The cosmology of Esilur is best described as a series of great concentric spheres, each rotating at different speeds around the world at their center. Some, like the Sphere of Stars, rotate so slowly as to be nearly imperceptible. Between the spheres lays vast spaces, filled with aether, and suspended in aether are the celestial bodies. The spheres are, in ascending order, the Sphere of Stars, Sphere of the Moon, Sphere of the Planets and Sphere of the Sun. - The Physical and Meta-Physical by Garmon of Torley

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I was an unremarkable star. I wasn’t the greatest of the stars in the sky, and I wasn’t the oldest. To the great bright Voxia, who guided the sailors on the ancient seas, I was just a twinkle. When I was being born from nebula dust and magic, Baexin had already shone for hundreds of thousands of years. I wasn’t even the youngest star in the sky, though perhaps I was close to it.

I was, however, unusually interested in humans for a star.

I had watched humans since the gods first placed them on Esiliur. As they learned how to hunt and then how to farm. To build cities, kingdoms and then empires. I watched them love and fight. Create and destroy. They lived so bright and quick, and never failed to surprise me.

For thousands of years, I watched humans with rapt attention.

I was there still, shining in the night sky, as the world grew old and humans faded away again, as great empires splintered, and their ancient cities began to empty, the people struck down by calamities - fire, flood, plague, war.

I was a lonely witness to the sundering of the world and the flight of the gods.

I watched, until the day that I fell.

***

Something pushed me.

Stars are not lively creatures. We exist in a semi-permanent state of hibernation where time passes faster, only half aware of the universe beyond ourselves. So I barely noticed the feeling at first.

It came again. This time, I was roused. Something had definitely given me a shove, or perhaps a pull. Given my physical body weighed millions of tons, and was suspended in an empty void tens of thousands of kilometers wide, it shouldn’t have been possible.

It happened a third time. Definitely a pull, not a push. It felt as if gravity suddenly became stronger for a brief moment, but that wasn’t possible, and besides which, I could still feel its slow, constant pressure at the back of my senses. Nevertheless, something had begun to pull on me. It might’ve been pulling for some time, because I distinctly remembered Esiliur being smaller before. In fact, the world below me was getting larger even as I watched. It got closer to totally eclipsing the void of space with each passing moment.

Since it was impossible for a planet to grow, I rationalised that instead I had to be getting closer to Esiliur. I didn’t like the thought, but I was powerless to slow down. Stars weren’t meant to move. I’d never moved in my entire existence and I didn’t even know how I was doing it now.

Was I falling? Falling was bad. I’d seen what people did to fallen stars that had the bad luck of landing near a mortal settlement. They broke them apart just to get to the power in their souls.

Yet despite any protest on my behalf, I seemed to be gaining speed. There was no resistance to give the motion a sensation and my only point of reference was the size of the land below, but it had been getting closer more quickly, so I had to be getting faster too.

Actually, that was wrong. I had one way to check.

I pulled up the System menu.

Name: Mizar

Species: Star

Class: Star

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Level: N/A

Core Stability: 100%

Mana: N/A

Mana Growth: N/A

Abilities:

Starsight: (once a day) Focus on a location known to you and which is within 100,000 kilometers, enabling you to view the location from above as if a flying bird. You cannot receive sound with Starsight.

My stats didn’t concern me right now. It was the information at the bottom that I needed.

Gravity: 10%

Wait …

Gravity: 11%

It was ticking up rapidly. That wasn’t good. None of this was good, but I watched for a moment. The tick was getting faster. Gravity reached 20% in less time than it had taken it to reach 15%, and it reached 30% even quicker.

The world below was so close, I didn’t even need Starsight to pick out the individual shapes of lakes and rivers and islands. Esiliur was beautiful like this, green and gold with a great slash of vivid blue aether that split the continents in half. I didn’t have time to appreciate it though. Sphere crystal is perfectly transparent, invisible unless damaged. So I didn’t have any warning before I hit the outer sphere of crystal that separated the world below from the heavens.

It shattered with a thunderous boom. A great shard of the sphere, hundreds of times larger than me, nearly the size of a castle, collapsed inwards, breaking apart as it fell. The force of the impact rolled through my core. Cracks spread across the surface of my core in a fractal outwards from the point of impact. There was a brief delay before I processed the pain. The first crack was a splinter of pain. Each new one hurt more than the last.

Warning: Core stability below 50%

I couldn’t do anything with the information, so I dismissed the message, and focussed on using every bit of willpower I had to hold the fragments of my core together. It wasn’t enough, and stability kept falling. I’d never imagined dying, but now it seemed possible.

All around me, aether rushed past, meeting with mana rising up to escape through the hole in the crystal. They met in an eruption of light, heat and sound. There was no smoke to the explosion, no flame, but the mana and aether annihilated each other completely. The explosions lit up the sky in a rainbow of colours.

System messages started to appear in my vision.

System Wide Warning: Atmospheric barrier breached. Local Godcores alerted.

A rolling list of damage information followed, but I had no way of comprehending it right now.

A mass of vivid blue aether shot past me, and my core spiraled sideways in its wake. The aether met a cloud of mana jetting upwards. Their equal opposing force tried to repel each other, and they tangled together in ribbons of vivid blue and colourless mana, before momentum overcame their inherent incompatibility. The cloud exploded with the force of a tiny sun.

The force wave hit my core first, throwing me clear of the intense ball of light and heat that followed. I lost my grasp on my integrity. It only took the moment between one thought and another, but the moment of vulnerability was enough. The wind tore a core fragment out of my grasp, and it disappeared into the wind.

I screamed.

Warning: Core stability below 10%

I thought I’d begun to understand pain. This was a new sort of pain, like claws had dug into my very soul and torn away a piece of what made me. It was so much worse.

System Wide Warning: [Error]. No Godcores found to assist. Repairs urgent. Warning: If repair is not made, [world: Esiliur] will become unstable. Estimated time to world destruction: 9 months.

I fought to think past the pain, like dragging myself through thick tar. There were no Godcores left. No one to repair the hole I’d just punched through the crystal sphere. By falling, I’d probably doomed the world.

The world was so close now, the vivid blue aether sea filled my entire field of view. I could see the red-orange glow it gave off as air met aether and burned.

At least, I thought, I won’t have to worry about it for much longer. I was moments from hitting the sea and being vaporised by the resulting explosion. I couldn’t watch it hurtle closer. I stopped looking and braced for impact. I just hoped it wouldn’t hurt for long.

In the absence of sight, I had no heartbeat to listen to. Just the roar of wind. It lasted both forever and only seconds.

I hit something solid, and punched through, and then hit something bigger and harder. It finally stopped my descent, but the impact tore another shard out of my core.

Pain whited out my vision and I stopped thinking.