The Shattered Star: Chronicles of Andarin
When a falling star fractures the world and shadows gather at the edge of reality, one young villager dreams of darkness and flame. Joined by a rogue mage and a haunted ranger, Eiran embarks on an epic quest spanning haunted forests, besieged cities, and forgotten deserts. As ancient secrets unravel, and allies and enemies blur, Andarin’s last hope lies in forging the impossible—from the shattered pieces of the world, a new dawn...if he survives the night.
The Eyes of the Mountain
Mist clung to the high slopes, thick as unspoken dread. The wind howled up the broken face of the mountain, hurling shards of ice against Mira’s cheek and stinging Eiran’s eyes to water. Here, at the rim of the world, every breath was a memory of loss, every step a demand. Yet forward they climbed—a battered trinity of purpose. At their backs, wolf-cold dawn broke bleakly across a horizon ridged with shadows.
Above, the peak called the Eyes of the Mountain burned cold through the clouds—a blunted wedge, riddled with ledges and fissures. Legends said its crests watched every secret kept beneath heaven’s arch. Somewhere near the summit, beneath ancient guardian stones, waited the shrine: a place the Elder had once whispered about in story and warning both, where even gods came for revelation, and mortals left blinded, changed, or dead.
They did not move as heroes. Mira’s stride was limping, blood caked stiff at her hip where yesterday’s arrow had grazed her ribs. Narsa, face drawn, pressed a hand to her chest with each exhale, magic flickering faintly in her gaze—strength nearly spent. Eiran led, star stone clutched through a torn glove, the old familiar ache in his bones magnified by cold and destiny alike.
Talin was gone. His absence had become a silent companion—Mira and Eiran neither wishing nor able to shape it into hope or acceptance. Narsa’s glance sometimes flickered to the horizon as if reading omens, lost in calculation of who, besides themselves, might even now be alive beneath this sky.
Each of them knew: the cult pursued, the storm's edge was near, and the truths they’d fled and sought both waited at the height the world reserved for reckoning.
The path was old, but barely there—its stones fractured by freeze and centuries. Snowmelt glimmered under a lattice of rime, and a single misstep would send any of them plunging toward nameless valleys. Eiran’s foot slipped twice—each time the star stone pulsed, a flutter at the edge of disaster. Mira placed each step with the precision of one who’d buried too many in avalanche and ambush both. Behind her, Narsa’s staff scored shallow lines in the snow, pale blue winking at intervals where a wordless spell buttressed wavering knees.
A quarter of the way, wind grew crueler. Eiran gasped, coughing frosted air, then paused at a switchback carved with runes: markings scored deep by hands older than kings, spiraling in six-pointed loops. He pressed his fingers to the stone.
"It’s a ward," Narsa said, voice thin. “Old magic to keep secrets, or spirits—maybe both."
Mira brushed frost from her lashes. “Then it will keep us for a moment."
They huddled—brief shelter in the lee of the carved rock. Eiran closed his eyes, picturing the faces lost—Talin, Lady Maiven, every villager scorched from Vael. When he opened them, the star stone was glowing gently; the runes on the wall echoed each pulse, so that for a single instant, all their breath came easier. A memory surged—a feeling, not quite vision, of warm voices gathering in the mountain’s womb, singing not of doom, but of courage won in darkness. He squeezed the stone, lips moving in a broken prayer neither new nor old.
The ascent turned steep—hands and knees now. Somewhere above, black shapes circled: perhaps birds of ill omen, or things not meant for day. Twice, Narsa’s foot broke through a crust of rotted ice, revealing thin air and blackness below. Mira grabbed her each time, eyes never straying from their path; they needed every piece of themselves to reach the shrine.
After hours—years, it seemed—the path crested at a narrow saddle. Before them, pillars of leaning stone ringed a low platform choked with snow. Runes and icons glimmered along their feet, many blurred by time; at the center, a shallow bowl of crystal caught the first trembling sunlight, throwing it in a single band across the peaks.
But the air—
It stank, suddenly, of iron and something deeper. Narsa drew her staff sharply. Mira’s hand fell to her sword. Eiran felt the star stone burn cold in his palm.
A voice, quiet and absolute, drifted between the standing stones: “Children of the broken star. You came far, but not far enough.”
They spun. Shadows melted from around the pillars, peeling away the thin illusion of solitude. Hooded figures, cloaked against the mountain wind—five at first, then more, forming a crescent across their route of escape. At their center, taller by a head, draped in robes stitched with threads that shimmered like the night sky, was the leader. Their face—an impossible blank beneath the cowl, features lost in a shifting veil of darkness. Only their eyes shone: obsidian, iridescent, reflecting stars that did not belong to any sky Eiran knew.
Narsa shuddered; Mira drew her sword free, point at the ground between them.
