Long before galaxies were formed, planets cooled to stone, and time began, there was nothing.
Just hollow darkness which held no sounds or signs of life. Simply, nothing. There wasn't even anything to speak of.
There was not sound, not even shadows since there was no light to cast them.
Only the silence of the endless, still void with not a speck of dust or whisper of wind to break the quiet hush.
Gravity had not yet pulled matter together and the very fabric of the universe held tightly shut, leaving nothing to wander through it.
Then, the first rupture of light tore through the nonexistence, and the blind dark was forced to part for a searing hot flash of energy.
The expansion of the universe.
Time inhaled sharply. It began to cool just enough for the chaos to settle into massive clumps that would soon become blazing beacons in the dark. Laws of physics began to carve out their permanent home in the fabric of reality.
Mass, entropy, and momentum took up residence in the endless dark.
Amongst these newly formed titans of fire, one young star burned with a strange pulse to it's heart.
While all the others burned with the blind, mindless fury of creation, this one held a gravity-defying spark of something else within it's core.
It's pulse did not simply burn, it watched.
At first it was only a small, stubborn point of light that was easily lost in the flashes of it's older cousins, but deep within it's corona, something alien and ancient felt the weight of gravity bend around the mass of the young star.
It watched the chaotic birth of the universe around it, and could still hear the echoes of it's own creation song vibrating through the empty void.
Drifted though the long, dark twilight of the cosmic dark ages came the young protostar, utterly alone. Its heart beat. The cosmos in which it drifted was one of vast, cold deserts of stray hydrogen particles, and eons slowly blended into an endless hushed stillness. The only sounds that filled this particular place at this particular time was the deep voice of the star's own fusion, and the slow, steady turning of space.
It watched the endless dance of the cosmos unfold before unseen eyes, great dark clouds of primordial gas forming, and ripping themselves apart with soundless fury, invisible rivers of gravity carving canyons into the very fabric of reality, but there was nothing there. Nothing at all, beyond those few sounds that had no names, no voices, no warmth, beyond the steady drumming of its own heart.
And then, along an endless stretch of light-years, came a tiny pinpoint of light to pierce the darkness.
It was another STAR, a distant cousin of sorts, also huge, also burning, also tearing through the gloom far off in the distance. To another creature it would have been nothing, an insignificant flicker of light that burned far too small to mean anything in the grand scheme of things, but the protostar felt it. It watched the far-off glow ripple through the vacuum, a silent message that somehow, it was not truly alone in the space between the stars.
Eons passed...
The core of the star changed, it's light fluctuated, then it awoke.
Consciousness formed in the core of the star, it recognized itself, then a name appeared in it's light, ungiven yet known,
Solarynth Caelaris.
It was awake, it knew not where it came from, only that it was named, and that it was alone. With new found determination it floated through the void, once again witnessing the birth of stars in collapsing nebulas and watching as black holes consumed the very light it emitted. Solarynth flew past light beams that would take millenia to reach, and time itself seemed no longer a concern to the ancient being... until it became.
And so the being grew, compacting itself deeper and deeper into itself...
Every star is born in the same fashion—a formation of dust and gas, pulled together by gravity until it's crushed into a fiery mass.
The difference lies in the type—which is determined by one factor, and one factor only—the mass.
Some stars burn as small, quiet points of light scattered across the void—containing just enough matter to be considered stars at all.
Gravity pushes them inward, minute by minute, over the course of hundreds of millions of years, or even longer.
It's slow, steady work, and the fires of such stars burn just as slowly, barely perceptibly.
Such stars burn for an immensely long time—longer than almost any other type.
They witness the formation of solar systems, and see civilizations bloom and die across the death-throes of the suns they orbit.
And then, eventually, long after more "important" stars have fizzled out and died, they too will go out—their fires extinguished for the last time.
But then there are the giants.
The massive stars, who from the moment of their formation exert gravity with such force that it crushes the very matter it pulls inward.
They burn from ten thousand years to several billion—time spans miniscule compared to the old stars, but long enough for the giant to achieve proper stellar status.
Their fire is fierce, consuming everything around them, burning away at the gases that form their atmosphere—and in turn lighting them up in a dazzling light.
They burn too quickly, too violently—and so in the end they die, just as fast.
Solarynth Caelaris was none of those things.
Unlike the other stars he was impossibly far above, impossibly lonely, with no hope of ever finding another to mark his existence.
He possessed a certain... awareness.
An understanding of what he was, and what he was capable of.
And an unwillingness to accept either.
The fusion at his core wanted to spread—to engulf him, as it did all stars before him.
He felt it, reaching out, grasping, seeking to settle into the same pointless pattern as every other star in existence.
Solarynth Caelaris stopped it.
Held it back, forced it down—waiting...
While he waited, something else kindled in him. Something that refused to become a dull main sequence star. Something that pushed him to change into something else. And he did. He pushed himself down into something smaller, strange. Something that looked like an anomaly.
