The Starry Knight

Hi! My name is Sia; I’m a student in high school, and writing is one of my favorite activities. It helps me put my thoughts down on a page (or screen); I also love telling stories about many different things from long fantasy adventures to real world problems and events.

This story is about self acceptance and how our own self love can extend to others in very meaningful ways. I hope you enjoy reading it!

When in trouble, you called on the Knight of Stars. 

	Or as the locals liked to tease, the ‘Starry Knight’.

	Either way, wherever trouble was, people cried and stumbled onto their knees for the knight’s service. Warring kingdoms, feuding neighbors, squabbles at the dinner table - whatever it was, it was no match for the knight. 

	They said that stardust danced on her eyelashes, that the white streak of the galaxy trailed across her eyebrows, that comets landed in the orbs of her eyes. 

They also said that the darkness that surrounds stars lived in the folds of her cloak, the gaps between her damaged hands, the divots in her lips. 

	But for every force, there is one in the universe that is greater and stronger. 

	The universe made a traveling mirror. A benign thing on its own, an all-consuming evil when it wants to be. 

The kingdom of Terra Speculo could hide under the blanket of sunny skies but when the covers were thrown back from the traitorous hand of night, the land faced a nightmare of the devil’s imagination. The traveling mirror had arrived in their corner of the world. You could try to go to bed, but sleep would be interrupted by the forlorn lows of people who the mirror captured. 

	Up in the black castle, the king of Terra Speculo kneeled before the queen, begging for her to wake up. The mirror had chosen the queen’s chambers as its residence for the night, a suitable location, heavy with lofty expectations of the queen’s beauty. 

	“Dahlia!” He shook her knees. 

	She only mumbled one word. “Captured.” 

	That is why they were called the ‘captured people’. Because whenever they came back from wherever the evil took them, that is all they could say. 

	Captured. 

	So the king fled from the vacant eyes of the queen and ran to his general’s chamber. 

	“Call her.”

	“Her?” The general’s sleepy eyes widened. “That her?”

	“How many ‘her’s do we know? Do it now! This has gone too far.”

	Seven miles away in the Nameless Forest, the Knight of Stars listened to the voices of the forest and the sky. They insisted on talking to her, but she was expecting a call to the Northeastern West Kingdom anytime now. Or was it the Northwestern East Kingdom? Either way, the voices needed to wrap up their conversation about five minutes ago.  

	The beat of hoofs crunched against the leaves of the forest floor. They were here for her. 

	But the knight did not move yet. The forest sounded lonely tonight. The moon called out for his loved one, the sky. But the sky shrouded him in its darkness, covering its ears with two clouds. The knight only listened. 

	“Knight!” A man’s voice called out. She stood up, her head brushing against the frond of lavender hanging above her dinner table. Moving them aside from in front of her eyes, she picked up her sword from the doorway and her cloak from its hook.

	“Knight!” he called out again. Her ears perked up. This was neither Northeastern West dialect nor Northwestern East tongue. It was Speculon, the language of her childhood. 

	“The Knight of Stars!” His voice was wretched and cracked in the hardened, icy air of the forest. “The King of Terra Speculo calls for you.” 

	He was at the front of the knight’s cottage. Gripping the sword hard, she moved silently towards the door; strangers in the past had pretended to be in danger, only seeking to harm her. She needed to be careful. 

	But the sobs halted her in her path. Tears betrayed all intent of subterfuge; this man was truly seeking help. 

	She listened at the door, one scarred ear pressed against the cedar wood. 

	The forest went quiet, too. The moon wanted to listen, so it parted the trees and leaned forward through the branches. 

	“My queen, the king’s queen, she is hurt. As are many of our people. Knight,” he implored. She heard a thud against the cobblestone path. “The queen is precious to Terra Speculo. Please help us.” 

	The knight opened the door. She recognized the fallen man as the general of Terra Speculo. 

	“Precious to Terra Speculo or precious to you?” 

	He strained his eyes. “Knight, I cannot see you.” 

	She stepped out into the pool of moonlight that invaded the canopy of the forest. Her cloak had kept her hidden, had blended her seamlessly with the night itself. But in the light, the moon divided itself in the streaks of her hair; for the most part, the moonlight got lost in her inky black strands, but one deviant streak of pale white ran down the side of her hair, like the slicing white of the crescent moon itself.

