A man was broken, his heart was sore.
Leaving, he said with backward glance,
to family dear and loathed alike, pain
is good and love is better, both are teachers,
love of life, the finite stretch, the final breath,
spring and winter. But in excess, both are bad,
to drown a soul and leave it dead, one has only
to take in excess. And so I leave you now, gone
am I forevermore.

And he left.

Weary, footsore, he walked the road, and searching
sought for greater meaning, to a life turned suddenly
devoid of reason. He'd thought of epics, of heroes brave,
who'd left their safe and painful lives behind, and gone to
seek a greater quest, leaving at their souls behest, else death
and languor were soon to follow, and the wasted sorrow of
an empty soul. Walking. Alone. Wind like the gentle heartbreaking
breath of solitude and silence forced sighs gently through his
windswept hair, and so dries his skin, in anticipation of the
final sleep, to which all things must go, their time or no, on
this plane of infinite mortality, life and death locked in endless
cycle, revolving again and again. Life and death, Summer and Spring,
Fall and Winter.

Night had fallen. The legion of infinite stars sparkled in the empty night,
and laughed at him, distantly, far away spectators of petty life, they who
observe only, older than the gods whom man has created. It was the time of
Autumn, and so the trees fall backwards down into slumber, deathlike in their
tranquility, while their leaves fall one by one, swept by the wind and smoothing
rain, to scatter about the sleeping world, and crunch as their fragile veins, bones
of the one, of the all, unique and yet not, are sent into the wind, dust in the current,
as the man walks over the cold face of the dying world, the wonders of spent life
alone heralding the earths rebirth, that flurry of life and light and power. But
then, on that place, in that time under the stars, all was still.

Illuminated by the fragile moonlight, deceptive in its enchanting glow, the man,
who had walked the world, saw towering in the distance, black as the void behind
the night, the towering spires of an empty house, abandoned long, left by its unfaithul
masters to rot under the care of the rain and the sun and the ever blowing wind.
The man stumbled across an empty field, littered with jagged chunks of fallen stone,
the shattered bones of that empty place. The man built a fire from the fallen timber littered
there, and so drove back the night. For awhile. For when he closed his eyes to sleep, and laid him down his weary head, so returned the dark and fearful night, and left his mind painted red with blood, black with rage, grey with sorrow. Snow was coming. The man closed his eyes, and waited. Perhaps the shrieking wind would topple that ancient house, straining its
rusted nails, stretching its boards far past all endurance, and the house would fall. The world would fall, and send him screaming into the darkness from whence his nightmares came, to fall there, and become twisted in the darkness, until at last he too would become
one with the darkness, and rise to torment other souls, to guide them down to the darkness,
for forever and for eternity.

The sun rose high, and in that grey and cloudy sky, worked to lift the dying melancholy
from the world, a little. The man woke and, startled, he heard the songs of birds as they
too, rose with the early dawn, and sang their morning hymns to the rising sun. The man
walked out of that charred and ruined place as if in a dream, and so came to stand in the middle of that field littered with the broken stones of that place. Looking, he saw the dew glittering in the rosy light of dawn on the bare limbs of the naked trees, stark in their unclothed beauty. He beheld the yellowed grass, changing from their bone like hue, to a soft and golden color, as to wheat waving in the summer fields, in the bygone days of life and youth. He felt, light, as to the seeds of the dandelions floating on the breeze in the sweet months of spring, light as if he were the light, and so thinking he looked down and perceived
the golden grass, and closed his eyes. And yet! Glory of light, of heaven, of all glorys, he saw the grass, saw it brighten to shining brilliance as the world took on its true shape to him, he, blessed with the power of sight and light and peace at last, respite and tranquility from the seething dark. But no. He was rising, falling up, up into the empty nothingness of the blue and hollow sky. He tried to will himself down, tried to fall there, but he was nothing, a shadow made of light, and the light was taking him, taking him, merging with him, transforming him into the light worshipped and revered by all those who lived in peace and feared the darkness. And yet he was afraid. And as he passed into the light to suffuse the earth with his young and glowing light, his last thought before the end, was that it wasn't so bad, not really, at the end of things, at the end of him, to illuminate the world in light and nothingness.
It wasn't so bad he thought, as he passed, to be a star.