The stars are falling through these broken skies

Like tears they dance across our opened eyes

One glimpse of dream

Has found me in this endless knowing

Threads past all the stars to make you shine

Two silver rings

That draw me close in careless motion

And dance across the depths of sea and sky

And nothing now could keep me from your side

Amhose, Warrior-poet, before her disappearance at the Battle of the Scarred Peak

[Editors note: this is a rough translation to modern Pelagic of one of the early essays written by Amhose, famed Warrior-poet and philosopher. She was not famous for her scientific or astronomical skills, but was well known for several volumes of work – some now lost – summarizing the theories and ideas of other philosophers, poets and astrologers, in a relatively objective (though one cannot say impassive) way. This essay is not her most famous, which most people commonly accept to be her love poems entitled Only if for a Night, but it is a clear and relatively modern perspective on what various philosophers, astrologers and other thinkers have theorized about the stars]

Prologue

We have all had this experience, or should have if we are to count ourselves adults and fully-formed souls in these difficult times: you wake in the early hours before battle, your lover’s bronzed skin a streak of liquid amber against the rugs and blankets of your battle-tent, flickering in the last light of the candle that was the last witness of your best exertions. Your mind is still, calm with the last langour of lust sated, not yet urgent and twitching with the sense of the coming battle. You stir, your lover murmurs some sweet words, but you are quiet, and anyway it is better to rest before the coming bloody dawn, so you slide out of bed and slip on a gown, wondering “why am I awake?” And as always before the battle you find yourself standing outside the tent, the first light of dawn roseate on the far horizon, the sun shard gone, its strange play of silver and faint blue-greens lost from the darkness. In its place the stars blaze, a million tiny points of light that could be just over your head, close enough to reach, or a bow’s shot away, or so far away that no bird or magic could ever reach them. Elusive points of light, purposeless, cold, so near yet so far. You have killed under their indifferent flickering light, they have served as props for some empty declaration of love that wooed a stranger to your bed, they have witnessed your quiet tears for comrades dead and lovers lost and secrets buried, though doubtless they cared not at all. Always there, silent, inscutable, unknown, unreachable. What are they? You stare at them as you sip your drink and the camp lightens slowly, inexorably as the dawn light streaks the sky pink and the storm clouds of distant battle gather in your heart.

What are they? Do they have a purpose? What can we make of them? I have wondered for years, and as I wandered this land I have asked many people – farmers, warriors, rimewardens, maidens, crones, old men in the market place and young men in my bed, Astrologers, bakers, beggars and lords – and I have learnt many theories about their strange, constant, alien beauty. Sadly the study of these stars is relatively new, having only begun long after we settled our peoples after the Harrowing, and mostly confined to the idiosyncratic interests of a few Astrologers. The dwarves use them for navigation but are reported to have a singular lack of interest in them beyond that, and although the elves are known to be able to communicate under the stars, there theories of the origin or nature of their friends in the sky are a mystery to humans. Is this by design or simply because of their lack of interest in humans? Regardless, study of the stars is limited and relatively new, and questions far more common than answers. Here, then, let me describe what I have learnt. Perhaps after I am gone – after we all are gone – someone will be able to make sense of the ramblings of many philosophers, and come to some ultimate conclusion about these elusive points of light. Or perhaps not. In any case, let us consider the folly of modern thought about this strangest and most impenetrable mystery of our lands and skies.

The facts

Abraxis, in his timeless work Logic and its Inquities, argues that before we even begin with first principles we should confirm and agree upon those facts which are incontrovertible with respect to the matter at hand, and those things that we can confirm and all agree upon with the evidence of our own senses. Only then, Abraxis argues, can we begin to build a theory of that which we do not know. Had Abraxis followed his own guidance he might have noticed what was happening between his young wife and the dairy maid, and would not thus have ended his life so when the truth was revealed to him that fatal day on the rocks above that part of coast we now call Abraxis Reach; but his own failings notwithstanding, his method is as solid as a steel sword in a firm grip. Let us then confirm some facts, and ascertain some basic details about what everyone agrees our senses tell us about this strange topic (by which I refer of course to the stars, not Abraxis’s failed love life).