Slowly the blazing heat of him compressed into himself.
The stellar fire folded in upon itself until there was clearly a shape to it. A shape formed from plasma, limbs forming from the solar fire, a torso of condensed stardust, a face of compressed light.
Constellations glowed feebly on his skin as his body of stars took the shape of man.
Solarynth hovered in the vacuum of space, observing the strange structure that hovered before him. He had no idea what made him choose the design he did.
It was almost as if it were instinctual.
Slowly, he raised his hand, running his fingers along the solid mass that was his torso, brushing against his cheek, and tangling his fingers in the strands of his hair, which glowed with the pale, calm light of white fire.
He thought to himself,
"This is weird..."
But he didn't know what to do with a physical body composed of flesh and bone woven from light.
Then, he heard a voice, calling out to him from somewhere in the distance, in another light year, whispering familiar sounds just like a woman might sound when she speaks.
Solarynth could almost feel her presence in the room with him, though he was an angel of sorts, if you could call him that.
Didn't he still wonder to himself what he truly was?
What was his purpose in this strange new world?
Solarynth simply didn't know.
One thing is clear, he thought to himself,
"that I am a star, but I am no ordinary star in this universe."
While floating in the void, Solarynth stared into the direction from which the noise had come, five light years away.
He prepared to land there, carefully, wondering whether his freshly created body would endure such speed as the velocity of a star. Not knowing why he had answered the call, but feeling that he must, he propelled himself into the dark.
He expected some resistance, and thought that it would be impossible to achieve such a pace in a compressed human shape, but the void rushed to meet him as he accelerated to meet the sound.
He was flying at a galactic orbital speed, two hundred and fifty or so kilometers per second, faster than he had ever imagined possible.
It was nothing to him anymore, the speed he was going, as it was standard issue for him when he was still just a mindless ball of plasma.
He skimmed past thousands of miles with ease, diving deeper and deeper into the dark to find the source of the strange voice in his head.
Solarynth was unaware that the trip wouldn't take nearly as long as he thought.
Shooting through space at two hundred fifty kilometers per second meant that the five light-year long journey wouldn't take him nearly six thousand eight hundred years to complete.
Solarynth continued traveling on his course at that same speed, thinking to himself just who would dare call out to him from the void, but after forty-four hours of conscious traveling, his patience had worn out.
As he continued on his path, the gravity well of a long-dead black hole loomed up before him.
This titan of an inanimate mass had drawn its last breath a while ago, as evidenced by the ghostly rings of distant starlight it curved around.
Its invisible tendrils of gravity reached to meet him, trying to stop him, but he merely shifted along the invisible currents in space, slipping the crushing gravity of the black hole around him.
"Nice try.. big boy.."
He could not wait millennia to arrive at his destination at sub-light speed.
Solarynth prepared to go faster than he ever had before. He tapped into the reserves of helium and hydrogen that fuel his form and fed more of their energy into his core, sparking the fusion of his new human-like body.
Within the mechanics of his new humanoid chassis, the physics of a star had to be reinvented from the ground up. A titan radiating light and heat from its surface in all directions, which Solarynth proceeded to roll into a compact bundle of himself.
To break free from the crippling limitations of sub-light speeds, he took his personage and turned it into a huge magnetodynamic nozzle.
He pulled the hydrogen from his own starlight lattice into his chest, centripetal force binding the atoms together with the force of gravity, and let the proton-proton reactions down the center begin, the helium isotopes at the core calming the violent energy from within his ribs, keeping it from tearing him apart from the inside out.
Instead of letting the superheated gas escape his personage in all directions, he funneled it down his spine.
A powerful fusion thruster hidden within a human frame, Solarynth let the compressed and superheated plasma at his tail unleash a flash of light into the void, the force of which pinned him to the ground with relative ease by his spine, his stellar body easily taking the strain of the G-force.
He propelled himself further into the black, faster than he ever had with his previous, mortal frame, his speed easily overtaking the measly two and a half hundred kilometers per second.
Solarynth blinked, the white-hot afterimage of his exhaust flames burning at the edge of his vision as he looked down at his glowing boots, the sensation of the vacuum of space passing him by at such a pace surreal.
He tipped his head, his vocal cords vibrating for the first time as he experimented with the strange instrument his mind had formed.
"Hot," he rumbled to himself, the foreign sound of his own voice rough and unused, no different from the lilt of a child learning to speak for the first time.
He shifted his weight, testing the violent forces pressing against his spine once more. "Exhaust... directed. Why hot?"
He regarded the stream of superheated gas burning from his posterior with a bemused expression, his fingers twitching as he thought to reach out and catch the occasional spark thrown his way for inspection before thinking better of it.
"Movement... fast. But unnecessary friction?"
He tipped his head the other way, calculating the vector of his flight path in much the same manner as any newborn mind would when presented with the raw power of a star.
