The star did not fall so much as it was severed.
A streak of silver against the velvet bruise of twilight, it tore a wound in the sky that wept light for three days. The shepherd boy who saw it, a child named Elian with dirt on his knees and wonder in his heart, thought it the most beautiful thing he would ever see. He did not know it was a funeral shroud.
He found the crater where the heat of descent had fused the sand to glass. And at its heart, not a rock, but a man. Or something like one. His skin was pale as moonlight, his hair a spill of silver, and he wore armor of a metal that drank the light. He was breathing.
When the boy crept closer, the figure's eyes opened. They were the colour of a winter sky, and held a sorrow so vast it stole the boy's breath.
"It is done," the star-man whispered, his voice the sound of distant chimes. "The gate is broken. The Silence comes."
He pressed something cold and smooth into the boy's hand a shard of crystal that pulsed with a soft, inner light. Then, the light in his eyes faded, and his body dissolved into motes of dust, carried away by the wind.
Elian stood alone in the glassy crater, holding the shard. He felt a faint, warm hum against his palm, a rhythm that was not a heartbeat, but a countdown.
He did not understand the words. The Silence. But in the years that followed, as the stories began to trickle in from the edges of the world, tales of villages going quiet, not destroyed, but emptied of all sound and soul he remembered.
The star had not been a gift. It was a warning. And the echo of its fall was just beginning to be heard.