While the people of Oakhaven celebrated their festival under a canopy of lantern light and dancing moths, Praxus was closer to the stars than any of them. His home was not a place of thatch and timber, but a temporary camp of worn leather and oiled canvas, pitched precariously on a high, lonely ledge in the foothills of the Spire Mountains.
For twenty years, this had been his life. He was a wanderer by trade and a scholar by soul. While others farmed the land, Praxus farmed the sky. He was a Cosmolog, a title of his own invention, and the self-appointed Oral Historian of Aethelgard. His life's work was the pursuit of a single, grand understanding: the divine pattern. He believed that Qy'iel's will was not a mystery, but a design of breathtaking elegance, visible in the sweep of a constellation, the turning of the seasons, and the simple, honest stories passed down through generations.
His tent was less a shelter and more a portable library. Every surface was occupied by the tools of his obsession. Rolled scrolls of star-charts, painstakingly copied by hand, were held down by carefully chosen rocks. Stacks of leather-bound journals were filled with his spidery, precise script, documenting the oral histories he gathered in his travels, the story of the Oakhaven well was on page thirty-four of volume seven, nestled between a fisherman's tale of a miraculous haul on the Mirror Coast and a weaver's account of a divinely inspired tapestry pattern. In the center of it all, gleaming in the lamplight, stood his most prized possession: a brass astrolabe, its interlocking rings and delicate pointers a miniature map of the heavens.
Praxus himself was a man shaped by the wild places. Lean and weathered, his face was a landscape of sun-etched lines, and his grey-streaked hair was perpetually unruly from the mountain winds. But his eyes were the sharp, focused eyes of a craftsman, constantly measuring, calculating, and seeking. He did not just look at the world; he observed it.
Tonight, however, his observation was yielding only frustration.
The subject was the Serpent's Coil, a faint but significant constellation that coiled near the celestial pole. For centuries, its dimmest star, a pinprick of light named Umbra Minor, had served as a crucial navigational point for his calculations. It was a constant, a given. The 'anchor' of the northern sky.
Tonight, it was gone.
He had first noticed it three nights ago. He had dismissed it as atmospheric haze, a common trick of the high altitudes. The second night, he had blamed his own tired eyes. But tonight, the sky was a flawless, crystal-clear curtain of black velvet, and his eyes were sharp. Yet the space where Umbra Minor should have been remained stubbornly, unnervingly empty.
He grunted, frustrated, and loosened the locking nuts on the astrolabe. He re-calibrated the entire device, his long fingers moving with practiced certainty. He checked its alignment against the three bright stars of the Summer Triangle, a simple but foolproof measure. They were exactly where they should be. He then swiveled the instrument back towards the Serpent's Coil.
Nothing. Not a glimmer. It was not just that the star was missing; the very space it occupied felt… void. For Praxus, who viewed the night sky as a symphony of light, it was like a single, crucial instrument had suddenly fallen silent, leaving a jarring hole in the music.
"Impossible," he muttered to the wind, his breath fogging in the cold air. Stars did not simply vanish. Qy'iel had set the heavens in their perfect, eternal dance. The pattern was absolute. To suggest otherwise was not just an astronomical error; it was a theological one. It implied a flaw in the divine design, and such a thing could not exist.
The error, therefore, had to be his. His location, perhaps. A magnetic anomaly in the rock of this specific mountain ledge, interfering with the brass of his astrolabe. It was a weak theory, but it was the only one that didn't unravel his understanding of the universe.
He made his decision with the swiftness of a man who values time over comfort. He would go down. He would travel to Stonefall, the oldest of the foothill towns, and consult their records. Someone, somewhere, must have noted a similar atmospheric event in the past.
By dawn, his camp was packed onto the back of his placid, long-suffering mule, Hester. The journey down the winding goat-paths was one Praxus had made countless times, but today he felt a strange urgency. The familiar landscape, usually a source of calm contemplation, seemed subtly altered. The silence of the mountains felt heavier, the shadows in the ravines deeper. He knew it was his own mind projecting its unease onto the world, but the feeling lingered.