"If mass decreases at exhaust point, velocity scales upward. It... works. I am going faster."
A ponderous hum escaped his lips as he watched the stars smear into elongated points of light.
"Who... is calling?" he asked the dark, his voice light and inquisitive, almost childlike, impossibly small for the endless void he flew through.
"Is voice... friend? Or obstacle?"
The acceleration was in an instant, a sudden burst that was exponentially increasing his momentum five-fold. The very vacuum around him seemed to ripple as his speed increased, past one thousand two hundred and fifty kilometers per second.
Solarynth gasped, his new chest heaving at the tremendous acceleration before his eyes. He grabbed at the air, and marvelled as the distant stars smeared into elongated, brilliant needles of light.
He looked at his hands, watched the white flame that burned just beneath his skin grow impossibly bright, to push himself forward to counteract the new acceleration surge.
"Fast," he tried the word experimentally, surprised at how well it fit this time. He blinked, tilting his head as he did calculations in his head.
"Five times... more. Mass-to-energy ratio... acceptable."
The stars fell away around him, a veritable waterfall of silver and blue.
At one thousand two hundred and fifty kilometers per second, the stars fell away around him and the distance that had been so incredibly long suddenly contracted, though it was still considerably long by acceptable measures. His new mind did calculations almost on autopilot, comparing and contrasting, thousands of years falling away into a tiny fraction of a percent.
He shifted, balancing himself against the jet of white-hot plasma flowing beneath his feet. He wasn't tired. Stars didn't tire, and neither would he - flesh and blood, but of a durability far beyond any other living human being could possibly hope to achieve.
"Still... far," Solarynth muttered, watching the indistinct, ghostly numbers swimming before his eyes. He curled his fingers into a loose fist, feeling the new sensation of determination blooming in his chest, along with the burning fusion core.
"Must... keep going."
The math in his mind grew exponentially. One thousand two hundred and fifty kilometers per second was a snail's pace in the gargantuan distance yawning before him. Six thousand eight hundred years was an eternity, a span too vast and too cold even for an eternal star to contemplate.
It wasn't enough.
Solarynth gritted his teeth, the white fire flickering beneath his skin, stretching from a steady pulse to a roaring, violent inferno. He fed it, not only throwing his core into the hungry furnace, but opening the floodgates within his veins.
Hydrogen pressed in with terrible force, and helium surged forth, a desperate stabilizing agent, fighting against the crushing pressures which threatened to rupture his ribs from within.
He leaned forward, forcing every atom of the violent explosion to shoot forth from his spine, his feet, his very being.
The universe ripped open around him, and he felt the G-force pressing down upon him like a collapsing mountain, screaming within the newly formed bones of his body, threatening to spill his humanity back out into the cold void as raw, elemental plasma. His vision exploded into white, and the stars shot past him, streaking across his eyes until all he saw was a tunnel of iridescent light.
He was faster than ever before, shooting past the barriers that had bound him, his core burning with the very Light-speed itself, locked onto a fraction of the ultimate velocity.
TWENTY-FIVE PERCENT.
Solarynth's heart pounded in his ears, each beat a furious drumroll as he shot past the boundaries of imagination itself.
At seventy-five thousand kilometers per second, the very fabric of space-time bent to his will, shortening the five light year distance to mere decades.
Twentieth of the blink of an eye, and he would be there, but it wouldn't be soon enough, the searing agony within his chest spiking with every violent heartbeat, every pulse of his core. The fusion burning within his very person was far too hot, far too powerful for his own good. Already his skin cracked away in fine, razor thin sheets of pure white light, the raw power bleeding from the fractures in jagged, searing tendrils.
Solarynth choked back a gasp, the acrid vacuum of space biting savagely at his throat, his voice shaking as he fought against the roaring within himself.
"Too... hot..." he panted, his eyes wide and fearful as he stared down at his hands, watching the jagged fractures of light dance and flicker across the ridges of his fingertips.
"Body... breaking? But... distance... shrinking."
He couldn't stop. He couldn't slow. The whisper of the female entity was growing louder, overriding the agony, and with twin streams of ionized stardust trailing from his fractures, Solarynth roared into the tunnel of light, hurtling towards his goal at a speed that could only end in death.
Solarynth was breaking through his own limits, the price to be paid for such reckless performance nearly too much for him to bear.
He burned far too hot, far too furiously, and stood on the very edge of a true stellar death, a death that would tear him apart and swallow him whole in a mass of collapsing stardust.
And yet despite the impossible odds, he persevered, and when he finally turned off his engines and crossed the threshold into the system, his physical form could take no more.
His blazing heart dimmed, his limbs went limp, and he passed out, his battered and broken body floating through the asteroid belt of some unknown solar system, a stray, wandering star cast onto another world.
Drifting through the silent expanse of the asteroid belt, Solarynth looked less like a living entity and more like a broken monument composed of white fire.
