Sylwen Aelthoris: When the Stars Forgot Their Names

The first time the stars spoke Sylwen Aelthoris’s name, they did so by mistake.

It happened beneath the Eldertree of Sylwenor, where the roots drank moonlight and the air tasted of old songs. Sylwen stood barefoot upon the living boughs, silverleaf brushing their ankles, the night thick with auraflits drifting in slow, emotional spirals. The Evervale Council had forbidden this place after twilight. Too many prophecies had broken here. Too many futures had argued with one another.

Yet Sylwen had come anyway.

They had been born with prophecy stitched into their blood, House Aelthoris’s curse and inheritance both. The elders said the line once heard the First Shard sing, back when truth still broke itself to be understood. Since then, every Aelthoris child carried an echo of that sound, faint but insistent, like a memory that refused to stay buried. Most learned to ignore it. Sylwen never could.

Tonight, the sound was louder.

The stars above the Evervale trembled, rearranging themselves into a constellation that had no name. One point of light flared, then dimmed, as if embarrassed to be noticed. Sylwen felt it in their chest, an ache, sharp and bright, as though something inside them recognized a future it was not meant to see.

“You are early,” said a voice from the dark.

Sylwen turned. A glimmerfox stepped from the shadow of the trunk, its bioluminescent tail rings pulsing softly. Its eyes were too knowing, its posture too deliberate for a mere beast. In Evervale, such things were never merely what they seemed.

“Or late,” Sylwen replied. “Prophecy never agrees on timing.”

The glimmerfox tilted its head. “You stand at a seam. The world dislikes seams.”

Before Sylwen could answer, the roots beneath their feet shifted.

The Eldertree did not move often. When it did, entire centuries tended to notice. The bark split with a sound like a held breath finally released, revealing a hollow spiraling downward, an entrance that had not existed a heartbeat before. Starlight spilled into it, refracting into colors Sylwen did not have names for.

The glimmerfox backed away. “If you descend,” it said, “you will not come back the same.”

Sylwen smiled faintly. “I rarely do.”

They stepped into the hollow.

The descent was not physical in the way stairs were physical. Each step felt like walking through a memory that belonged to someone else. Voices brushed against Sylwen’s thoughts, elven children laughing beneath moons that no longer existed, seers arguing over which future deserved to live, a single, sharp scream echoing backward through time.

At the bottom waited a pool of starlight.

It was small, no wider than a dining table, yet within it churned the reflections of a thousand possible skies. Sylwen knelt, fingers hovering just above the surface. They knew this place from half-remembered dreams. The Evervale Council called it heresy. The old myths called it a gift.

Sylwen touched the pool.

The world fractured.

They stood on a battlefield made of constellations. Each fallen star burned with a memory. Sylwen recognized some of them, choices they had not made, words they had never spoken, alliances that might have saved cities or doomed them sooner. In the distance, a figure moved through the starlight, winged and indistinct, leaving ripples in reality with every step.

The figure turned.

For a moment, Sylwen thought they were looking at themselves.

Then the figure spoke, and the sound was wrong, layered, echoing, as though several voices were sharing one mouth. “You were not meant to see this yet.”

“Neither were you,” Sylwen said, steadying their breath. “And yet, here we are.”

The figure laughed softly. “House Aelthoris never did respect thresholds.”

Understanding struck like lightning. “You’re an echo.”

“Or a warning,” the figure replied. “Or a survivor. Names depend on which timeline wins.”

The battlefield began to collapse, stars falling upward, memories unraveling into threads of light. Sylwen felt something tug at their chest, a pull toward sorrow, toward hope, toward a choice that had not yet been offered.

“What do you want from me?” Sylwen asked.

The echo stepped closer, its form flickering. “To remember,” it said. “When the Council asks you to forget.”

The vision shattered.

Sylwen gasped, finding themselves once more beneath the Eldertree, the pool gone, the hollow sealed as if it had never existed. In their palm lay a single tear-shaped bead of condensed starlight, warm and humming with quiet significance.

Footsteps approached. Real ones this time.

Torches flared as members of the Evervale Council emerged from the trees, their expressions carefully composed into concern and disappointment. Arch-Seer Maltheris looked at Sylwen with eyes that had seen too many endings.

“You have trespassed,” he said. “Again.”

Sylwen closed their fingers around the bead. They felt it resonate, aligning with something deep and old within them. Not defiance. Not obedience. Something quieter. More dangerous.

“I listened,” Sylwen replied.

The Council stiffened.

“To what?” Maltheris demanded.

Sylwen looked up at the sky, where the nameless constellation was already fading, pretending it had never been there. “To the truth breaking,” they said. “So it could be seen.”

Silence followed. Not the comfortable kind.

At last, Maltheris spoke again, voice low. “You walk a path that fractures worlds.”

Sylwen met his gaze without fear. “Then perhaps the world was already cracked.”

As they turned away, the auraflits swirled brighter, their colors shifting toward hope and something dangerously close to rebellion. High above, a star flickered once more, correcting itself, or perhaps making another mistake.

And far beyond Evervale, in places Sylwen had not yet dreamed of, something listened, and remembered their name.