Your mind is set.

You do not plan to let your wing heal. You make sure of that, by banging onto your cage’s bars during the night, closing your beak shut to make sure you do not wake anyone up with your screams.

You do not want the Star Hunters to gather the spoils of their prey, so you will give them only rotten bones and broken feathers to feast their eyes on.

You ponder on the idea to pluck the feathers from your wings yourself, but you are afraid the Star Hunters could notice that and force you to keep living for their sake.

So your claws stay still.

You are grateful for the roof of the cage: it keeps the sorry sight of yourself away from your kin above.

Days pass.

You are inside your cage and your wing hurts. It sends waves of pain throughout your arm and your legs, until it pounds on your head, but you do not care. You have seen the Star Hunters and the fake Star Mender bicker back and forth a few times, pointing at you and lashing out, shouting words you did not understand and that you did not care about.

Maybe they are disappointed by your wing’s lack of healing. That is good.

However, you have been forced to eat. The man feeding you has noticed you throwing away your food and now, whenever he comes, he strangles you with his hand and forces the food down your throat.

In the end, you preferred to start eating a little than to be handled like that again.

But it is not enough for your sustenance, you make sure of that. So now you wait for your demise in the silence of your cage.

One night, after everybody falls asleep, flame still flickering in the middle of the village, you are preparing yourself to hurt your wing once more, when the shuffling of grass stops you.

You look around, eyes wide, when a familiar face appears.

The rage answers before anything else, and you leap to the cage’s bars, claws bared while you lash at the human child in front of you.

Betrayer.

The boy stands still. He is too far away for you to reach him. He stopped at the precise right distance.

He knew. He knew.

He knew everything.

In the end, tiredness chokes you and you stop, breathing heavily.

It’s only then that the child kneels down, to look at you in the eyes.

He mutters sounds, but you do not care. You ignore the veil of sadness that envelops him and that his voice carries: your rage sounds much more reasonable, now.

But the child does not seem to care for your dismissal, either: he lights up one of those trapped fires that you saw earlier, before taking out a branch and dragging lines on the ground.

You do not want to see them, so you turn around, but you can still hear the dirt being dragged.

Then, the sound stops, and nothing else moves.

The flame flickers in the silence. You expect the child to force you to look at him, but instead no hand grabs you, like that of the Star Hunter that forces you to eat.

Nothing moves and everything stays still.

The child is not moving. He is waiting for you.

He always did, after all. Even when you were in the cave, he waited for you to come out.

You slowly turn your head around. The shadows of the trapped flame cast dark shapes on the ground and on his face, but it does not hide the veil of sadness in his eyes.

His mouth does not carry words, but now you do understand what they mean when they say that humans have many more ways to convey their feelings.

You look at the lines he has dragged on the ground. They are not symbols you are familiar with, but they are easy to understand.

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The child says he will help you to escape from the cage.

You raise your eyes to meet his, rage still festering in your chest. His face sends pangs of violence down your claws, but tiredness and hunger are the only thing stopping you from hurting the child.

Can you trust him?

He utters sounds. He acknowledges your doubt, but that does not stop him.

You are a star. You have always followed the rules of nature: they are ingrained into your very being and you cannot escape them. You always thought all living creatures, humans included, were like that. You have seen enough depravity of humanity to know how wicked they could be and how often they would never change.

But, right now, you wonder if some things can change.

If humans can change.

If you can change.

Did that not happen already?

Did you not enjoy spending your time with this human child? Watching the mortal lands so closely? Interact with it?

He is a Star Hunter. He has struck you with his spear, he is the reason why you are in this cage right now.

But his words carry such a sorry feeling, that you cannot think that to be anything but the truth.

The child’s heart cries for you, cries for his actions. He regrets trusting the fake Star Mender and you can feel that he does not feel sorry for you only, but also for himself.

He also wished for that Star Mender to be a genuine one.

Your home has always been the skies. Flying together from one place to another in precise formations, looking at the world from above. How the day turns into night, how humans live, how oceans continue their journey, how animal fight to survive.

Together with your kind, you never could imagine life any differently.

But this child can. Humans possess a great imagination, after all. He prays for a different life. A life where he does not have to hurt a star ever again.

A feeling of gratitude seeps into his words. You do not understand why this child feels gratitude towards your kin, but it is then that he approaches the cage, hand extended. For a moment you think to retaliate, but something in his eyes stops you and you do not move while the hand passes between the bars and touches your cheek.

He moves his hand, his fingers touching your skin. Your body relaxes and your throat starts to chirp.

It is not the first time this happens. Back when he had saved you from the river and you found solace in the warmth of the fire, your throat also chirped.

This boy. How does he know this?

It is then that you remember.

The human child who had befriended a star. Who the Moon herself had guided back home, his prayer so strong.

This child.

He knew your kin’s favorite food. He knows how to treat you. He knows how to talk to you.

This child owes your kin.

And that is why he does not want to hurt you.

You look at him once more.

And the decision is natural, like the leaves of a plant that turns towards the sunlight to ensure its survival.

This world is so very big and so very vast and so very complicated. Ancestral laws mean nothing down here. Humans can change.

But you can trust his feelings. Humans cannot lie when speaking the universal language.

You decide to trust him once more.

You point at the lines on the ground that he made and he holds his breath.

You nod.

He smiles, eyes becoming wet, and nods in response.

Then, he gets on his feet and looks around, before dragging his foot on the ground, deleting the lines that he dragged and turns the trapped flame off.

He then looks at you once more and nods, before leaving.