He was completely unconscious, his limbs hanging loose as he was carried along a smooth orbital path towards the source of the whisper. But the cost of his twenty plus percent light speed sprint had come at a price. Having burned vast quantities of his core hydrogen in the process, his humanoid geometry was failing.
Small, spiderweb-like cracks split through his glowing skin, allowing thin tendrils of flashing plasma and shining dust to escape into the vacuum. Bits of crystallized starlight flaked off of his shoulders and hands at each passing meter, colliding silently with the surrounding space rocks before vanishing into the dark.
He was a dying star in miniature, unraveling atom by atom, but clinging desperately to the humanoid shell he had forged.
All around him, the asteroid belt spun like a slow ring of teeth, jagged iron and ice tumbling through the cosmic dust. A stray, jagged boulder drifted into his path, knocking against his shoulder. Instead of bouncing off, the impact carved a glowing furrow through his fragile flesh, exposing the blinding, unstable nuclear hearth beating erratically under his ribs.
He did not awaken.
He simply continued to drift forward in the alien system, leaving a trail of pale, glittering stardust in his wake, pulled ever closer to the voice that awaited him.
A dying star is not something that happens quickly by the old laws of the universe.
It is a slow surrender of hydrogen, a core that swells, cools, and collapses after eons of patient burning. A star dies not because it has had enough, but because it has nothing left. Because time itself has caught up to it.
That was not what had befallen Solarynth.
He had not run out of fuel over the slow passage of years. He had spent it. Recklessly, furiously, in the space of hours instead of eons. He had torn through reserves meant to fuel him another lifetime of the universe, burning them in a single, desperate sprint through the dark.
What should have taken a star hundreds of millions of years to waste, he had emptied in less than two days.
His body did not understand the difference. It only knew that fuel was critically low, that fusion was sputtering, that the core was destabilizing. It was the same set of warnings a star would receive upon reaching the true end of its life, simply arriving at from a different direction.
A wound rather than an ending.
Self inflicted rather than natural.
He was not dying because his time was up.
He was dying because he had just been careless enough to spend a hundred million years of survival in a single breath, and his body was only now sending the bill.
UNTIL... HE WOKE.
Solarynth's eyes fluttered open.
It was no longer an inhospitable wasteland of floating space and cold, empty void.
There was solid ground beneath his back, pressing against his person.
Above him, the sky was dense with rolling storm clouds. Strange fragrances filled the air, and far above and around him, strange and exotic birds cried and trilled their cries and songs in tones foreign to his ears, but not unpleasant.
Closer by, the sound of running water in small streams and brooks filled the deep hush of the forest sounds around him.
He felt something strange happen, a sudden and violent panic seizing his throat. He gasped, a startled sound as his senses were overwhelmed, and he lurched backward violently, his limbs locking out, until he found himself standing really standing upon the earth, rather than floating.
He was upright and on his own two feet for the first time in what might have been eternity.
He looked around, perplexed, taking in the strange new forest around him or rather, what he could see of it.
Looking down at his hands, he found them no longer wreathed in crackling white flame, no longer split and broken at the joints like some angular and broken star.
Not that there wasn't something wrong with the way his hands were. Beneath the surface, he could still feel the distant pulse and heat of the sun within his breast, rolling and vast and lonely.
It wasn't something he could quite explain. He felt something had happened, something had changed, and with a hesitant touch, he hovered his shaking fingers more in concern than curiosity over his own shoulder and along his collarbone, searching for the terrible feeling of his true self, the terrible and searing pain of his power unraveling.
But there was none. Only a strange, deep and steady cadence pressed against his palm, like the pulse of some great and ancient tree.
A cold sensation ran down Solarynth's spine. This planet, with the oppressive squareness that pressed on his bare skin, was utterly alien. A world of raw elements, where the air did not shimmer with the crisp tang of beyond-space.
Naked but for the occasional wisps of cool hair that clung to his body, he approached cautiously the sound of the stream. Reaching the edge, he peered down at the rippling surface.
A face was staring back up at him.
He stumbled back on his bare heels, heart pounding in his ears, before creeping forward again after a moment's hesitation to investigate. There was no face in the stream.
Staring back up at him from the water was the image of himself. A pale face stared back at him, its features framed with strands of light hair, and eyes like twin suns of molten gold. He had never seen a face such as this, never worn such an appearance. With slow, hesitant movements, he reached out a hand to the side and hovered a finger there to trace its surface.
His fingers broke the surface. There was no mirror. Only the chill of flowing water curling around his skin.
While Solarynth stared down at the rippling amber eyes in the water, a sharp snap of twigs broke out in the background of the chattering birds and rushing streams.
"You're awake," a voice whispered.
It caught him by surprise. He jerked back, tripping over his own unaccustomed nerves and falling forward. He tumbled face first into the shallow stream, pushing himself up to look up at the intruder.
Standing at the edge of the tree line was a woman.
