He felt at ease beside the stargazer, finding a kindred spirit in them which he hadn’t felt in some time. There had been other shed-stars to come to Denocte – yes. But the shed-stars had never been a particularly close knit group. The People had valued knowledge and fortune above all others. Children were born, taken from their parents, and raised as simply another cog in the wheel. Stories were passed, more out of necessity – to teach instead of entertain. Youth were cherished, but as the continuation of a bloodline instead of the warmth of a child. He had never been given the opportunity to know love and affection, never understood it, until he came to this place.
Denocte had given him everything he hadn’t known in his past life. But there was still a piece of him which longed for the homeland he’d known and lost, most of all, for it’s closeness to the stars. But they were warm and near here too, bright and shining as they always had, if not a bit further than he’d known them before. “Your world sounds beautiful too – idyllic. Were the stars different from what you see here?”
He watches as the heavens turn, as minutes click by. They might have stood together for hours, each in awe of the way the starfields changed as dusk turns to night, night back to dawn. Lazy clouds pass by in front of them, but he knows the patterns well enough to recite them from memory. “Cepheus. Carina. Centarus.” He whispers as he counts, taking in the beauty of them as if seeing them for the first-time all over again. “I find the brightest ones each night, wondering all that they have seen. Wars, the birth of nations, their fall.... They are three just there, forming in a triangle… Altair, Vega, Deneb.” He pointes out the stars as if they are his friends, naming them with a fondness, his voice warm with wonder.
“The People believe that when you die, your soul ascends to the heavens and a star is born. But I have seen a star die too… have held one in my touch.” For in a strange and poetic turn of events, Azrael’s own glow had come from a dying star, clinging to him as a last beacon of hope in this mortal realm, passing on its light before it faded into the earth. It was Caligo, he had decided, who blessed him with the starlight, and he whispered a prayer under his breath when thinking of it, a prayer that only the goddess could hear.
“What do you think they see, when they look upon us? What would they wish for, if stars could dream a wish to life?”
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