Gwendolyn stood in the doorway of their cottage, the wooden spoon from the stew pot still in her hand. The sun was dipping below the treeline, painting the sky in shades of orange and purple. Supper was ready, the table was set. But rlin’s chair was empty.
"Where is that boy?" she muttered, her eyes scanning the path leading from the village. "He’s never this late. Not without telling us."
She heard the scrape of a chair inside. Her husband, Kelvin, appeared beside her, his broad fra filling the doorway. He placed a calloused hand on her shoulder. "He’s seventeen, Gwen. Probably got caught up watching the blacksmith work, or lost track of ti by the river. You know how he is."
"Maybe..." Gwendolyn started, then shook her head sharply, as if dislodging a terrible thought. "No. It can’t be that. Not now. We did everything. We moved here, to the edge of nowhere. We never spoke of it. He doesn’t know. He can’t know." Her grip tightened on the spoon. "He’s not so... so prophecy. He’s my son."
Kelvin nodded, his own face grave. "He is. He’s our boy. It’s just being late for supper, love. That’s all." He said the words firmly, willing them to be true. He believed his wife. He had to.
But as Gwendolyn stared into the gathering dusk, her mind couldn’t help but travel back. Not to a prophecy in a dusty scroll, but to a mory. The real one. The night their lives changed forever.
Seventeen years ago...
The sky over their old farmstead, far to the south near the Whispering Mountains, had been clear and full of stars. Then, a new star appeared. It grew brighter, moving fast, trailing a tail of silver fire.
It wasn’t a star.
It was a ship. A thing of smooth, seamless tal, unlike any dwarven forge-work or elven crystal-craft. It scread through the atmosphere, not with the roar of a dragon, but with a high-pitched whine that made the livestock panic. It crashed in the distant mountain pass with a sound that was more a deep thump than an explosion, a shudder that ran through the very earth.
Kelvin, then a younger man with fewer scars, had grabbed his hunting spear. Gwendolyn, her belly just beginning to swell with the child who would be rlin, had followed him, her heart hamring against her ribs. They were simple farrs, but they were not cowards.
They found the crater. Steam rose from scorched earth and lted rock. In the center lay the vessel, smaller than they’d imagined, shaped like a teardrop, its silvery hull now scarred and blackened. A hatch, circular and seamless, had irised open on its own, spilling out a strange, sourceless white light.
And inside... was a cradle. It humd softly, cradled in a nest of glowing wires and softly pulsing lights.
Within the cradle, wrapped in a cloth that seed woven from starlight itself, was a baby. A boy. He wasn’t crying. He was awake, his eyes—a startling, deep blue even then—staring up at the unfamiliar stars of their world with a calm, ancient curiosity.
On his tiny chest, a mark glowed with a soft, silver light before fading into his skin: a sigil of intersecting circles and arcs, like a star caught in a geotric web.
There was no one else. No pilot. No parents. No ssage. Just the child, delivered from the void.
They had stood there in the smoking crater, two ordinary people, staring at an impossibility. The whispers had already started in the villages about ons and falling stars. The Dark Lord’s power was rising in the east. The world was becoming a fearful place.
Kelvin had looked at Gwendolyn, at the wonder and terror on her face. He had made the decision then. "No one can know," he’d said, his voice rough. "Not where he ca from. Not the... the ship. They’ll call him a demon or a weapon. They’ll take him."
Gwendolyn had nodded, tears in her eyes. She had just learned she could not have children of her own. And here the universe, in its cruel, mysterious way, had delivered one to her doorstep.
They had worked through the night. Kelvin, with a strength born of desperation, used the broken shards of the ship’s strange tal to pry and dig, collapsing part of the crater wall to bury the vessel forever. Gwendolyn had bundled the child in her own shawl, the star-cloth hidden away at the bottom of a chest.
They had moved north, far north, to the sleepy, forgotten village of Kandor’s Edge. They told a simple story: they were refugees from the southern conflicts, their farm burned. The baby was theirs, born on the road. They nad him rlin, after Kelvin’s grandfather.
And for seventeen years, they had kept the secret. They watched him grow. They saw the little oddities—how storms seed to avoid their farm, how animals were never afraid of him, how once, when he was five and fell from a tree, he had landed not with a thud, but as light as a feather, a look of surprise on his face before he started crying. They called it luck. They called it imagination. They taught him the simple, hedge-magic every country child learned—how to charm a warts, how to find a lost spoon. Nothing more.
Back in the present...
Gwendolyn blinked, the mory of that silver ship and the silent baby dissolving back into the worry of the present mont. The empty path. The cooling stew.
Kelvin squeezed her shoulder again. "I’ll go look for him. Check by Old Man Harkin’s forge, down by the creek. He’s fine, Gwen. He has to be."
But as Kelvin grabbed his cloak and stepped out into the twilight, Gwendolyn felt a cold certainty settle in her stomach. It wasn’t just supper he was late for. The past, the one they’d buried in a mountain pass, had finally co looking for their son.
A/N
Who can guess his Absolute Status.
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