Page 21 of Starlit Bargains

But Kai was already moving toward the temple, his feet carrying him up the worn stone steps and onto the ancient floor. Something had changed since the previous night. New markings—or perhaps old ones that had been hidden—now traced their way up the crumbling columns.

“Look at this,” he said, approaching the nearest column. Strange symbols had been carved into the stone, reminiscent of the patterns in the floor but more deliberate, more precise. They seemed to tell a story, spiraling up the column from base to broken top.

“Those weren't visible yesterday,” Briar observed, flitting closer to examine the markings. “I would have noticed.”

“They're similar to the floor pattern that lit up when our magic connected,” Kai murmured, reaching out to trace one of the symbols with his fingertip. “I wonder if?—”

The moment his skin made contact with the carved marking, the world around him dissolved.

Light—blinding, all-encompassing light—surrounded him, not painful but so intense he couldn't see anything else. Then, gradually, shapes began to form within the brilliance. Stars, countless stars, spread out in all directions, but not as Kai had ever seen them from earth. These were close, vibrant, alive with colors no human eye could normally perceive.

And among them, radiant and terrible in his beauty, stood Eliar.

Not the Eliar that Kai knew—the quiet, brooding man with sad eyes and careful movements. This was Eliar as he truly was, or had been: a being of pure celestial energy, his form only vaguely humanoid, composed of light and starfire. Wings of cosmic energy stretched from his back, spanning what seemed like galaxies. His eyes, still that impossible blue, contained entire universes.

He stood at the boundary between realms, a guardian at his post, watching over the thin line that separated one reality from another. Other beings like him—though none quite the same—maintained similar positions throughout the cosmos, their vigilance eternal.

Then came discord—a disturbance in the cosmic order. Kai couldn't grasp the full nature of the conflict, could only sense that Eliar had questioned something, had refused an order, had looked upon humanity with compassion rather than the cold judgment expected of him.

The vision shifted. Eliar stood before others of his kind, their radiance collectively blinding. Words Kai couldn't understand but somehow felt reverberated through the void: betrayal, disobedience, exile.

And then, the fall.

Eliar's celestial form, stripped of much of its glory, hurtling through darkness. The pain was immense, immeasurable—not just physical agony as his immortal essence was constrained and diminished, but a deeper anguish of separation, of loss, of purpose destroyed.

Impact. A crater formed where he struck the earth, the land forever changed by his arrival. Forests grew around the impact site over centuries, hiding the evidence but not erasing it. And in time, humans built a temple over the place where a star had fallen, sensing its sacredness without understanding its origin.

The visions flickered faster: Eliar wandering through human history, always apart, always watching, his power bound but not entirely gone. Villagers dreaming of falling stars, creating myths to explain what they sensed but could not see. And throughout it all, Eliar's solitude—a punishment not of pain but of isolation, of eternal separation from his kind.

Until now. Until Kai. Until something in Kai's magic called to what remained of Eliar's celestial nature, creating a resonance that neither expected but both felt to their cores.

The vision ended as abruptly as it had begun, leaving Kai gasping, one hand still pressed against the carved symbol on the temple column. He stumbled backward, overwhelmed by what he'd seen, by the enormity of Eliar's existence and the depth of his loss.

“Kai?” Briar's voice seemed to come from very far away. “Kai, what happened? You went completely still for almost a minute.”

He blinked, trying to reorient himself to the present, to his physical body standing in a ruined temple in a darkening forest. The symbols on the column were glowing faintly now, a soft blue-white light that matched the color of Eliar's eyes.

“I saw him,” Kai whispered, his voice unsteady. “I saw what he was. Before.”

“Before what?” Briar asked, hovering anxiously in front of his face.

“Before he fell.” Kai sank down onto the temple floor, legs suddenly unable to support him. “He wasn't just someone with magical powers, Briar. He was... something else entirely. Something ancient. Something cosmic.”

“A star,” she said softly. “Like the villagers say in their stories.”

“More than that,” Kai shook his head, struggling to find words adequate to describe what he'd glimpsed. “But he... disobeyed. Showed mercy or compassion when he was supposed to be coldly impartial.” He looked up at the darkening sky, where the first stars were becoming visible. “And they cast him out for it.”

The implications of what he'd seen were still unfolding in his mind. Eliar hadn't just been punished; he'd been fundamentally changed, his very essence constrained into a pale shadow of what it once was. And yet, even that diminished power was beyond anything Kai had encountered before.

“Why would your magic connect with his?” Briar wondered aloud, settling on Kai's knee. “What makes you different from all the other humans he's encountered over centuries?”

It was the question at the heart of everything, and Kai had no answer. Only a lingering feeling from the vision—a sense that the connection between them wasn't random chance but something deeper, something perhaps even older than Eliar's fall.

“I don't know,” he admitted. “But I intend to find out.”

As they sat in the gathering darkness, the temple ruins coming alive with softly glowing symbols, Kai felt something shift inside him—a certainty that his life had irrevocably changed the moment he'd met Eliar's star-filled eyes in that alley. Whatever was happening between them, whatever consequences might follow, there was no turning back.

He had glimpsed a fragment of the truth about Eliar, and it only made him hunger for more. Not just out of curiosity now, but out of a growing conviction that their meeting hadn't been coincidence—that perhaps they were meant to find each other, to wake something that had been sleeping far too long.

---