Wednesday 17 July 2013

Starchild

"It's not as easy as it looks, is it?" he asked, watching them attempt the complicated steps of the star dance. 

He only knew one other guy who had managed to catch a star. It took time and patience and luck, but catching a falling star gave you a chance of granting you a wish, and for most people, that was temptation enough. Some said that if you had enough money, there were big corporations like StarScope who would catch a star on your behalf, but it cost a hell of a lot of money and with no guarantee that your wish would come true, not a lot of people were willing to gamble on that sort of luck. 

The other guy he knew was his dad, and some people said he was the product of that wish. 

Glen Starcatcher, they called his dad now, who had become something like a local celebrity in his village. There were very few who had caught stars in the world, and to think that there were two from their own little village made people flock from far and wide in hopes that it would be easier to catch a star there instead of their parts of the world. 

His parents had named him Elnath, a good name for a starchild they had said. 

He wondered if it was true what they said. That star children were blessed, with their golden eyes and luminous skin, features that gave them an almost unearthly look. That star children had connections to the cosmos that others didn't. He didn't know any other star children, so he had no idea. 

He often wondered if there was any further purpose to being a star child. Sometimes he dreamt of travelling between the stars to worlds far away, and sometimes he imagined whispers in his consciousness, telling him to learn the star dance. 

 Some part of him feared learning. 

What if he failed? 

He would be that failure, the star child that could not master the dance - for it was very few who could master the intricracies of the dance itself. And some part of him feared what would happen if he really could master the dance - and what would be the consequences should a star child tap into that reservoir.

But he always watched those training with his golden eyes, practising their steps by the moonlight of the river, practising their calling of the stars, hoping that perhaps they would one day too make that connection to a falling star and it would become theirs. 

So he watched, and dreamt, and feared.

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