We humans have lived on the Archipelago for 1000 years, but because of the Harrowing we lost all our knowledge of the time before we came here, and do not know where we came from or why we came here. Elves, dwarves and deepfolk lived here in grace and savagery before we arrived, but it is not known whether Wildlings and Changelings came with us, before us, after us, or were always here. Humans began to settle towns and cities permanently about 800 years ago, after the end of the Harrowing, with the help of elves and dwarves, and have been building a coherent, continued history for 700 years or so. During that time conflict with deepfolk has been constant, though it ebbs and flows, and I am unlucky to have been born at the peak of one of those flows, which is why the hands that write this text are calloused from sword rather than ploughshare. That lost 300 years of history have cursed us to an uncertain community: We do not know how long we were in the Archipelago before the deepfolk turned on us and the Harrowing began, whether one generation or several, and the reason the Harrowing ended and the story of how humans first settled permanent towns and cities is also shrouded in mystery, though we believe that it was done with help from the elves and the dwarves. The elves taught us stonework, the dwarves made us shipwrights, and the Wildlings taught us to fight. Now we have spread out across all the lands where they did not live, and naturally when we stand on those lands under the night sky we look to the stars.

The stars are a mystery, as is the sunshard. We can see them on a clear night, indicating that they must lie behind the most distant clouds, and they clearly generate or shine with light. Some stars are fixed in the firmanent, some move erratically, and some move in stable patterns that repeat over generations. Some, it is believed, are on stable patterns that repeat so slowly that we may have seen them only once since the Harrowing, and perhaps maybe those others which appear erratic are simply moving in patterns too slow or too complex to have been measured in the short space of human history. Stars have been known to disappear, but our catalogue of these tiny flickering lights in the sky is incomplete, and so we do not know if new ones are born. No one has seen a star during the day, but they can be seen when the sun shard is dancing. It is also known that elves can dream under the stars and share those dreams with each other, though little is known about the elven relationship with the stars beyond this. We can view stars with a telescope, but they simply appear as larger lights with no detail or further structure. So what are they, and what do great thinkers believe about them?

The theories

Let us immediately dispense with the most outlandish notions, for though we are here to discuss speculation we must not humour insanity. The scholar-physician Banu Delecta, for example, believes stars to be distant equivalents of our own sun, which may be warming other lands as our sun warms ours, and beneath which it is even possible other humans – or stranger creatures – live. We obviously reject such nonsense out of hand. Let us also reject also the stranger pscyho-philosophical musings, such as those of the idiot-savant Kanta, who believed that the stars are an extension of human dreaming, and that if we all willed it so we could eliminate night altogether, and live a lifetime of perpetual daylight. Kanta believed that the stars were a representation of all the souls of humanity, shining in the sky as they allowed their own fears and confusion to create a shroud of night over the earth. After 30 days without sleep, it is said that Kanta lost his own mind, and thankfully so his theories were lost to us in his mad apotheosis on the isle of Kaen. Dragons, perhaps, also do not accept preposterous theories of the universe.

So to more tangible explanations of the nature of the stars. Many scholars have proposed that they are fragments of our own sun, cast far across the sky in an ancient cataclysm that weakened the sun and left embers of it burning in the deeps of night. Some say this cataclysm accompanied or even triggered our arrival in the Archipelago, while others believe it predated that event and even predates the the arrival of elves and dwarves in the Archipelago, if indeed they ever arrived here and are not native to these shores. This theory explains the extinction of stars, which are perhaps embers burning out, and the strange movements of others – perhaps some of those embers are still careening though the darkness of empty space beyond our skies, spinning and tumbling in fire through the distant heavens. If so then one day they will all fade, and the sky will become a clean black slate. But this theory does not explain why we cannot see stars in the day, or why some of these chunks of light are not larger than others.

Analactia proposed a Two Worlds Theory, in which the darkness of the night sky is a shroud between our world and another, and our sun most also move around and between that other world, which is why it is not in our own sky constantly. Then, the shroud between the worlds is sometimes rent or torn or has tiny holes, and so we can see the light of that other world as the sun traverses its daytime sky, shining through the rents in the sky to remind us that our sun will return. This theory is complete in its own right, but it raises many questions, and in particular I am concerned to know when the denizens of that other world will find a way through the shroud of night, so that I must fight them. Others, such as the renegade Astrologer Zenobix, have proposed a many worlds version of this theory, though these are less attractive except in that they offer a wider array of opponents for me to one day face in battle.

