep your mind still.”

Aster sighed, turning his eyes from their lazy skyward vigil to the clearing below the outcropping they were perched atop. This was one of their favorite places to post for their hunts. It offered a passable vantage over the dense forest of their valley, while being close enough to one of the tributary creeks to still hear it burbling gently through leaves that danced softly on the breeze.

He found himself drawn to one particular spot of dense forest. A brief shudder of leaves eager to betray their guest told him he spotted their quarry. “There! Looks like our hunt won’t take all day this time.”

Sighing, Phaea complained, “You always do that. You get to just doze off and not actually keep focused on the hunt. Then, at the perfect god’s torn moment, you just suddenly look at the right place. If I had that luck of yours…”

“I know, I know, you’d be the greatest champion Karipos has ever known. We’d all be bowing in submission and begging for just a grain of your favor, oh mighty and powerful Phaea.” Aster bowed in an exaggerated motion as he grabbed his bow from its place resting against a boulder. When he stood straight again, his eyebrows raced each other up his forehead.

The beast that came into view was certainly large; its antlers reached to nearly the height of the village gates of Karipos, and strutted with the proud majesty of a king in his court. “Woah! A flamestag… and a big one at that.”

Phaea threw him a look, urging quiet as she gestured for them to move into position.

Aster made sure his spear was strapped firmly to his pack and slipped the bag on, carefully and quietly following Phaea from their vantage point to get into range. At her signal, he readied an arrow. Aster assessed their prey more closely; heat blurred air obscured intelligent eyes, and it looked around with curiosity beyond that of a common beast. It also, importantly, was breathing fire through its nostrils and had antlers that ended in tips that burned red hot, as if they’d been freshly pressed into shape in the heat of a forge.

Steam rose from the ground around the beast, and looking at it dampened Aster’s forehead with beading sweat. Though, that may have been from nerves as much as anything else. It was definitely at the Awakened stage. Aster and his sister tried to only hunt Attuned animals, but lately they were increasingly hard to find.

According to elders, wild animals classified as Attuned or even Awakened were extremely rare back in the Gilded Era. Something about the Fall had caused nearly all the animals of Galae to grow and develop size, strength, and unnatural abilities. Thankfully, the beast before them was still young so it probably couldn’t project pillars of fire like the one from his father’s bedtime stories. Probably.

Aster took a deep breath that smelled of a day’s old campfire while eyeing the beast that looked like it could have walked straight out of legend. His heart beat in his chest like the ceremonial drums of the village Wardens, and he found himself hoping the Flamestag wouldn’t hear it as well. At Phaea’s gesture, he nocked an arrow and pulled the string taut. The sound of the sinew stretching tickled his ears as he aimed.

As they both released a deep breath, they also released their arrows in near perfect synchrony. Phaea’s arrow pierced deep into the lungs of the beast, Aster’s punched into its throat.

The flamestag gave a surprised bellow accompanied by a burst of flame that set the nearby bushes alight. Turning towards them, its eyes glimmered with a fiery fury. It charged.

“Forsake us, this is going to be another rough one,” Phaea exclaimed, as broke off into action.

Running to the left and in the open, Phaea quickly loosed two more arrows mid stride as the flamestag focused its blazing eyes on her. One caught it in the flank, but it jumped out of the path of the second. At a distance of nearly twenty five paces, the oppressive heat surrounding the beast dropped heavy beads of sweat into Aster’s eyes. He began digging through his sack frantically as the forest around him fell into a dangerous silence.

“Any day now!” Phaea called out to him as the flamestag lowered its blistering crimson antlers to her.

“Got it!” Aster shouted, heart racing as he nearly fumbled pulling out a flask of swirling blue liquid. He really hoped this would work. He grabbed his spear and ran at the stag, gripping the flask with desperate fervor as he approached.

It seemed to sense him, however, and before leaping into a charge straight at Phaea, it crashed to one side, reared its head back towards Aster, and released a spiraling jet of flame. Aster dove, oppressive heat licking greedily at skin just out reach, and hurled the flask towards the flamestag.

For a precious and perilous moment, Aster felt as if time slowed as he tracked the flight of the bottled concoction. Aster was pulled back to reality when, moments before the flamestag released another blast of fire, Phaea’s next arrow exploded the flask in a shower of glass and gleaming blue liquid imbued with the essence of elemental water.

The flamestag roared, but as it turned to Phaea with a stance promising another furious inferno, only a mournful bellow escaped its snout.

"Now!" Phaea ordered. She dropped her bow and drew her shortsword.

Aster lowered his spear and ran straight at the frightened forest king.

The once blazing heat emanating from the beast vanished as if blown away on a cool breeze, and Aster didn’t miss the moment to engage. As Aster’s spear sank into its flank, Phaea dodged a sweep of its antlers and opened a massive gash in its throat. With a final defeated huff of steaming breath, their quarry collapsed. Hot blood soaked into greedy ground. Aster rested his forehead against the spear sprouting from the beasts side as Phaea knelt to reap their harvest.

Aster panted heavily. “We should probably expect this to only get harder and harder. It feels like every season now these beasts grow in strength.” Crouching to join Phaea, he sank his knife into the monster’s hide, Aster’s weariness only grew while he thought about the trials they’d yet face while hunting. “Maybe as the alchemists continue making these essence vials they’ll get better and more affordable? These Awakened beasts may be a valuable kill, but if we can’t keep up with them…”

“You know,” offered Phaea while removing the stag’s tongue, “Thalysios told me he’d met a man who had actually become Attuned himself. I bet he’d have far less trouble with these.” She pulled the tongue free with a sweaty smile, her hair plastered haphazardly to her forehead and her carving knife held deftly in her right hand.

