A toned illustration featuring a story and character belonging to  GuardianKing. I had a brilliant time working with this illustration and the concept behind it! Please enjoy this story written by the patron of the illustration.


"Long ago, in ages when a thick fog cloaked the Deepwood with its cold embrace, a lone maiden picked white lilies for the Somber Elk she loved. The Elk gazed up at the empty sky with deep longing in its eyes, and from the empty chasm that formed the heavens, Her eyes would not move. "Once, longer ago," she whispered to Her beloved maiden, "the gods cast us down from our home. We live beneath their radiance, the empty sky a reminder of our exile."

"I wish I could see the colors of Madoh again," she wished with a wistful sigh.

One night, the flower maiden followed a trail of lilies through a path that led her towards a quiet clearing. She came across a pond whose still waters sat at the heart of a perfectly circular clearing. The pines and willows bowed around the water's edge. Within the still reflection of the pond, the flower maiden beheld a sight unknown to her crimson eyes: a pale orb that hung high above the pond and by its side sat a sea of white dots splashed upon waves of colors. Nothing like the black sky above us, she thought to herself.

Joyous of her new discovery, the maiden sauntered back to her Elk in the Deepwood. When she told Her of her vision, a wistful grin stretched Her withered lips. For a moment, and no more, a glimmer alit her vacant eyes. "My dearest flower..." She caressed her beloved. "I always knew you did not steal those eyes: they were a gift from the gods themselves." She gestured up to the dark sky, masked by the mist forever more. "You belong up there with them, not with a heathen as I."

Nevertheless, the flower maid insisted she would stay. Left with no choice, the Elk whispered to her maiden that such things were called stars by the gods. "Once," She spoke to her faithful flower, "these woods had stars too. Alas, the gods stole them from us as a reminder of our exile."

This would not do, the maiden thought. And so, she set back out to the pool. She climbed to the top of the highest pine with a basket of flowers in hand. With her eyes affixed upon the pond, she sought to plant a new garden of stars that would blanket the Deepwood below. And so, for a thousand days and a thousand nights, marked only by the presence and absence of the lonely eye in the water she dubbed "Moon", the maiden danced from pine to willow, and willow to oak, atop the trees with her delicate step, and each with stride, she planted a new patch of stars upon the sky.

Alas, she did not have the colors to paint this ceiling. The newborn stars sat alone upon their new home. So, instead, she cut her hair with the finest branch. Rather that replicate what already existed across the water, she sought to invent something new: something none had seen before. She took each strand and wove the stars together into fantastical shapes: shadows of what she saw through the water, yet shapes nonetheless. For all their beauty and colors, the sky of the gods lacked any forms. Besides, the maiden thought, it was a waste of stars for them to wither apart, adrift in the expanse.

When the maiden returned to her beloved Elk, she beckoned her faithful to gaze away from the clearing and up once again at the sky.

And it was then that the Somber Elk saw the first constellations. "