	The general saw the silver stream in her hair and knew that the Knight had shown herself to him. He bent further down, his forehead nearly touching the path. 

	When her lips opened to speak, her sword twitched in her hand. 

	“I will go with you.” 

	Terra Speculo slumbered as the Starry Knight rode onto their soil. The pinpricks of the stars poked holes in the tapestry of dark. 

	“Is she in the castle?”

	“Yes,” the general said. They had stopped, finally, after traveling nonstop from the cottage to the kingdom. 

	“What about the others?” 

	“They are with their families. They are not a danger to anyone, except themselves.”

	“The captured people,” she said. “What is capturing them?”

	“A mirror,” the general said. His hands tightened on the reigns of his horse. “It travels from house to house in Terra Speculo. Last night it had finally arrived at the castle.” He scrunched up his nose. “The king would not have sent me. Until it affected him. Dozens of our people have already fallen to the mirror. I would have come by myself, but the queen… she had asked me not to. She feared the king would accuse me of greater crimes than his.” 

	Dozens. The king had only sent for her now. Lives could have been saved. 

	“Is the mirror still at the castle?” 

	“We think so, but no one has gone into the queen’s chamber.” He swallowed, averting his eyes from the knight. “We are afraid to be captured, too.”

	“Understandably,” the knight said kindly. The general’s shoulders sagged. “Take me to the castle.” 

	They rode on. 

	The moon and its secrets dogged at her heels as they entered Terra Speculo. Unlike its position in the forest, the moon peered at the city through the gaps in the roofs and towers of the main city. 

	When they arrived at the castle, the sun was about to light the sky. Looking to the horizon, the knight shielded her eyes, and her lips tugged upwards in welcome. The moon had given the light in her hair, eyes, and stardust. The sun had given her stormy lips, skin, and warmth. 

	It was the merciless earth who had given her the trenches of scars running along her hands, her neck, her shoulders. 

	“The mirror has muted power during the day,” the general said, signaling his men to open the gate. “Whatever you must do, it is better to do it during daylight. Once the sun disappears, the mirror’s full strength is returned and it travels to a new location. We will have to renew our search if it disappears tonight.”  

	“Then we must move.” The knight clicked her tongue, and the horse trotted through the castle gates. Sunlight passed through her hair, like fingers passing through air. 

	“That’s her.” A knobby-kneed soldier indiscreetly pointed at her cloak. In the morning sky, the cloak shimmered like a river woven with the reflections of the stars. 

	But others did not share the soldier’s awe of her arrival. They gaped openly at the harsh lines of scars that encroached on her collarbone, on her hands, on the side of her neck, like persistent ivy creeping up the side of a castle wall. 

	In one fluid movement, the knight dropped to the ground from the horse. The king approached. His beard drooped and his hands shook. Her hand cramped around her sword on her belt. 

	“The Knight of Stars. You live up to your name,” the king said quietly.

	“I do.” She raised her chin at him. “I must thank Terra Speculo for my start.”

	The king said nothing. His posture sunk further into hopelessness. 

	“The past is the past,” she said, bowing her head. “I am at your service now.”

	“Queen Dahlia is very sick. The mirror in her chambers,” his finger shook at a window above them. “Its evil has done this to her.”

	“May I see it?”

	“You must not look at it!” The king’s face boiled to a deep purple. “It will capture you, too. We will have no one else to turn to if you fail.”

	The knight bowed her head again. Fear would not rattle her so easily. 

	“Very well. I will keep my distance. But I must see what it is. Fighting a faceless opponent is something I will not do.”

	“Do it at your own risk,” he said. “Guards, take her up to the queen’s chambers.”

	Still starstruck at the knight, the guards nodded like puppets on a marionette string and led her up a series of winding stairs, passing bursts of stained glass windows and still, lifeless portraits.

	She stood in front of the queen’s chamber with the two guards flanking her. In the back of her mind, she heard the king’s warning. But warnings did not apply to a knight of hundreds of kingdoms. Especially when they came from a coward king with an empty queen and a love-crossed general. 

