An excerpt from "The Path Retaken"

Below is a short story around which my third novel revolves. Enjoy:

Let me tell you the tale of a special child, born of the stars. One night a maiden lay on the ground gazing up at the stars. She’d done this many nights. But this night was unlike the others. She saw a streak in the sky, an arc of light. A star had fallen free. It swam through the sky towards her. As it approached she rose to her feet, frightened.

The light filled the night sky bathing everything in white. Gone was the darkness, its radiance stretching across the horizon. Her fear melted away as she and the star stared at one another. It seemed limitless to her mortal eyes.

“Are you alright fair star?” she asked her celestial companion.

The star had seen her from his distant land. He had fallen in love with her. He had come to profess his amorous intentions.

She marveled at his beauty as she reached to touch him. They shared a special moment, there, alone on the plains below.

But it wasn’t meant to be. The other stars warned him of his fate should he stay too long in the mortal realm. Their laws were different from those of the heavens. Stars were not meant for man to see and feel. They told him that if he did not return he would dim and die. The Earth was not their place. He refused to believe them, the love he felt causing him to burn brighter than when he’d been alone in the night sky. He would not accept the loneliness of the horizon.

As they had predicted his light began to fade. But he would not go. He did not want to let her go. As the days passed away he shrunk smaller and smaller, his brilliance dimming. This mortal love had burned away his essence and left him a flickering core barely able to sustain itself against the savage winds of the world.

The girl was sad, weeping as she held him in her hand. She asked, “What was wrong?”

He told her of what the stars had said, of how he would fade away.

She asked him, “Why he hadn’t left?”

He told her that he would rather spend a moment with her than an eternity of watching and wondering. He wanted to know what it was like to live and love rather than watch and never understand. She had drawn him away from his isolated world and filled him with such curiosity of what life would be like shared with someone else. To no longer be alone. Some would say he had fallen. He believed…that he had only exchanged one life for a better one.

Then the night came when he was no more than a spark, his voice so soft as to barely tremble as a whisper. He told her that his time was nearly gone. She pleaded with him to return to the sky but he couldn’t go. He could not bear to let go of what he held most dear. To spend eternity unable to touch her or speak to her…only able to remember…he would rather die having lived fully than to live in eternal emptiness. As he wavered he asked for one more embrace before the darkness took him. Tears in her eyes, she held him close and felt him pass away becoming only a memory.

She wandered alone, beneath the stars, for many months after that. She could not bring herself to see the horizon as she once had. Once a land of legends and dreams it was now only a reminder of loss and pain. There was a hole in the heavens, a jewel missing from the treasure of the cosmos that would forever render that collection incomplete.

With time she came to realize that he was not completely gone. A part of him had lived on inside her. It grew within her, forged a new life. It was a child born of their union. He was conceived of both worlds. A bridge of sorts. She held him in awe. His skin glowed like his father’s though his face was hers. He was a pale child with eyes that shined as twin spheres of magnificence. The heavens were enraptured by him as the stars swam and spiraled, their games lasting throughout the days to come.

The boy grew and came to realize he was special. Whatever he wished…he could do. At first he would make his dreams real, enjoying adventures told of myths that his mother related. Then his interest spread to the wood. He held no fear for the trees or the beasts inside. He entered and spoke to the animals laughing at their tales and discovering they were not much different from his mother and him. But what he loved to do most was fly through the sky. Taught by the stars, he would soar through the clouds and see the whole of the world beneath him. As he saw more and more, traveled further than the wood or the plain, his mind ventured farther.

As the days went by a question rose within his mind. He saw that his mother lacked his abilities as did the animals of the wood. Where he could do anything with a wish others had to struggle. Why did he have this power? Was it to serve some higher purpose? Was he meant to do something with it for surely there was a reason to everything? In his time with the stars staring down at the Earth he had seen the connection and interaction of all things discovering the laws that bound all life. Yet he remained outside that circle and it bothered him.

He asked his mother, “How was it that I can do such wondrous things?”

She told him the power that he held was not of this world and thus not something she could explain. She told him to speak to the stars for surely they knew for they were immortal and understood all.

So he went out onto the plain and looked to his ancestors. He asked them, “Why am I born with such power?”

They told him that they too were baffled. None of them wielded such power. Perhaps there was no reason, they told him, for if they, who could see all, could not see this then truly there was nothing to see.

But the child could not believe that. All of nature was a balance. To believe himself something that threatened that, to be unnatural, caused him to feel isolated. Perhaps he should not have been. Perhaps he threatened the whole of all things.

As years passed the question challenged him. For all his wishes this was the one thing he had to struggle to understand. When he thought the answer was within his grasp it would slip away. He became frustrated. Angry. He began to believe himself to have no purpose. His wishes became fewer and his brightness began to dim.

And then the day came when his mother died. She had lived a long life and was ready. The child, now a man, began to wish her a longer life but she stopped him. It was not for him to decide her fate but herself. It was her time and he had to let her go. He begged her to let him save her but she refused. Though another day would be a blessing it was not what she was meant to have. In her heart she knew it was time to go and in that she found the answer that her son had long sought.

He had asked everyone else why he was and never truly asked himself. If he wished to understand then he had only to look into his own heart to find his answer. She passed away from the world, her words all that survived past that last breath.

The man went out onto the plain, his soul in pain. The stars could not console him as he wept. He fell to his knees on the grass and almost wished himself out of existence until he heard a whisper. It told him not to give up. The voice surprised him as there was no one there.

He asked, “Who are you that speaks to me?”

It replied, “I am your heart.”

“Why now do you speak to me?”

His heart replied, “I have always spoken to you. It was only now that you listen.”

“But I have never heard you.”

His heart chided him. “You have never listened because you were never still. Your constant thoughts always deafened you to me.”

He did not understand, but his heart told him he did.

The man asked his quiet heart, “What is your purpose?”

“To tell you yours.”

“I do not understand.”

“When one is born their purpose is held in their heart. It is there that their answers lie should they truly want them.”

“Then why am I?” he asked his heart.

“You exist because of the bond shared between his father and mother. You are born of something more than Earth and Heaven. You are love.”

“I do not understand.”

His heart told him, “You are capable of anything, to overcome all obstacles. You are the sole immortal creation of mortal make. You can make dreams come true and make sense of senseless things. You are hope and faith. Your gift was created that the world might come to understand more than simply life. You were conceived that the world might learn to live. Too many wait until their end to listen learning only then to hear their heart and regret the destiny they had failed to achieve. You were born to help them realize.”

The man finally had the answer that had long been the sole goal of his life but rather than fill him with triumph it stung him with pain.

He looked up to the sky from whence he came and knew that his place was no longer here on Earth. He had to go where he could inspire and be seen, where he could watch over and guide. He would have to leave this life behind that others might live.

With one final tear he ascended into the sky to take his father’s place in the heavens. He is there still, the brightest of all stars, his whispers and wishes guiding man to listen to their heart that he might not waste their lives looking for an answer that they always had.