Dancing in the Starlight

[Gael]

Gael sits in an upper room of the Companion Guild dormitory, seated at a table beneath an open window looking out over the nighttime seascape and the stars making their slow procession through the night sky. These stars serve as the only illumination in the room. To her eyes, though, the sheaf of papers and a few pens sitting on the table before her are as visible as if it were noontime. The gentle sounds of water lapping at the sands of the beach, the gentle stirring of one of her guild siblings in their sleep and the far-off call of some night bird are music enough for now for her task. Eyes gleaming like the stars outside the window close for a few moments, absorbing the moment, before opening once again and a slender hand takes up one of the pens...

Greetings, my Sisters and Brothers and all other who may, in time, come to read these words. I am known as Shaandra Gael though I choose to call myself simply Gael. I have a tale to share with you, one that is many, many years in the making. In thinking of how to frame this story, I am faced with the same question any who would endeavor to tell a story confronts.

Where do I begin?

"Begin at the beginning and procede from there," A wise man's rather foolish character once told someone pondering such a question. And I would save that my story actually begins a very long time before my birth.

Should I start with when I came forth from my mother's womb?

Should I start when the foundations of my soul and spirit were laid?

Should I start so long before that moment that the comet that laid waste to Earth long before the first creatures even remotely able to be considered human walked that world?

Should my tale begin at the point were everything began? When She Who Created All, She who I call Mother, Sang the Song that brought forth light and life into the Universe and the Firstborn who Sang with her to give that light and life shape?

I think those last two might be both too far back to start this story. While, to be completely honest, there was much that happened in those earliest of times that, indirectly or directly affected me during my lifetime, they are also things that I believe I can reveal at times more directly relevant to the story I shall tell.

So, instead, allow me a few moments to 'set the stage' as it were.

First and foremost, I am not from the 'Verse. In fact, I am not from this universe at all. Where I am from, though, bears many similarities to Earth that Was and was not very different from it. There were wars and strife and hope and vanity, pride and folly, lust and love, hate, envy, joy, compassion...All in their fullest measure of human ability. What there was that was greatly different, though, is quite telling as well.

Stirring within the shadows of that Earth were conflicts and struggles that raged for thousands of years that held the fate of humanity in the balance. Many of the participants in this conflict were known by name to people who knew nothing of this secret war though they were often unknown all the same. Legends, after all, are just that; stories of old, morality plays, perhaps a guide but nothing but a story when one awakens from the dreaming.

I was to play a part in this struggle, though I knew it not as my mother held my small form to her breast and sang to me the songs of our Romany ancestors as I suckled and dozed.

I was born innocent, as everyone is.

My innocence did not last long.

And, thus, with the stage set and enough background in place to have a place I can look at and say, 'Here. This is where I shall start my story,' in place,. I shall truly begin my tale with my next page.

[Varahi Lusch]

/me settles herself down with a cuppa "I love a good story..."