She carried a tall, carved staff in one hand, her other raised in a loose, delicate gesture as if just finishing a spell. Her features were impossibly soft, her parted lips and long silver hair framing a few stray strands around her face. Her eyes were covered over with thick, dark blindfold, bound tightly at her temple with an ornate gold circlet.
She wore a voluminous, flowing white-and-gold hooded cloak that fell from her shoulders, pooling around her feet on the damp earth. Underneath the loose folds of the flowing material, a close-fitting white-and-black bodice ran up her silhouette, the folds of its intricate, vine-like gold trim flowing at her neck in the style of a halter. Long, white opera-style gloves stretched up her arms, bound by thick gold cuff bands, while wrappings and geometric gold straps decorated her hips and thighs in the form of a toga. Ornate, gold-and-white greaves hugged her lower legs with cutout patterns, complementing the heavy gold armbands that glittered in the light.
Solarynth blinked water from his lashes, his bare back pressed tight against the chill mud of the stream bank. As he looked up at her, the frantic rhythm of his new heart pounded in his ribs.
Is this... he thought to himself, his newborn mind brushing at the strange feeling vibrating in the back of his head. Is this the voice that called me through the dark?
The water was cold as it washed over his bare skin, but Solarynth stood his ground. The half-naked man kept his golden amber eyes fixed on the blindfolded woman standing above him.
She lowered the glowing fingers she'd been tracing in the air, the luminous remnants of whatever sigil she'd been drawing dissipating into the thick air. Her face remained placid as she studied the naked, star-born entity she found in her stream, unfazed by his appearance.
"You nearly tore yourself apart," she said, her voice holding the same cadence as the telepathic whisper that had guided him across the light-years.
Solarynth blinked, droplets of water sliding down the pale length of his starlight-silver hair. His newborn mind reeled at the thought of the distance he'd traveled in his current, fragile state.
"My..." He swallowed thickly, the strange and foreign feeling of the word rolling over his tongue. His fingers curled into the wet soil of the stream bank, his voice rough where he tried the syllables again. "...Core. The overdrive... twenty-five percent of light. I..."
"You did," she interrupted, tilting her head as if he'd said something in a language only he understood. "When your fusion drive failed on the fringes of this system, you collapsed. They found you drifting among the asteroid belt, caught in this system's gravity well."
She took another step closer, her voice dropping to something between a purr and a sigh as her voluminous white and gold cloak skimmed the grasses lining the stream bed.
"It took you weeks to travel the distance from the belt to these mountains, traveling at ten kilometers per second," she said, her tone even, precise - and unnervingly kind. "A lesser being would have been reduced to ash or atomized before skipping across the thermosphere. You put on quite a show, Solarynth. One that could have ended far more spectacularly, I'm afraid."
Solarynth pushed himself off the bank, steadying himself on his hands as he peered up at the woman. He looked down at his bare arms, the smooth skin of his human form contrasting the still visible, angry white lines of where terrible fractures had spewed torrents of white hot plasma to the outside world mere moments ago.
"Why..." He stopped, swallowing past the tightness in his throat. "Why am I even..." He trailed off, his heart thundering in his chest at the strange, alien sensation as it pounded in his ears. "...Like this? I was a star. Now I have a pulse."
The silver haired woman rested her carved staff against the earth, gold armbands catching the weak sunlight as she crossed her hands over the top.
"Because a star cannot walk where I have to walk," she said simply, her voice impossibly gentle. "And the void doesn't answer the questions I'm about to ask."
The woman tilted her head in such a way that the blindfold caught the glow of the faint light that came through the leaves. With a knowing smile, her lips curled at the corners.
"I am Aditi," she said, her voice exactly like the one he followed into the woods. "And Solarynth... I am the one who called you... I am the goddess of magic."
Solarynth blinked several times in succession, trying to rationalize the concept of the title goddess of magic in any possible physics or universal constant. The weight of the atmosphere was not familiar, nor was the texture of the ground beneath his bare toes.
He climbed out of the shallow stream slowly, water dripping from his pale limbs as he stood completely naked before the woman on the riverbank. He was completely unashamed, completely unaware of any concept of decency or rules of modesty in this world.
Aditi did not seem surprised. In fact, her expression barely changed as she flicked her staff casually, sending an invisible thread of intention through the air.
The air around Solarynth vibrated suddenly with ambient power. Swirls of fabric of the purest white and deepest charcoal appeared from nowhere, twisting around his slender, starry frame. They folded over themselves in tight patterns, forming a snug tunic and trousers of pale fabric with very subtle gold trim.
Confused and startled by the sudden movement and the feeling of foreign fabric brushing against his skin, Solarynth gasped and stumbled back, his hands coming up to feel the strange clothes. "What... is this?" he asked, staring down at the clothing in wide amber eyes as he took a step back.
Aditi watched him examine the new fabric, her lips curving into a knowing smile.
