The Wound

The stars are scattered fires in an indifferent dark. Each burns for its own reasons. Your hand rises, asking no one. You draw a line. This fire to that one. You name the shape: a hunter drawing his bow, a bear circling the pole, a serpent rising in the south. The stars do not move but tremor leaves your hand. The scattered fires resolve under your hand. In the naming, a pattern. In the pattern, direction. In the direction – a home.

The Path

You want the pattern to have been there already. A shape waiting to be found. The stars hang, offering nothing. But you drew. You named. You chose. Ten thousand years ago, someone shivering looked up. Two fires became shoulders. A third, a drawn bow. The stars did not move. Every generation since has steered by that hunter. That hand: no different from yours. You draw a line. By morning, you've made something that was not there before. What you draw is not true the way stone is true. It is true the way promises are true – because you will steer by it.

The Shadow

To draw is to risk. The line you trace: erasable by other hands. He learnt this young. He drew once – five stars. The first, her forehead. The second and third, her eyes. Two more for the smile she kept for him alone. He brought it to his father as a gift. His father looked at the sky. The silence lasted long enough for the boy to see what his father could not find. There's nothing there. The boy looked again. Searched for the shape that had been so clear. His father was right. There was nothing there. He searched for it every night that winter. By spring, the stars had rearranged themselves into his father's silence. The night his father died, he tried to find him in the sky too. The stars stared back, scattered, refusing to hold. That night the scattering became truer than any shape. He dies with his finger raised towards nothing, certain that nothing was always the truth. ⧫ She saw what happens when lines are trusted too long. The Disciple of Bone watched a captain steer by a constellation his grandfather had drawn. The ship broke on rocks the stars no longer named. The stars had moved. The old lines had not. She catalogues the drift. Memorises the patterns others have drawn, tracking their errors. Some nights her hand rises without permission. Her eye finds two stars, then a third – her mother's hands taking shape between them. The line wants to close. The name waits on her tongue. But the stars, she knows, have already moved. Her hand falls. She dies in a field of charts - her hand frozen mid-reach, as if courage had arrived one breath too late.

The Cut