Heroes of Dreamland Rewritten, Book 3: Stars Amidst Darkness

Prologue

There's no feeling in the Galaxy quite like the wind streaming through your outstretched primary flight feathers as you cut through the air, gloves held tightly to your sides, mask keeping your face safe from the elements, and feet held straight behind you in order to minimize your wind resistance. Truly, I pity all Dimensional Cape bearers who have any kind of wings other than the feathered varieties. The feeling of the wind whistling against your smooth, shiny feathers is easily half the fun of flying.

And that's certainly saying something, since the other half of flying is already incredibly fun on its own. The ground of the beachside, grassy world known as 'Cappy Town' or 'Greater Dreamland' below me is lush and green; it is a beautiful day today here in Dreamland, a day nearly identical to every other day for the past four-plus years. Everything is calm; peaceful. To be honest, it's really starting to grow boring. If my search today proves fruitful, though, we should finally start having some fun around here again.

Smirking to myself, I tilt into a warm updraft that lies along my flight path, savoring the burst of exhilaration as the warm air surrounds me and burgeons me up several feet in the blink of an eye. As I exit the path of the warm air, I tilt my body to one side, and hold my wings in a stiff glide, banking into a steep turn as I begin to grow nearer to my destination.

Slicing through the sky, body free, wings allowed to stretch out into the warm sun... Flying is one of the most satisfactory sensations known to any species, starborn or no. But if, like me, you have known the burden of being bound both spatially and temporally in a cage of pure tempusfunemium crystal, flying takes on an especially-freeing quality beyond what it had before. Once you've spent over a hundred years—but what felt like an eternity—trapped in something rather like frigid ice, which shades all the light you can see through your eyelids a dark magenta, slows time, prevents you from making the tiniest movement except perhaps to blink, and keeps you in an eternal state somewhere between waking and sleep... To be able to move, breathe, live, fly becomes even more gratifying and enlivening than before.

I can't help it; the memories of my imprisonment send a shudder of disgust up my spine. It was terrible, to say the very least. And if it weren't for Nightmare's paranoia, I would have gotten away with my original plan and never have had to bear the ordeal in the first place. What's worse, Nightmare won't even take responsibility for being the one to seal me away. No, he used my suffering as yet another war propaganda effort. Thank Nova he's dead; I truly did despise the wretch.

Of course I know all the fraudulent stories about my existence and incarceration—I played a part in writing most of them, after all, up until I was imprisoned. The legends say that I was a great Star Warrior, more powerful than all, who joined Nightmare in conquering the Galaxy without ever sharing his power with his people. The rumor Nightmare and I perpetuated for quite some time was that I was the foretold Warrior of the Stars, but when I saw the weakness of my people's army, I abandoned my foretold destiny to join the winning side. And as the legend goes, once my people were made aware of my treachery, a few nameless (fictitious) heroes found me and bound me somewhere where my power could never again be used for evil. The legend served dual purposes for Nightmare—it gave the waning Star Warriors some semblance of hope at the knowledge that one of their enemies was gone, but simultaneously crushed their hopes of lasting out long enough for the Warrior of the Stars to come and make things right. If the legend was true, after all, the foretold rescuer of the starborn army who once ruled the stars had already come, and had left them all to their cruel fate rather than realizing his prophesied destiny.

Of course, most of that is complete nonsense, but some of it rings true. Yes, I abandoned my people when I realized that I could not achieve my true ends through them and had a better chance if I partnered with Nightmare, but not until after I tried to use them as means to my visionary end. I did share my talents and power with them for quite some time; they simply didn't know that who I am now is also who I once was. They know me now as the Galactic Knight (or simply 'Galacta Knight,' depending on the translation of my nightmarish title), as the long-reigning Greatest Warrior in the Galaxy, and up until the actual title-bearer finally appeared, as the traitorous Warrior of the Stars. They knew me once as another face and name entirely. Ever since I joined Nightmare, though, I've taken on the false identity of the betraying Warrior of the Stars, and no was ever the wiser.