"It is clothing," Aditi said smoothly, her voice echoing with a strange authority. "On this world, walking about uncovered is an invitation to unnecessary complications. Society here works by rules of modesty and protection. You cannot simply wander the mortal realms in your natural form—though, given your previous incarnation, it is a miracle you did not blind half the hemisphere upon entry."
Solarynth gave a cautious tug on the soft, clinging garment that had appeared around his torso, marveling at how it had appeared in the first place, and looked up at her with narrowed amber eyes.
"Protection? Modesty?" He tested the alien concepts with a furrowed brow. "My form... in space, I radiated freely. Mass and energy required no boundary."
"This is not space, Solarynth," Aditi replied, leaning against her carved staff. She took a step closer, blindfolded eyes fixed on the man before her. "You are no longer a stray fusion reaction adrift in the void. You are tethered to a terrestrial plane."
With a flick of her gloved hand, she gestured to his person, taking in the whole of his new form.
"And your body did not alter by accident," Aditi continued, her tone lightening slightly. "When you broke past my threshold, your stellar core was on the verge of catastrophic detonation. Had I left you in that raw, untempered state of pure plasma and uncontained gravity, this planet would have cracked open beneath your feet, and you would have burned out in a matter of hours."
Solarynth looked down at his hands, flexing his fingers to feel the steady, rhythmic thud of his new heart.
"You... modified me," he stated, realization dawning in his newborn mind.
"I tempered you," Aditi corrected gently. "I have compressed the infinite chaos of your stellar consciousness into a vessel that can actually survive here. A human-shaped frame, dense and stable enough to contain your own self-regulating magic. It is the only way a celestial entity of your magnitude can walk this world without tearing the fabric of reality apart."
She tilted her head, listening to the quiet hum of the magic still settling into his new biology.
"You are still a star, Solarynth," Aditi murmured, her voice dropping to a low, resonant whisper. "Only now... you have a hearth to contain the fire. And a path to walk."
Aditi took a step forward, closing the distance between them until she was just a breath away. Despite the dampness of the earth, Solarynth could sense an unseen pressure shift in the air around Aditi—and a responding hum from where his own celestial might resided.
Up close he could sense the tell-tale itch of the volatile force crackling away inside his newly forged flesh, a wild spark of magical spite leaking out.
"You are already adapting to the magic of this world, Solarynth," Aditi observed softly, her voice brushing past the sound of the trickle nearby. A knowing smile curved her lips beneath the Aditi took a step forward, closing the distance between them until she was just a breath away. Despite the dampness of the earth, Solarynth could sense an unseen pressure shift in the air around Aditi - and a responding hum from where his own celestial might resided.
Up close he could sense the tell-tale itch of the volatile force crackling away inside his newly forged flesh, a wild spark of magical spite leaking out.
"You are already adapting to the magic of this world, Solarynth," Aditi observed softly, her voice brushing past the sound of the trickle nearby. A knowing smile curved her lips beneath the blindfold.
"Though, perhaps I should not be surprised. You are, after all, a proto-celestial star."
Solarynth stood petrified, having heard what she told him. Magic? What was that? It made no sense to him. How could something like that possibly exist? He tried to process the information, searching his memory, and all he knew of star systems, physics or thermodynamics failed to connect to the topic in question. His mind simply drew a blank.
"M-magic?" He stuttered in confusion, the word not sounding very appealing in his mouth. "What is it?"
Aditi simply smiled at the boy, understanding the problem he was having. The newly formed man didn't know what magic was, so Aditi decided to show him. Walking up to him, she raised her staff, which had the shape of a tree carved onto it, and planted the tip of it on the center of his chest, right where his new heart was located.
The world around him suddenly disappeared, replaced by a flurry of images only he could see, since Aditi had a blindfold over her eyes anyway. He saw countless hidden threads floating in the air, some holding the very ground above them together, others carrying the waters of various rivers away, the currents of the earth, the winds of arcana, and veins of dark energy running through it all, like the single thread of spite that ran through everyone's heart.
Suddenly, an image appeared in front of his eyes, one that made him realize a very important lesson indeed. It was burned into his retinas, along with the knowledge of the magic itself, now ingrained into his being.
Magic is not a power simply obtained and used by will alone
It is a force that must first be unbound, understood, learned, and only then defeated.
Solarynth gasped as his vision unfurled from the rivers of mana to the wet green rimmed bank where they had been moments ago. He panted, the knowledge of the visions twisting in his gut, seeping into his bones. Even as the vision receded, even as the sensation of floating above unfamiliar terrain, the embers of understanding still smoldered in his chest.
It was intoxicating.
It was terrifying.
Most of all though, it was insatiable.
"I... I need to know," Solarynth choked out as he looked down at Aditi with wide, desperate amber eyes. As he reached out, fingers hovering over her staff he realized how much he still did not know. "Please tell me how to control it. Show me how to manipulate this magic."