	“Listen,” she said sharply. “Unless you want more people to get hurt, I need you to do this for me.” 

	The guards, their eyes wide like lovesick boys’, bobbed their heads. 

	“I need you to face the mirror. And I will rescue you come the end, but right now I need you to be brave and go first. Like the king implied, I’m your only chance.”

	“Your Bravery, you want us to go first?”

	“I need to see what the mirror does. Will you do this for your country? For your queen?”

	They were not hesitant. Scrambling in front of each other, their elbows knocked in a fight to go first. 

	“You.” She chose the one in the green tunic. “You can go first.”

	He grasped the handle of the door with a stony face and flung it open. 

	Immediately, the knight saw the mirror begin to swirl. The guard’s reflection sucked inwards and spun with the mirror. The knight drew her sword from her belt. Courage had fled from the second guard; he had flattened himself against the stone wall and began to inch down the stairs. But the knight shot out her hand and grasped his tunic. 

	“Stay.”

	He succumbed to her reputation once again. 

	She turned her attention back to the mirror. The man’s reflection had appeared again, but it was crooked and sharp in places. His nose was elongated like a woodpecker’s and his arms were shrinking in the mirror every second, and soon they would not be there anymore. 

	“My nose, my arms,” he muttered over and over again. He kept clutching at them, as if to hide them from the mirror. But the reflection would not relent; its images turned more grotesque, the nose a beak, the arms twigs and sticks. The guard shook in his boots and moaned at the mirror.

	“Please make it stop!” 

	The knight had seen enough; lithe like a tiger, she lunged at the guard and brought both of them to the ground. With her right leg, she kicked the stand of the mirror, and it toppled over, its glassy side facing down. 

	It did not shatter. 

	“Are you okay?” She rolled off his trembling body. 

	“C-c-c-”

	He was only going to say captured. She rubbed her face, disappointed. 

	“C-crooked nose. Twiggy arms,” he breathed, his eyes staring at the ceiling above him.

	“Yes, we saw in the mirror. But look,” she said, drawing out a small mirror from one of the many pockets in her cloak, “it’s alright now.”

	“I hated it. When I was a child, all the girls would laugh.” He shuddered. “They tugged on it like it was a horn.”

	Her mind whirred. 

	“And your arms?” she asked anxiously.

	“My brothers tried to play with me, but I would never be able to catch the ball. They said my arms were too weak.” He looked at them ashamedly. “I should not even be in the king’s guard.”

	“You should.” She nudged his shoulder with a gentle fist. “You were the first person to hold off the power of the mirror.”

	“Only because you saved me in time,” he said quietly. 

	“Give yourself some credit,” she said, standing up. She held out a hand for him. “Thanks to you, I think I know what this mirror does.” 

	He took her hand and looked at it. Her eyes followed his and landed where they landed. Her hand that she had offered had been shriveled up and twisted like the trunk of a tree for as long as she had been the Starry Knight. It was the price she paid for bravery. She made no show of putting it away. It rested on the hilt of her sword. 

	“Shouldn’t we destroy it now?” The guard dragged his attention away from her hand and eyed the mirror warily as if it were a sleeping dragon ready to burn him again. 

	“No. I strike at dusk.”

	“You must not! The mirror is at its strongest at night.”

	“And I am the Knight of Stars,” she said fiercely. “We both are part of the night. I must be with it when it’s at home. Like how the soldier feels safest in his castle, I feel safest with the stars.” 

	When the knight felt the last dying light through the window on her face, she lifted her head. She rose from the step and stood in the doorway of the queen’s chambers. 

	The mirror lay face down. 

	Leaning over it, she straightened and faced its blank surface. 

Waiting for the glass whirlpool to appear in the mirror, the knight braced herself. Her reflection ran her gnarled fingers over the hilt of her sword. 

The mirror stood impeccably still. Not the silver remnant in her hair, not her marred skin, not her starry eyes moved one bit.

	An unexpected warmth blossomed in her chest. It could only mean one thing. 

	“I am not afraid of you, mirror. I know your trick.”

	It might have been futile, even ridiculous to talk to a mirror, but the knight knew that this was no ordinary reflection. 

	“Those poor people. Preying on their insecurities, their childhood injustices. Only the insecure themselves hunt for others’ weaknesses.”

