The Wandering Stars
Beyond the Traveller, three more lights stray against the fixed stars: Avelis, the brightest wanderer of the night, which every watcher knows and every watcher calls a star; Noryss, the pale stray at the very edge of sight, whose rare appearances are read as omens of quiet years; and Ulvaan, which no living eye has ever seen, a world that survives only in the old Iru People Iru The progenitors, and the only naturally evolved people of Elshore. records.
Key traits
- Avelis: the brightest light of the dark sky at its returns, outshining every true star; universally known, universally mistaken for one. The Vigil marks its risings, and Randenist reading takes it for an attendant of the suns.
- Noryss: at the threshold of sight on the darkest nights, drifting so slowly that a single life barely sees it move; watchers dispute whether it exists at all, and its confirmed appearances are counted omens of stillness.
- Ulvaan: never visible from Elshore under any sky. It is named in the surviving Iru star-tables and nowhere else; the simple folk have no name for it, because no one has ever had a reason to point.
- Four moons attend Avelis - Aress, Nirath, Serren, and tilted Ollun, which keeps a slanted road of its own; all four are names from the Iru tables, seen by no eye.
- Two moons Cosmology The Two Moons Two moons attend Elshore: Liir, the near and swift one, and Ressor, the far and slow one. attend Noryss - Hessil and Virra - known, like their parent, only to the old tables.
- Ulvaan keeps one companion, Vess, riding so near that the tables write the two as a pair.
- None of the three keeps a shared measure with Elshore's year: their meetings with the world wander around the whole of its road, and each faint pull is undone by the next.
- Only the Traveller shakes the world, and the difference is the timing, not the size.
The night sky of Elshore holds a small company of lights that will not keep their places. The brightest is Avelis, which at its returns burns brighter than any true star; herders and sailors and children all know it, and all of them call it a star, for what else would it be. The Vigil marks its risings, and the Randenist readers take it for an attendant upon the suns. Far dimmer is Noryss, a pale stray at the very threshold of sight, found only by patient watchers on the darkest nights and lost again for seasons at a time; because it drifts so slowly that a life barely sees it move, its sightings are disputed, and the years in which it is agreed upon are remembered as quiet ones. Of the third wanderer, Ulvaan, there is nothing to see at all. It stands in the surviving star-tables of the Iru, with its slow period and its distances, and it stands nowhere else; the folk of Elshore have never named it because they have never seen it, and most who copy the old tables take the entry for a scribe's invention.
Why does the Traveller shake the world when it draws near, while these three have never stirred so much as a tide? The answer the old astronomers give is timing. Tharuun keeps close to a two-for-one measure with Elshore's year: for every circle Elshore closes, the Traveller closes almost exactly two, and so the two worlds meet again and again at nearly the same place on their roads. Each meeting alone is a small thing, but the meetings lean on Elshore in the same direction, time upon time, the way a swing rises higher under small pushes that keep its own rhythm. Age by age the timing drifts a little, and in the generations when the meetings fall truest the leaning becomes a shaking, and the world knows a passage. The wandering stars keep no such measure. Their meetings with Elshore fall now here, now there, all around the road, and each faint pull is cancelled by the next, the way pushes given out of rhythm bring a swing to rest. They may stand where they please in the sky; the world beneath them never feels it.
What the Iru knew of these three, they measured; the learned of later ages cite copies of copies, each thinner than the last; and around the fires the wanderers have become omens, attendants, and inventions, according to the teller. The lights themselves keep their roads regardless, precise and indifferent, waiting to be measured again.