When the Stars Defy the Sky

Chapter 1: Exile

As night falls along the desert's horizon, the irrepressible wildlife had stilled their activity to retire for the evening. Like every night in the desert for the past several centuries, a young boy lied at the center of the flattened land, lost in deep thought.

He stared at the iridescent sky above him, lips slightly parted to embrace the cigarette between his fingers. He inhaled and then exhaled, letting the smoke drift from his mouth until it trailed into nothing more than a hazy line.

He had lost the capability to concern himself with so many things, as he had adopted the hardships of desolation long ago. The life he had accustomed himself to living was one of solitude, and though many would feel alone if left to a life of such absence, he found comfort in it.

He listened to the howled winds that carried from the mountains in the east and felt its dry air lodge in the back of his throat.

Time and solidarity had numbed him to the awareness that he can never return from which he came. Since his exile, he had spent his limitless moments gazing into the cosmos. He would read and interpret what was written in the stars as they swarmed around him, trying to make the emptiness feel less empty. 

Before being stranded in such a place, he was the author of fate and chance in the mortal world, many lives written as a story well told. Each and every life the boy wrote told tales of all living things from their birth until the end of their short, untimely lives.

He had written the lives of great kings and aristocrats, of legendary scientists and world-renowned artists. Lives filled with love, hope, sorrow, and pain. Beginnings that were rough and endings that were painless, and every one of them had been methodically planned and coordinated. He was a being more powerful than many, not man nor god, and harnessed the control of fate and destiny.

Alas, he was a Zodiac.

As guardians of the universe, the Zodiacs have been the defenders of the galaxy since the chain reaction of cosmic explosion erupted life into existence. These omnipresent entities keep cautious surveillance on anything and everything that could possibly disturb the balance of life.

Watching over all living things in the galaxy had been the only life the young boy had ever known. Regardless, he had no desire to continue this constant tradition of guardianship. The weight of the universe was a burden he did not wish to bear, let alone rule and command. All it ever did was further the void in his trial, and in due time, the choice to step down from such responsibility concluded in exile.

He carried out that sentence billions of light-years away from his home in the Milky Way Galaxy on a planet called Earth.

Earth had always been so very inessential to the vast expansion of the universe and the complexity of space, thus why he had been exiled to spend forever here. What he discovered, however, is that the planet was not as barren as he thought it'd be. In fact, it was quite the contrary, and the humans who inhabited were not what he'd expected them to be as well.

He didn't quite understand them at first; from what he could tell, they had no purpose. They live to be erased from existence, and later never remembered. Their pointless lives were not fulfilling, nor eternal.

He found their limitations and expendability irritating, but he couldn't help feeling somewhat drawn to them. They managed to find meaning, however pointless their lives may have been. To have such conviction in the concept of success that it provides substance and outcome was intriguing, to say the least. Of course, he needn't forget his fascination with their inventions and creativity, which came about after many short trips throughout their prolonged history, and his dereliction. Some of whom he fostered their fates himself.

There are worlds within worlds on this planet, and the young boy had seen them all. Time moved so fast in their world, and he had trouble keeping up with their fashions. He would leave for short moments to then return, and find what was once young then became very old. 

All the while, he found himself falling in love with a mortal girl, a french pauper several centuries before the current time. She could not see him nor know of his existence, but he loved her just the same. He watched her from a distance and shadowed her time and time again. He remembered her beauty, though all who'd seen her only saw what she was to the world, and that was poverty. Every summer solstice, the young boy would see her in the wheat fields of Nice working for a decent franc. Sometimes he would sit beside her as she would rest her feet and do nothing else but desperately yearn for her eyes.

But those eyes were forever gone from his gaze when a viral epidemic swept through her small village, taking her with it. And in his grief, he promised to never again love another.

He concluded his thoughts with a sigh and retrieved his cigarette for another drag. The tail of the cigarette reached the tip of the filter, and with a flick of his two fingers, the wind carried the ashes off into what he liked to call "elsewhere."

His elsewhere.

A place that he needn't worry about the balance of the universes; where life never ends, and the pauper girl's eyes never left his face. He closed his own eyes, picturing that elsewhere. And for just a moment, he let himself remember.

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