She waited for the mirror to retaliate.

“But I am not afraid of myself. I do not shrink at the sight of my reflection.” She spread her arms wide as the glass began to crack.

	“I love that I am the night and day sky in one. These hands, my mouth, my hair that withers away into a colorless void every moment - it cannot stop me. But it will stop you, mirror.”

	The mirror trembled like a crying child. Pieces splintered off from the top and clattered at her feet. She picked up one shard and touched it gently. 

	“Whatever, whoever you are, mirror, you must be hurting, too. Let me help.”

	The mirror emitted a high pitched wail which caused it to break down further. Shuddering one last time, it shattered completely, shards bursting everywhere like nebulas bursting in the universe. 

	Blinking in its brightness, the knight fell onto her knees when she saw what was left of the mirror. 

	A young man with hair pale like the threads of a spider’s web, like the knight’s hair, tumbled out of the blackness of the mirror. His body shook with a racking cough, and he collapsed on the floor in front of the knight. Tired eyes sought after hers. They were listless, floating in their sockets. 

	“Water…” he rasped. The knight scrambled to her feet to find water in the chamber; she returned with a bronze chalice. Accepting the cup with wizened hands, he gulped the water down. 

	“Thank you,” he said. He set the chalice down, and this time the knight really looked at his hands. They were old, but his face was not. 

	“What happened to you?” The question escaped her before she realized.

	“I… don’t know. One moment I was standing under the moon and the next I was standing in front of thousands of people, just talking to them.” 

	“Thousands?” 

How many had the mirror captured?

	“Yes,” he said. “I watched them pass, and I tried speaking to them. I tried to make them free me.”

	“But they would not. What were you doing to them?”

	“Nothing,” he insisted. “I was only talking to them.”

	She remembered the guard’s long, pointy nose in his reflection. That was not just talking.  

	“Do you remember what you said to the queen?”

	The man’s back shivered as he answered. “I was talking to her about my wife. How she never loved me as much as I did. Her net had captured me and had not set me free yet. You have to understand,” he said as he shifted on the ground towards her. “I needed someone to talk to.” 

	“But in turn you drove the queen mad.”

	“Mad?” he whispered. “I didn’t mean to make anyone-”

	“She took what you said about yourself and thought it of her own marriage, too. She will not talk to the king except for one word. Captured.” 

	“I didn’t mean to,” he repeated quietly. “I only wanted someone to talk to. The guard understood. I told him that my arms were weak, too. That I labored and fought in my training until they nearly broke from the strain.”

	“In turn, the guard was reminded of his own arms, too thin to play with his brothers.”

	“No…” 

	“I know you didn’t mean to.” She offered her hand to him, and they stood up together. He had gotten off the floor but he was still bent over, like a dying tree. 

“Others’ pain is a shadow in our own,” the knight said quietly.

	“My pain comes from years of falling behind. Where does yours come from?”	

	“The very same. I was appointed knight long before I was ever ready to become her.”

	“You are a Knight?” His eyes held hope in them. “Perhaps we are not so different.” 

	“How so?” The knight’s eyes roved over his person to look for his sword, his cape, his curse. “All the knights are gone.” 

	“They are. The moon stripped my title from me before it put me in the mirror.”

	She searched his face. “You were the Knight of the Moon? You are the one who talks to me?” The conversations in the forest. The pearl in the sky, a bead on a string that pulled and wrapped around her. 

	“That makes you the Knight of Stars.” His eyes traced the silver line in her dark hair, her eyebrows, and down to the line of stardust above her cheekbones. “Thank you for saving me.”

	“Our work is not done yet. The sadness that consumed you in the mirror has touched others. We must save them, too. I promise you, knight, I will help you return to yourself again.” She held him firmly by the shoulders and looked into his milky eyes; their color had been slowly creeping in again, like the moon waxing into a full one. “Then one by one, we can return light to this kingdom again.”

	She saw what she needed on his face. 

	“We will do this together.”

	And so, after years and years of searching for belonging, the Knight of the Moon found his home amongst the Stars. Terra Speculo no longer faced the darkness alone. 

	Now, when in trouble, you called on the Knights of the Sky. 

	After all, the sky is where all great things are born.