The leader lifted a gloved hand, graceful, empty. The cultists’ chant deepened, rolling through the stones and up the mountain, refracting in a tongue that made frost crawl along Eiran’s spine.
"You are braver than the priests who first built this shrine. Or more foolish. You carry the relics of ruin as if they were hope."
Mira spat, eyes steel. "We carry what you destroyed. Why shadow us? Why massacre the world you claim to save?"
The leader tilted their head—a faint, almost tender gesture. "You lift easy questions, but the mountain demands their bones. Listen, brave ones. You see us as monsters; I see a world built on lies too brittle to survive the truth. The Star did not shatter for ambition or envy alone. We broke it—yes, I speak for those ancients now—because the Hunger beneath the world could only be fed by sacrifice."
Eiran’s conviction flickered. “The Hunger? Is that the darkness I’ve seen—the thing in the roots?”
“Not simply darkness—the end of what is. A gnawing need that even starlight could not banish. The Ancients bound it with the Star. But their shield became prison, prison became rot. Every century, it writhes closer. Shatter the Star, let the Hunger feed, and the pain ceases.”
Narsa braced her staff. Her anger poured silver sparks into the dawn. "You’d destroy all, rather than see one hope endure."
The leader’s hood turned to her. “Hope can be tyranny, if it means endless struggle with no promise but grief. Haven’t you wondered why your magic strains you now? Why the world’s bones shift beneath our feet? This is not the cruelty of men, but the closing of an ancient wound—one that perhaps must end in death."
Mira’s hand trembled, blade wavering. For a sick instant, Eiran nearly stepped forward—caught by some magnetic force in the cult leader’s words. But the memory of the star stone’s warmth, of Talin’s sacrifice, of breath and song and wild, defiant courage held him.
“You call it mercy,” Eiran choked, “but it's just giving up. You choose oblivion because you think the fight can’t be won. But the world—people I love—deserve a chance, even if we pay in blood.”
A low sigh, half sorrow, half pride. "Then try. I would have spared you, for the sake of prophecy—star-marked child, lost wanderers, broken mages—but now, the Hunger stirs."
A finger flicked, and the cultists surged, hands flaring with night- flame. The ground heaved, writhing as if roots below sought to spill out and devour all surface life. The mountain itself shuddered—runes flaring, then shattering to black. Eiran, still gripping the stone, recalled the vision in the roots—the first betrayal, the shattering, the blood on the hands of both hero and villain.
Mira shouted—grabbing Eiran’s arm, dragging him across a fault that split like a wounded god’s mouth. Narsa, shrieking despair and rage, flung her magic: a fountain of white-hot fire that burst against a cultist’s face. In the chaos, the leader stepped unhurried through the mayhem, gaze fixed on Eiran.
“You are marked for more, dreamer. When the circle closes, choose what must end.”
With a thunderous crack, the shrine collapsed—rocks tumbling in a hail of ancient dust and hatred. Eiran and Mira dove through ropes of falling stone, Narsa behind them, staff raised as a final shield. The mountain’s cry became a roar: snow, rubble, and shadow cascading as the shrine’s spellwork unraveled.
They stumbled, slid, and half-fell down a snaking gully, the world behind dissolving in a roiling maelstrom of lost prophecy. Somewhere far above, the cult’s leader—still untouched by harm—watched through the break in the storm, their eyes twin voids burning with all the light of what could be lost.
When at last the world steadied, they found themselves bruised and battered on a shelf of hard earth, hearts pounding, lungs torn by the thin air. Above, thunder rolled and unseasonal lightning clawed the sky over the ruins of the shrine. Eiran’s palm had been cut by falling stone—crimson blood washing across the star stone, pooling in the cracks as if called. Narsa sank to her knees, spent, arms limp at her side. Mira, battered but upright, searched desperately for pursuit.
No cultist came. Below, the world stretched out—ravaged but untouched—while high above, only the whisper of the leader’s words lingered, chilling as the storm.
In the silence, Eiran pressed a palm—sticky with blood and hope—against the star stone. In return, an image flashed in his mind: a map, the lines lit sky-blue through a darkness that pulsed like hunger and promise both. He gasped, clutching at the haft of Mira’s blade for balance.
“I saw... the next shard, maybe—a place with rooted pillars and water like glass. But also—” He hesitated, shuddering. "I saw... hands, not just the cult leader’s, but... older, deeper. Someone else moves the threads."
Mira cradled his wounds, voice shaken. “Then we’ve won a little time, and a warning. That’s more than most get.”
Narsa’s weary smile flickered—a beacon in the battered dawn. “We’re not broken. Not yet.”
The mountain howled in the wind, promising more storms to come. The companions gathered what will they had left, stepping down from the ruined shrine with flecks of the old prophecy and new dread sticking like snow to their boots. Behind them, the Eyes of the Mountain watched—unblinking, ancient, and alive with the memory of all those who had ever dared to seek or defy the truth.