51 The King of Achar
54 Journeying through the Night
57 While WolfStar Lay Sleeping
62 The Warding of the Star Gate
If poisonous minerals, and if that tree
Whose fruit threw death on else immortal us,
If lecherous goats, if serpents envious
Cannot be damned, alas, why should I be?
Why should intent or reason, born in me,
Make sins, else equal, in me more heinous?
John Donne, Holy Sonnet no. V
The four craft crashed through the barriers between the outer universe and the planet, exploding in raging flames, creating the portal that later races would call the Star Gate.
The creatures inside fought for control of the craft, fought even knowing it was a lost cause – the craft had ceased to listen to them hundreds of years previously. But even when death was only moments away, their hands clung to navigation mechanisms, hoping to somehow save their cargo … and maybe even save the world to which they plummeted from their cargo.
It was useless. Most of them were drifting ashes by the time their flaming craft smashed deep into the surface of the planet.
Most of them. One, like the four craft, survived.
Within days the craft had shifted comfortably into the pits created by their violent arrival, accepting the waters that closed over their surface. For three thousand years they dreamed. Then they woke and began to grow, spreading their tentacles deep beneath the land, reaching out, each to the other. Their metalled surfaces and walkways and panels and compartments hummed with the music they had learned in the millennia they’d travelled the universe. But this music the craft kept to themselves, not letting it mix with the sound of the Star Dance that filtered through the Star Gate.
The Survivor occasionally woke from his own deep sleep, wandering the corridors of the craft and those hallways that extended between each craft, looking, looking, looking, but never finding.
“Katie!” he would cry, “Katie! I don’t know where it is!”
His searching always left him physically and emotionally exhausted, and within days of waking he would wander disconsolately back to his chamber, and there lie down to sleep yet again.
His dreams were disturbed, wondering why he’d survived, and yet not his comrades.
Wondering what the craft needed him to do.
Wondering whether the cargo was safe.
Wondering whether it would ever be claimed.
Wondering.
Aeons passed.
Enchanter-Talon WolfStar SunSoar wrapped his wings tighter about his body and slipped deeper into the madness that consumed him. He stood at the very lip of the Star Gate itself, his body swaying gently to the sounds of the Star Dance that pounded through the Gate.
Come to me, come to me, join me, dance with me! Come!
Oh! How WolfStar wanted to! How he wanted to fling himself through the Gate, discover the mysteries and adventures of the universe, immerse himself completely in the loveliness of the Star Dance.
Yet