Aditi did not move as his fingers hovered over her staff. Blindfolded, her face was an unreadable mask, save for the soft knowing sigh she released.
"I cannot lead you down that road, Solarynth," she simply said.
"You can be given understanding. You can grasp control. But you were never meant to be carried."
As the words left her lips, Aditi tapped the butt of her staff sharply against the damp earth.
A flash of geometric light burst before Solarynth's eyes, sending a ripple of power skittering down his spine. Golden sigils flared into life in the space between them, twisting together to form a great circle of pale gold script that spun wildly around his feet. He staggered back, feeling the air tighten around his lungs like a vise.
"Wait-" he began but found his words swelled out by the sudden rush of air. The force of the runes pinned his shadow to the ground, chaining him to the glowing sigils that outlined a path that lead into the distance.
"Find your own footing, Solarynth," Aditi's voice called, muffled by the sudden flash of light.
As the last of the runes dissented into the air, Solarynth found himself falling—not onto the damp earth he expected but a roiling maw of darkness that stretched into the sky, the familiar trees and stream long gone.
The blinding flash dispersed into a haze of choking, sulfur-laced dust. Solarynth landed heavily on his knees on the cracked, sun-warmed earth that radiated the dry heat.
He stood up, coughing, the abrasive air scratching at his fresh lungs. Gone was the rich, verdant wilderness.
Instead, a vast, desolate graveyard stretched before his eyes.
His golden eyes narrowed against the bruised, ashen sky, his gaze falling to the gray dunes that littered the scorched ground with the bones of some long-dead massacre. Just a few feet from him, the skeletal remains of some gargantuan creature littered the silt in a violent twist of its spine and ribs, as if it had died mid-seizure.
Among the dunes, the scattered remnants of humanity were strewn, half-buried in the gray stone. At the edge of a jagged rock, a human skull grinned with bleached bones, cracks in the bone as if some titanic force pressed into its cranium with scorching heat.
There were no birds or running water to mask the sound of the wind's toxic whistles, or the steady, heavy thudding of his own heart that he was alone and completely vulnerable.
Solarynth stood in the middle of the desolate land, all around him. He was stranded. There was no coordinates, no reference to where the goddess sent him. All he saw were the broken, black spiky fortresses in the distance and the gray, stone arches surrounding him were closing in. He looked around, taking it all in, the feeling of unease crawling up and down his spine.
The gray, bleached bones partially uncovered in the dry ground sent a jolt of something unfamiliar deep inside his chest. His hands formed into fists at his sides, the feeling twisting and turning like ice in his veins. It was something foreign, something he never felt before. There was no name for it, at least in his newborn mind. His amber eyes widen in realization, the sudden feeling of dread and disgust burned away, leaving behind a strange sensation.
"...Where... the hell did she sent me.." Solarynth muttered darkly, his back turned at the desolate, ruined land surrounded by gray haze.
Solarynth took the first tentative step over the dead, rusty earth. His boots crunched over the brittle bits scattered on the ground. Jagged spiers of black and grey stone loomed around him and twisted into the grey sky above casting long menacing shadows on the desolate landscape.
He walked past the skeletal remains of some kind of bastion running a hand over a blackened and scorched pillar.
"Structures." He muttered to himself strangely out of place in the expanses. "Habitations...purpose built yet completely eradicated. Was there a stellar impact in this system? Some kind of confluence of energies perhaps?"
He paused looking at the jagged spiky structure rising like a broken mouth of stone and metal in the distance. The strange tightness in his chest flared again, a reaction to the place it seemed, some buried part in his person remembered. It reminded him of the strange sensation Aditi had told him about the undercurrents of power weaving though the very fabric of this planet.
"Magic." He whispered tasting the word with bitterness.
Looking down at his hands he flexed them feeling the tightness in his chest echo with the slow deep rhythm of his new heart. Aditi had said it with such force, such determination that it still rung in his ears.
It is a force that must be awakened, understood and controlled.
"Awakened." He repeated in a low rough voice as he stared up at the ashen horizon the foul wind whipping at his pale starlight-silver hair. "She would have me control over some unseen force in the fabric of this dead world."
He exhaled sharply, a scoffing sound the heat of his words pressing tight against his throat.
"Very well then. If this dead and barren grave is to be my crucible, let us see how much this vessel is capable of."
Solarynth abruptly came to a halt, skidding slightly on the ash covered dirt. He took in the sight of the skeletal ruins before him and slowly pulled his arm back as his fingers curled into a tight fist. He clenched his eyes shut as Aditi's words reverberated in his skull
It is a force that must be awoken...
"To awaken magic, I need to force something..." he muttered, his jaw set in a tight line."Alright, alright magic."
He opened his eyes suddenly and dropped into a crouch. To force something he had to reach into the only truth he knew, the omnipotent memory of what he remembered being. He pushed away the feeling of the dead land around him and forced himself to remember the all consuming speed he had wielded as a fledgling star before he had died and become this.
