The last thing I ever felt as just Kael was the rough grain of the wood beneath my fingertips.
I was mending the fence at the edge of our property, the one that separates my father's hunting grounds from the wild tangle of the Silent Forest. The evening air was cool, carrying the scent of pine and the distant, smoky promise of supper from the village of Oakhaven below. My hands, though young, were already calloused from a life of this—from fletching arrows, skinning rabbits, and gripping the worn handle of my father's old hatchet. They were good, honest calluses. The kind that meant you'd done a day's work.
I remember looking down at the village, a scattering of warm, torch-lit jewels nestled in the valley. I could pick out our cottage, smaller than the others, tucked near the blacksmith's forge. I could see the sturdy outline of Roric's smithy, and the larger, more imposing hall of the Elders. It was a small world, my world, and for all its quiet suffocation, it was mine. I knew its rhythms, its grudges, its small generosities. I knew my place in it: Kael Ardyn, the hunter's son. Quiet. Unremarkable. Haunted by dreams I never spoke of.
The dreams were the only part of me that didn't fit. In them, I wasn't on the solid, forgiving earth. I was adrift in a velvet blackness, punctuated by points of light so brilliant they hurt to look at. Eighty-one of them. I'd counted, in that strange way you can know things in dreams. They orbited a silent, sleeping world, and their light was a song, a mathematics, a law of existence woven into light. And then, always, the song would falter. A crack would appear in the perfect, dark glass of the sky, and the stars would begin to fall.
I shook my head, banishing the creeping feeling of the dream. It was just a dream. The sky above me was perfectly whole, a deep, placid indigo where the first true stars were beginning to prick through. The familiar constellations of the Stag and the Plough were there, steady and eternal. I took a slow breath, the solidity of the earth beneath my boots a comfort.
That's when the first sound came.
It wasn't a sound you heard with your ears, not at first. It was a vibration that started in the marrow of my bones, a low, dissonant hum that made my teeth ache. I straightened up, my heart giving a single, hard thud against my ribs. The birds in the forest fell silent all at once. An unnatural, waiting hush fell over the world.
Then, the sky tore open.
It didn't crack like ice on a pond. It shattered. A jagged, impossible rip of blinding white light scored the heavens from horizon to horizon. There was no noise, and then there was all the noise in the universe—a roaring, screaming cacophony of breaking glass and dying suns that was somehow utterly silent and deafeningly loud at the same time. I cried out, clapping my hands over my ears, but the sound was inside my skull.
And then they fell.
Eighty-one streaks of fire, of molten gold and silver and colors I had no name for, blazing across the torn fabric of the night. They were not the gentle, poetic arcs of shooting stars from my father's stories. They were violent. Anguished. They were the death-throes of gods, and we were just the insignificant world below, about to be buried in their celestial grave-dust.
I stood, frozen, my head thrown back, my mouth agape. It was the most beautiful and most terrifying thing I would ever witness. The world was ending, and it was setting the sky on fire for its own funeral pyre.
One of the falling stars, a shard of incandescent white searing a greenish after-image into my vision, seemed to veer from its chaotic path. It grew larger, brighter, screaming towards the earth not a half-mile from where I stood, just inside the tree line of the Silent Forest.
The impact was a physical blow.
The ground heaved, throwing me off my feet. A wave of heat and force rolled over me, smelling of ozone and scorched stone. The concussion of sound finally hit, a deep whump that punched the air from my lungs. I landed hard on my back, staring up at a sky now painted with lurid, unnatural hues. For a long moment, there was only the ringing in my ears and the panicked hammering of my heart.
"Kael!"
The voice was distant, frayed with terror. I pushed myself up onto my elbows, my body protesting. My father was running up the path from the village, his figure a stark silhouette against the flickering, wrong-colored sky. Other figures were emerging from their homes, their shouts thin and sharp in the strange air.
"I'm here!" I called back, my voice raspy. I got to my feet, my legs trembling.
He reached me, his strong hands gripping my shoulders, his eyes wide as he scanned me for injury. "By the Sun, are you hurt? What was that?"
"It fell," I stammered, pointing a shaking hand towards the forest. "Into the trees. A star, Father. A star fell."
His face, usually so stoic and composed, was a mask of primal fear. He looked from me to the dark line of the forest, where a faint, sickly glow was now emanating from the crash site. The light pulsed, a slow, rhythmic beat like a diseased heart.
The rest of the village was converging on us now. Old Man Hemlock was leading the way, his carved walking stick stabbing the earth, his milky eyes wide with a fervent, religious horror.
"The sky-sickness!" he wailed, his voice cracking. "The legends are true! The heavens have vomited their corruption upon us!"
