Pray to the stars, for they are eternal.
Pray for your soul, that the stars may keep it safe when you pass on from this life.
Pray to them in life, if you value the sanctity of your selfhood, that the stars may swiftly find your pure spirit in death.
When the time comes for your rebirth, the stars will guide your soul safely to its new home. You will be born anew, cleansed of all the worldly experience that clouds a life, and yet whatever your new circumstances, you will remain fundamentally yourself.
Through this unbroken cycle of reincarnation, we join the stars in their immaculate, unchanging immortality, our cycles through life after mortal life reflecting their eternal revolution in the night sky.
Not so for those fooled into praying to the False Star.
It comes but once a generation, traveling a blasphemous path wholly unlike the stately procession of the true stars.
Like the sailors it tricks into losing their way, your soul, too, will be led astray if you cast your prayers toward its distant light.
That’s what they tell us, anyway.
Yet somehow lately I find myself unimpressed by their wisdom, and my heart thrills when my prayers reach out to the False Star and touch something so alien…and so covetous.
It’s inhuman. It’s wrong. And I am in love with it.
I’ve never heard anyone speak of the stars responding to their prayers, but this False Star responds to mine with sweet whispers in my mind.
It says that I’m right to distrust the lore of my ancestors—that I am wise where they are blind—and it offers to share its secrets.
It tells me that the unchanging immortality offered by the stars is just another kind of death. To be stagnant from one life to another is not growth. It asks me, without growth, how are we any more alive than the stones under our feet?
I beg it to show me the way.
The False Star reassures me that it has already claimed me, that even when it leaves, no action will be able to divert my soul from its clutches.
I can expect to join my new siblings in its journey, to mingle with the others dissatisfied with immutability.
We will change.
And when at last our souls no longer resemble those of mere humans, the False Star will turn again, sending us in a slow trickle over long decades to fill new vessels, to grow, to gain strength, to spread our taint.
Before that happens, however, I have a task in this life.
The False Star has some weeks yet before it fades completely from view. There remains opportunity to seduce others to join me in giving prayer to the Bringer of Change.
When at last it is gone, perhaps I will seek out those whose souls have already been twisted. I am so eager to learn what it means to be more than human!