Starlight

Prologue 1 - A Star Is Born (Mei POV)

My name is Mei, I'm 21 years old and I'm from a small town in the Fukui Prefecture, known for our plentiful rice fields. Growing up I didn't have much to do besides wander the fields and look for work in any place that would take me, luckily out here in the country most people could use an extra hand in the rice fields so that wasn't too difficult to manage.

My mother died when I was younger, she was terminally ill and superstitious of doctors. My father always said "You can't trust those quacks, they'll make you worse than you started."
God bless my mother and her blind trust in her foolish husband. When she passed it didn't come as a startle to us, she had been in decline for months before her eventual demise. My one regret, is that her walk towards death was a long and arduous one, every passing day I could feel the life in our home seep through the walls as death creeped in to take it's place.

My father never truly recovered after that, he had a penchant for drinking but after she left us... He became abhorrent... Fathers are supposed to protect and love their daughters, mine was responsible for the death of my mother and the death of my spirit. Losing my mother was difficult but admittedly I felt less than I expected, perhaps it was our strange relationship. Mothers and daughters often compete in that way, watching the flower they blossomed into life spring forth with virility as they wither away. She always had a way of keeping me past arms length...

One night I came home from working the rice harvests to find my father in a drunken stupor. "You were never supposed to happen, your mother and I were a mistake and you're the biproduct... You look so much like her, yet you're nothing like her... Cold..."
I couldn't believe the things I was hearing, I clenched my teeth for a moment, working up the courage to spew something just as vile back at him, but then I felt a wave of calm wash over me, almost as if my mother was with me in spirit. I trudged to my bed that night and went to sleep feeling numb and conflicted... My father hated me.

The following morning I entered the kitchen to find he had shot himself in the mouth. The back of his head was obliterated, leaving chunks of skull, brain matter, and blood clots all over the tile. A few men in the village helped me clean up the mess of my father and buried him next to my mother behind the house... I didn't bother to mark his grave with a headstone, in the sakura orchards near our home I would bring sprigs of cherry blossom home to adorn my mothers burial site, never his.

I lived alone in the house afterwards, for a while the other people in the village would come to visit me, they'd bring rations and see how I was, most days I was just despondent. After a while though they started to visit less and less until it was not at all. That's how life goes though isn't it? We fall and we get up and keep going, life always goes on. I wish I could've convinced myself to move on with life so easily. As years passed by I felt myself growing more detached from reality, I stopped tending to the fields and the house began to undergo decline from the elements, and without knowledge to repair it, it wasn't long before the cold winter breeze blew through the house like swiss cheese.

The winters were cold and lonely, the summers were sticky and humid, I was seemingly trapped in a constant limbo of content discomfort. Life went on like this for a while, a good while actually... Until one day I found her.

I wandered into the rice fields after dark one night, I liked to soak my skin in the cool waters among the reeds during warm spring evenings. The stars always reflected brilliantly off the surface of the water, it was like lying amongst the stars themselves. And that's when I found her, tufts of messy pink hair curled around her face and not wearing much to speak of besides tattered cloth. At first I thought she might've been dead, but she was so young that such a thought felt too grim to consider. I approached her cautiously and noticed she was in fact breathing, yet unresponsive. The trek home with her was strange, our skin was cool to the touch but for the first time in years I felt true warmth, it's as if my heart knew it had found home again.

I wasn't too much older than her when we crossed paths but in a way I resonated with her. Two lost souls wandering this world alone, she was too young to remember anything from her past but I suppose that didn't matter to either of us since the future was just ahead. Life was more vibrant from then on... I wasn't sure what to call her, we sort of built our bond on an initial foundation of unfamiliarity. There wasn't much to eat with our lack of money but I often made rice cakes for her the way my mother made them for me, they were her favorite. It wasn't uncommon for her to put away a dozen of them in one sitting. During the cherry blossom season I would make sakura mochi as a special treat for her. I had no idea she could like something more than rice cakes, but she proved me wrong.

Things went this way for a couple years, we grew stronger and closer, I finally felt the world breathe life back into me after so long. Perhaps it actually was possible to go on with life, was I happier now than I was as a girl before all of the misfortune that befell my family? My heart knew the answer but logically I couldn't acknowledge the possibility that life might've never held the significance it does to me now. I had something, someone, to live for. And her name is Elysia.

My mother read me stories of greek myth as a child. Tales of cyclops, giants, gods, and angels more fantastical than my wildest imagination. She told me of a place called the Elysian Fields, a magical land of eternal happiness and relaxation, in Elysium there was no such thing as pain or struggle. As a young child I thought maybe she meant somewhere like our rice fields we were so accustomed to, I imagined we would one day visit the Elsyian Fields for vacation. After her passing the message became clearer, Elysium is not a vacation resort, it's the eternal resting place of the blessed amongst us. My mom was fascinated with the possibility of a heaven she could retire to after her struggle with illness, perhaps she anticipated her own death long before my father and I. To this day I can't quite wrap my head around why, why didn't she try? Why didn't she fight? I surmised my mother faced more than just a physical affliction, she had an infection of the mind & heart and I'm convinced that was a more lethal poison than the disease that killed her.

Elysia was not just my home, she brought me out of the depths of my own tireless hell and into our very own heaven on earth.