Chapter Text
Beginning Roughly Around 800 B.C.E.
Long ago there lived a small, wandering group of storytellers. For a few hundred years, they traveled throughout the world in places that, many centuries later, would be known as Eurasia and Northern Africa. They collected stories from all kinds of people, spinning them into greater stories to pass along to the next people they visited. Music and song, dance and theatrics. It did not matter the method the story was passed on, for they would choose the medium that best suited the story being shared. This group never grew very large in numbers—as they only would gain new children by taking in and caring for those who had been abandoned or orphaned—but they were strong in spirit, and respected by many who had the delight of hearing them weave and spin their stories.
They had a name, these wandering story-sharers, a name that has long been lost to time. After all, who would remember the storytellers when they were dead? When they kept their personal names to themselves? For as they believed in the power within a story, they also believed that stories should not have the names of the teller attached, lest the focus go from story to teller. It should be the story that survives.
Many groups throughout the history of this world, and many before it and after it, have been lost to the sands of time, memory, and dreams. Some are left only known in whispered rumors passed from parent to child over generations—others are forgotten entirely. Even gods fade, when their people do. Gods cannot exist without their humans to remember them.
The only beings that would never fade were known as The Endless. Siblings that were of their very nature essential to life. They had countless names given to them, but their duties remained largely the same. They were Destiny, Death, Dream, Destruction, Desire, Despair, Delirium. They were conceptual, abstracts of existence that would never fade. The only one who ever changed their purpose was the youngest, Delirium, once known as Delight. Why she changed it, not even the most knowledgeable of storytellers could say. There are secrets kept when delight turns delirious.
But, like many groups throughout history, the storytellers had their own gods. Or rather, a singular goddess, one born of their devotion to their craft. They were, at their beginning, a single group of refugee children, who wove their stories together for comfort as they traveled to flee a dying nation that would be soon lost to time. They were scared, but unyielding. The gods of their nation, they knew, had abandoned the people.
And so they figured they might as well create their own through their stories, passing the tales of a storyteller’s goddess down through a few generations of rescued children. Children were the key to the stories taking life—a child’s unfaltering belief is naturally the strongest sort of devotion humans could produce. And so, the children took the stories told by the adults and whispered them to each other when they settled each night together. They believed in a goddess from the stars, one who wove stories in thin air, using light and laughter and hums and tears. She told stories that gave the children only the best of dreams.
And one night, as the group settled for the evening in a forest clearing, the storytellers were all transfixed by the night sky. Stars flew around the sky, brilliant stress of light that would be known as a meteor shower to the people who saw this sort of delight centuries and millennia later. It was under this heavenly sky that the older adults told the children once more of the goddess from those stars, saying that if the children believed in her, she would make sure they had good dreams.
At the first rays of dawn, the adults discovered the new child amongst the children, who were all piled together like kittens and puppies, sleeping late from the excitement the night before. The adults were whispering, a few of them frightened, all of them unsure—for no other groups of people were near and yet this lovely little child had appeared unnoticed in the night. There was something inhuman about her, from her silver-white hair to her freckle-patterned skin, but she looked so serene amongst the other children that none of the adults would dare to disturb them.
Upon waking and seeing the transfixed adults, the eldest of the storytellers, the last member of the original group of the people, sat down carefully next to the slumbering children. Her sharp, loving eyes kept watch over them.
“ It is her, our goddess, ” she whispered in a tongue that would be forgotten in a few generations. “ I was told stories of her, when I was but a small child myself. The older children always told me that, should we remain faithful, she would bless us with stories and safety, and here she is. She has come to join us, walk among us. She is our Star. ”
When the eyes of the young goddess, The Story-Star, opened for the first time, it revealed eyes of an indeterminable, shimmering color. Eyes that sparkled like curious little stars, burning as if they held the secrets to every story behind them.