Aster scoffed and blew off the idea with a gesture of his hand. Thalysios was one of the few strangers to find their way to Karipos after being displaced by the violent storming of Chaos. Aster often eagerly listened to their tales over bowls of wine, but had learned that such stories often had some rotten grain in the bundle.

“I’ll believe that when I see it. Until then, we need to figure out how we’re going to keep contributing to the village. We’re lucky to have survived that, and that’s the fourth close call we’ve had this month. I don’t think we can keep this up,” Aster replied.

Frowning, Phaea let Aster’s words sit on a tense silence.

Aster knew how much she enjoyed being able to hunt with him, and that wasn’t the first time he’d voiced his doubts.

At last, Phaea’s frown vanished nearly as quickly as it had formed and in her teasing tone, Phaea retorted, “You could always fill out a bit and enlist as a Warden.”

“And stand around all day long bored out of my mind like Tokites? Gods, can you imagine something more painful? See, that’s why I choose not to grow tall and strong.” Aster laughed.

Phaea chuckled with him. “Ever wonder if all of Galae is going crazy like this? It sometimes feels as if we’re all on the verge of following the gods into the void.” Though before she could linger on the grim thought, she was back to her normal optimism, “Hey, at least we’ll probably all make it long enough for the celebration of your birth tomorrow! My little brother, already about to be twenty. You know I think some of the elders may have had bets going on whether or not you’d even make it this far.”

“I’ll be glad to have cost them their wagers, then,” Aster replied while he helped Phaea hoist the carcass of the flamestag onto their sled.

As they embarked on the trek back to Karipos, Aster continued to discuss logistics for the next day and make other small talk. Phaea elbowed him for once again carrying less than a quarter of the load she was from their haul while she was the one dragging the sled across root and rock. He and his sister avoided any further mention of the growing dangers of the world.

✹✹✹

After a day overly full of danger, sleep claimed Aster with the ease of a kind embrace. Aster dreamt. As was usual in his dreams, he was in Karipos.

At his gesture, the palisades collapsed and marble walls grew to replace them. The village expanded, his home replaced with a tower standing over the rest of the houses like a tree surrounded by grass. Flying to the top of the tower, he took his customary seat upon the throne of his dreamscape. As he pondered what new adventure to conjure, his gaze flicked up. Through the roof of his tower, the stars shone.

When he focused on them, the world flipped to night. The shining lights moved far faster than the stars usually did as he gazed upon them, and he swayed with disorientation as he found himself standing in a dark empty space, surrounded on all sides by constellations both foreign and familiar. There was a constellation of a massive tree whispering its dominance into the night; a winged figure that filled him with hope, and, out of the corner of his eye, there was a silhouette. Focusing on it, it was as if the distance between him and the new figure vanished, and he was standing face to face with himself. The person before him mirrored his confused expression, the raise of his hand, and the scratching of his head. It was like looking in a mirror, but what he saw wasn’t quite… him.

In front of Aster was a man with his same dark and short wavy hair, the same small scar on his eyebrow from where a thrown rock had struck him when he was ten, the same short cropped beard, and the same neutral look he often wore.

On this face, though, that neutral look seemed to radiate a quiet determination that he rarely felt. The reflection before him was slightly taller than he was. It stood straighter than he did. Most notably, his reflection’s eyes were a startling purple as opposed to his own brown eyes.

“What in all the realms am I looking at?” Aster wondered aloud. His heart beat. The stars around him rippled to the rhythm, each pulse sending a wave through the world and ringing in his ears. He was used to being in control. He was not used to seeing things conjured into his dreams that he himself had not imagined. How did he get there? Where did this mirrored self come from, and why did it seem to be a little bit better than him in every forsaken way?

He had enough waking reminders of his insecurities, and it was cruel for his dreams to prickle his mind as well. Aster’s brows knit and his mouth fell open in wordless complaint; the reflection meanwhile smiled playfully and began to fade. As it reached a transparency that let the stars behind shine through, he reached out. “Wait!”

His finger touched the finger of the reflection, who had also reached out in the same gesture, a smile still on its face. He felt overwhelmed with sensation. His body felt heavy, as if his blood was turning to stone in his veins. His thoughts were overcome and disrupted as he desperately clung to a sense of self. He panicked.

Aster’s dream body erupted with light and dissolved into motes nearly indistinguishable from the stars around him. His eyes unraveled and his mind bled fear into his dreaming world.

Aster jolted awake only to find his body unresponsive. He tried to lift an arm, but it just laid by his side limply. His body was covered in sweat, and every muscle hurt as if pushed beyond the limits of even a thrice blessed champion. Stranger still, his eyes ached.

He tried to scream, but couldn’t make a sound. After thirty seconds that stretched like thirty days, and with a groan of effort, he rolled off his bed entirely, thudding to the floor in a cocoon of blankets. With effort worthy of the mightiest giants of legend, he got to his feet. He staggered to the doorway; Phaea stood in the small courtyard in the center of their home.

She yawned as she looked at him, confusion slowly warping her face. She looked him over once again, brows furrowing deeply as her mouth attempted to form more words than could be spoken at once.

She closed her mouth, took a deep breath, and asked “Aster, why are your eyes purple?”