Roric the blacksmith was there, his braided beard and soot-stained apron making him look like a figure from an old myth. He held a heavy hammer, his knuckles white around the handle. "Where did it land, Kael?" he demanded, his voice a low rumble.
I pointed again, unable to form words. The pulsing light from the forest seemed to be calling to me, a siren song that resonated in the hollow of my own chest. A strange, pulling sensation started there, a warmth that was both comforting and alien.
"The Silent Forest," Roric muttered, his face grim. "Nothing good has ever come from those woods."
"We must see," my father said, his voice tight. "We must know what it is."
"Are you mad, Daren?" Hemlock shrieked. "To approach a thing from the abyss? It is poison! It is death!"
But my father, and Roric, and a few other brave—or foolish—souls were already gathering torches. The decision was made. I stood, caught between the retreating crowd of wailing villagers and the small, grim party of men preparing to walk towards the unknown. The pull in my chest grew stronger, a taut wire connecting me to that glowing crater.
"I'm coming with you," I said, my voice firmer than I felt.
My father looked at me, a conflict of fear and pride in his eyes. He gave a short, sharp nod.
The walk into the Silent Forest was a descent into a nightmare. The familiar path was now a place of menace. The trees, usually just trees, seemed to loom and twist in the erratic, pulsing light. The air grew thick, charged with a static energy that made the hair on my arms stand on end. That strange, metallic scent was stronger here, coating the back of my throat.
We didn't need to track it. The light was our guide. It grew brighter, the pulses stronger, until we pushed through a final wall of undergrowth and saw it.
The crater was about twenty feet across, a raw, smoking wound in the earth. The soil had been fused into glassy, black slag. And in the center of it all lay the fragment.
It was smaller than I'd imagined, no larger than my fist. It wasn't a rock, not truly. It was a piece of solidified light, a jagged shard of a captive dawn. It pulsed with that same sickly rhythm, veins of black corruption crawling across its surface like tendrils of rot. It was beautiful. It was utterly, profoundly wrong.
The pulling in my chest became an irresistible command. I took a step forward, then another, my feet moving without my permission.
"Kael, stop!" my father barked.
But I couldn't. I was a moth drawn to a cosmic flame. The world narrowed to that shard of fallen sky. I could hear a whispering, not in my ears, but in my mind—a chorus of dead suns and broken laws. Visions flashed behind my eyes: a battlefield of giants clashing amongst galaxies, a silent, geometric being of obsidian and starlight watching from the void, a scream that shattered time itself.
I was at the edge of the crater. The heat was intense, but it didn't burn. It called.
"Kael, get back!" Roric roared.
I reached out my hand.
The moment my fingertips were within inches of the fragment, it happened. The pulsing light flared into an unbearable brilliance. The shard moved, not falling, but flying. It shot from its resting place and slammed directly into the center of my chest.
There was no impact, not of matter against matter. There was only an explosion of being.
White, agonizing fire erupted through every nerve ending I possessed. It was not a pain of the body, but of the soul—as if my very self was being unmade and rewritten. I screamed, but no sound came out. I was falling, not through the forest, but through an infinite, star-dusted void. I saw the cosmic being again, the Architect, its gaze of pure, unfeeling logic turning towards me, seeing the anomaly I had become.
Mistake.
The voice was the universe itself, cold and final.
Then, as suddenly as it began, it was over.
I collapsed to my knees on the cool, normal earth, gasping for air. The visions were gone. The fire was gone. The fragment was gone. All that remained was a deep, resonant warmth in the center of my chest, and a profound, terrifying silence in my soul.
I looked down, fumbling at the laces of my tunic with trembling fingers. I pulled the fabric aside.
There, just over my heart, was a mark. A small, raised patch of skin, shaped like a jagged star. It pulsed with a soft, inner light, a faint echo of the rhythm from the crater, before fading to a dull, warm throb. It was a part of me now.
I looked up, my eyes meeting my father's. His face was a canvas of pure, uncomprehending horror. The other men stared, their torches casting dancing, fearful shadows. They had seen it. They had seen the star choose me.
Old Man Hemlock, who had followed at a distance, pointed a bony, trembling finger directly at me. His voice, when it came, was a dry, rustling thing, filled with a venomous certainty that cut through the night air and sealed my fate.
"Star-Touched," he hissed. "The boy is Star-Touched."
And from the depths of the newly darkened crater, now just a scar in the earth, came a low, guttural growl. A shape, distorted and monstrous, began to pull itself up over the rim. A creature born of the fragment's corruption, its eyes glowing with the same sickly light that was now a part of me.
The first monster had emerged.
To be continued...