Stonefall was nestled in a valley carved by an ancient glacier, a town built of the very mountain it leaned against. Its buildings were sturdy, grey-stone affairs, and its people were as quiet and stoic as the rock they lived on. Unlike the open, sun-drenched cheer of a village like Oakhaven, Stonefall felt ancient, a place of memory and tradition.
He went directly to the Hall of Records, a low, circular building that housed the town's lineage charts, harvest logs, and historical accounts, all curated by the town elder, Elspeth.
Elspeth was a woman who seemed to have been carved from the same stone as the town. Her face was severe, her white hair was pulled back in a ruthlessly tight bun, and she did not approve of things that deviated from the established order.
"Master Praxus," she greeted him, her voice as dry as old parchment. "It is not yet time for the seasonal tithe of your histories. What brings you down from your rocks?"
"A query, Elder Elspeth," Praxus said, offering a respectful nod. "An astronomical one. My observations of the Serpent's Coil are proving… inconsistent. The region around Umbra Minor, specifically. It appears occluded. I was hoping to review your oldest charts, to see if any similar phenomena have been recorded. A recurring dust cloud, perhaps, or a seasonal haze."
Elspeth stared at him, her expression unblinking. "Occluded? Master Praxus, the stars are where Qy'iel placed them. They are His eternal word, not a fickle text to be re-read. We have no records of them 'hiding'." She gestured vaguely to a dusty shelf. "Our charts are the same as they were five hundred years ago. Perhaps your instrument is failing. Or your eyes."
"My eyes and my instrument are in perfect order," Praxus replied, his tone sharper than he intended.
"Then perhaps you are looking for a problem where there is only the will of God," she said with an air of finality. "Qy'iel's pattern is perfect. To question it is to question Him."
Praxus knew he would get no help from her. To Elspeth, and to most people, faith was a matter of acceptance, not inquiry. He thanked her for her time and left the hall, the dismissal stinging more than he cared to admit. He felt, for the first time in his life, utterly alone in his quest.
He took a room at the local inn, a clean but spartan space, and waited for nightfall. He refused to accept Elspeth's placid certainty. The pattern was perfect, which is why a flaw, however small, was so monumentally significant. It was like finding a single grain of sand inside a perfectly sealed water clock; its presence defied the very nature of the machine.
That night, he bypassed the inn's noisy common room and carried his astrolabe to a quiet, barren field at the edge of town. The sky above Stonefall was just as clear as it had been on the mountain. He set up his instrument with a grim sense of purpose, his hands steady despite the cold that had little to do with the night air.
He aimed the sights. His heart sank.
The void was still there. The silence in the symphony of starlight was not just present; it felt wider tonight. Deeper. He could almost feel it, a patch of cosmic cold, a silence that was not empty, but actively consuming the light around it.
A tremor of genuine fear, an emotion he had not felt since he was a lost child, ran through him. All his logic, all his careful calculations, had led him to a precipice of the unknown. He was a man of reason standing before an event that defied it.
In that moment of fear, he fell back on the instinct that bound him to every other person in Aethelgard. He closed his eyes, tilted his head back, and let a Whisper escape his lips, a desperate, silent plea into the vast, uncaring darkness.
"Qy'iel. Shepherd of the Stars. Guide my sight. Show me the flaw in my understanding. Show me what I am missing."
He waited. He waited for the familiar, gentle warmth in his soul, the quiet reassurance that always followed a Whisper, the feeling of being heard.
But this time, nothing came.
There was no warmth. No reassurance. No sense of a loving presence.
There was only the cold of the night, the weight of the sky, and the profound, absolute silence of a prayer falling on deaf ears. For the first time in his life, Praxus looked up at the stars and felt completely, terrifyingly alone.