The sun wanders alone in the sky. The moon loves him only briefly, the stars flee from his radiance. He scours them from the sky with a lash with of golden fire that cools to polite blue in his hand. Only haltingly do they emerge from hiding holes to peer queerly at the sun's turned back and the world below. What inspired his endless march from East to West? Does he know that he is trapped? Does he even wish to be free, or merely to rule? To know that he is feared and adored, worshipped within his domain? Does he know that each star in its own right wields their own lash, some mightier and more terrible than he? That he is only king in the land he occupies, that his steel-shod gait, his strongest scream seems to slip scurrilously into stutters and shushes of static, silent as snow? Does he know he will die, one day, too? The stargazers do. They are a stargazer, sitting in a house on a hill, high and haughty with nose upturned and yet somehow still in a book every other time you look. An apprentice pretends his hands hold books as grand as his masters do, doing the delicate work with a petite little smirk of repairing spines with glue. When the sky turns to day, the stargazer packs their things away and the apprentice sweats through their sewing outside. They watch the town down below, all criers and carriers, friars and harriers, terriers and barriers and pliers in hands of farriers. They wonder when they will all unstop their ears and worry about fate's cold arrears, and what will happen when the star they've fallen in love with will die out and fade from view. They wonder if then they will pay their due. She (ye) have no such grand design, though still you look up at the sky. You watch a crow swing low and arrest at its nest and cock its head down at you. "I've no fear of scourge or bright blazing blue," The crow says, puffing its chest, "And someday soon I'll fly up there and usurp that old beast for I'm sick of the devil's abuse." And now I must ask, for the time to narrate has passed. Who are you? what do you do? #cyoa #prose #barely #the-most-liked-reply-dictates
i am the smith's daughter, evading the heat of the forge only in the brief moments between tasks. the cool air outside is a boon enhanced only by the knowledge that i have more heat and toil ahead of me. perhaps i stray further, stepping out to see if the fruit stall has been picked clean.