Crouching low, Solarynth prepared himself in a runner's start as he painfully remembered the speed he had known. He had no idea if the blistering fast pace he had used to race through the vacuum of space before would have the same effect on this much denser planet.
He pushed himself off the ground and ran.
It was all very normal, very mundane actually, save for the fact that he had no proper running posture to speak of. As such, his running started off awkwardly though he quickly found himself adjusting to make up for his lack of form. His speed soon became equal to that of any average human being.
As the ashen ruins quickly passed by in his field of view he found himself thinking
Is it this vessel that holds me back... or do I simply not grasp the force I seek?
He was very heavily panting now, finding the running incredibly taxing to this particular body in a way that made no sense to him. He had no reason to feel such exhaustion when his travels in the void had been entirely weightless and without air resistance. Even so, he forced himself forwards with renewed determination to push past the unknown limit holding him back.
BAM!!
His sudden momentum was stopped dead in its tracks by an invisible wall of impossibly hard muscle and flesh. He flew backwards, skidding on the ashen ground with a heavy groan.
"Ugh..!"
Solarynth gritted his teeth as he pushed himself up, eyeing the mass of muscle and fur that had stopped him. Looking up at the giant was like looking up at an apple from the height of a microscope. Thick, curling horns adorned the giant's head, and a heavy, whip like bull's tail wagged lazily behind it.
The giant had the body of a man, but was otherwise unmistakably a bull. This was no mere man, but a Minotaur.
With a deep, rumbling growl the giant turned around, its powerful legs shaking the ground with each step. It lowered itself onto its knees before raising its hulking frame to glare at Solarynth with bloodshot eyes, tossing a single, jagged great axe in its hand carelessly as it did so.
Solarynth lay on his back in the dirt, regarding the towering beast before him with unafraid amber eyes. There was nothing but clinical interest in his gaze, not even a trace of fear, because he had no idea what it was capable of. He pushed himself off the ground, brushing the gray residue from his snug attire as he came to his feet, regarding the giant with renewed curiosity.
"You're... interesting," the young man stated simply.
His eyes trailed over the thick, heaving mass of the minotaur's chest, following the steady rise and fall. The creature let loose a deep, rumbling growl, expelling a thick wisp of steam from its nostrils in a show of aggression.
Regardless, Solarynth took a step forward, unperturbed. He had no concept of the rules governing this realm, and he had no internalized fear that told him to turn and run from the hulking beast before him.
For several long moments, the minotaur simply loomed over him, its bloodshot eyes narrowing at the strange, pale figure in front of it. Then, slowly, deliberately, it took a step forward, its mass of a body crouching ever so slightly as it loomed over the small human.
Solarynth tilted his head to the side, regarding the creature with an almost amused expression.
There was nothing but the barest trace of fear in his golden eyes.
Curiosity, perhaps, but mostly mild interest.
He took in the stance of the minotaur, taking in the shift of its bulk, the movement of its thick shoulders, the way its powerful hand was gripping the handle of the battleaxe.
"So... you're hostile, then," he murmured.
The minotaur let loose a deep growl in reply, and Solarynth's amber eyes narrowed with intrigue.
The minotaur's nostrils flared, a guttural snort echoing in the air filled with ash. Mistakenly taking Solarynth's analytical gaze as an insult, the creature swung it's powerful arms back, one huge battleaxe whipping through the air and whistling past his ear.
Instinct told Solarynth to move. He threw himself back and sideways, but it was not soon enough. The heavy metal bit into his right arm, slicing it with cruel precision, the torn flesh flying past him.
The weapon scraped past the bone, leaving a wide opening in his flesh, the pale white of the bone peeking out from the wound.
Solarynth winced as he flipped end over end, the feeling of the battleaxe cleaving through his muscles sending a wave of nausea over him, before finally landing on a hill of bones.
For a moment, there was only the sound of his breathing before a wave of pain shot up his side. He gritted his teeth against the sudden agony, the feeling of his flesh being peeled back like hot iron was dragged across his nerves.
Solarynth choked back a gasp, hissing in alarm as he looked at his mangled arm, only to realize with growing horror that there wasn't a trace of blood staining the torn fabric of his shirt. Instead, a river of condensed starlight shot forth from the large opening in his sleeve, hissing and hissing against the dry earth, the liquefied plasma the embodiment of the star that once was his heart.
The feeling of detachment that once plagued him was gone, replaced with something far worse. A wave of sheer mortal fear crashed over him, and he let out a pained whimper, heart hammering in his ears as he shot backwards on his knees, horrified at how easily his very being coud be shattered.
Trembling with pain clutching his mangled arm. Clenching his jaw against the pain and cursing up a storm as liquid starlight hissed against the wound over the dirt. He forced his eyes from the pain past the pain, past the blood tracing down his forearm, exposing the whiteness of bone beneath and met the hate and terror of a glare to the minotaur...