A variant of this Two Worlds theory is the much-derided Two Levels theory. In this idea the world of the deepfolk is actually somehow removed from ours, and is a kind of inverse world in which our sun shines during our night, and the deepfolk are in every sense an inverse of us – cruel where we are kind, hating our day and loving our night while they love their day and hate their night, rich in steel where we are poor, and so on. In this Two Levels theory the land of the deepfolk is on the other side of the sky, not underground, and the tunnels where we find and fight the deepfolk are simply entries to the other world, and the stars are variously the rents between those worlds, or the ways in which all forms of immorality seep into our world through the thin veil that separates us. I have fought deepfolk above and belowground, and I am sure that they have no sunlight in the world where they live, so I do not accept this theory. They are horrible pale-skinned monsters who crawl beneath the earth in darkness and ordure, and that is all the philosophy we need to understand them.

Other philosophers, such as Nedia the Younger, suggest that the sky is a kind of realm of the spirit, and our souls become stars fixed in that firmanent after we die. In Nedia’s cosmology, the sun departs from the sky for half of the day so that we may see the souls that have left us, and when we sleep we draw closer to the collective memory of our ancestors. In Nedia the Younger’s celestial vision our dreams are a way of drawing collective wisdom from those who lived on this earth before us, and we inherited this practice in a weakened form from the elves, who are able to commune with their own ancestors in their dreams, and can use the firmament as a medium of communication precisely because they understand as a people that it is the medium in which lost souls are embalmed. Some have observed – often somewhat critically – that the elves have no such theory of their own souls (indeed, anyone who has fought alongside elves might be led to wonder if they have souls at all!), and others have pointed out that simple mathematics suggests that if this theory is true ultimately the sky will become a single field of brilliant light and we will never again be able to sleep under the burdensome brilliance of our own ancestors’ post-mortem glow. How will I be able to take a new lover when all my past lovers who died in battle (not with me (mostly)) are up there looking down on me? I cast my salt-thanks regularly in appreciation of tents, against the possibility that this theory holds any truth.

The Romantics claim that the stars are a remnant of our tears from the Harrowing, fixed in the firmanent to remind us of our suffering. This is why the three stars known as Sword, Sigh and Tear circle back to their fixed positions over the Archipelago every year at the time of the Harrowing, and why the stars burn brightest at that time. They are the permanent reminder of that tragedy, and also the reason that the stars stir in so many of us feelings of regret, longing, sadness and hope. The Romantics, of course, have idiosyncratic ideas about dwarves and elves, which might explain why their theory does not consider the pre-existing history of the elves and dwarves on this matter (but we all know that if the Romantics had their way, there would be no dwarves or elves). I cannot credit the Romantics with any philosophical or scientific depth, and in general consider their few remaining adherents to be good for nothing except cheap banter, drinking songs, and an occasional robust brawl. I doubt their cosmological theories hold up much better than their brawling skills, either.

My personal belief is that this is all nonsense. The stars simply are, they have always been in the sky and always will, sometimes changing and sometimes dying, sometimes fixed and eternal. They move on patterns of no relevance to our own lives, and any finding that a star or a constellation affects matters in the Archipelago is simply coincidence, or the result of humans fitting patterns of our lives to the movements of the stars. For example, perhaps during the Harrowing humans fixed the Sword, Sigh and Tear as a good measure of time, and decided to define a year that way, so that after the Harrowing was over the beginning of years was fixed to those stars, and they have no connection otherwise to our history of torment and exile. We are here, they are there, and the deepfolk are beneath us, plotting and scheming. So it is that I must put aside my pen, again, cease my reading and speculation about the nature of the heavens, pick up my sword against the one and only threat that faces all of us, and act on the only philosophy that matters – the complete and utter extermination of deepfolk. The stars will be in their fixed, cold movements in the heavens long after I am gone, and I cannot change that, but I hope the deepfolk will be dead and gone by my hand, in my lifetime, and that at the end of that great fight I can turn my face up to the stars’ cold indifference, show them the blood on my hands, and tell them that I do not care what they are because I am, I slew, and I won.