Liora and the Star of Many Orbits

A Myth from the Wandering Valleys

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The night Liora first saw the Star of Many Orbits, she thought the sky was tearing.

Not with violence, but with excess.

A shimmer of branching lights rippled across the horizon—some circling, some spiralling outward, some flickering between paths as if unsure which future to favour. The elders called it an omen. The astronomers called it an anomaly. The storytellers called it a visitor.

But Liora simply felt the air tilt, as though the world were being asked a question it had never had to answer before.

She followed the shifting glow into the high ridges above the valley, where the wind always told the truth. There, she found a small fire burning beside a fallen cairn. A traveller, cloaked in something like star-woven dust, was tending the flames.

“You saw it,” the traveller said without turning. “Most people see only the sky. You saw the cut.”

Liora sat, wary but curious. “What cut?”

The traveller scattered a handful of dull stones into the fire. They flared into colour, throwing multiple shadows that moved in different directions.

“The sky has not grown a new star,” the traveller said.

“It has grown new orbits.”

Liora watched the shadows circle, intersect, and sometimes drift apart entirely.

“Why would a star have many orbits?” she asked.

The traveller smiled with the sadness of someone listening to a fracturing song.

“Because something has changed the weight of possibility.”

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The First Orbit: The Old One

From the flickering stones rose a large, slow shadow, heavy and steady.

“This is the orbit your people knew,” the traveller said.

“A future held by shared rhythm, by time that moved with walking feet.”

It circled ponderously, pulled by a familiar centre.

Liora recognised it immediately—not as an image, but as a sensation in her bones.

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The Second Orbit: The Quickening

A smaller shadow spiralled wildly around the first, moving too fast to settle.

“This orbit came later,” the traveller continued.

“It rushes ahead, outrunning the stories meant to guide it.”

Liora felt its pull—bright, intoxicating, a song that promised everything at once.

“Why does it move so fast?” she whispered.

“Because something helps it think faster than it can feel.”

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The Third Orbit: The Splintering

Then dozens of flickers emerged—tiny orbits, each self-contained, each tugged by a different, unseen centre.

“These are the orbits that form when the world no longer agrees on which future is worth the journey.”

Liora watched them drift, collide, repulse, couple and uncouple in restless dance.

“They look lonely,” she said.

“They are not lonely,” the traveller replied. “They are precise.

But precision is not the same as belonging.”

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The Question of Gravity

Liora finally asked the question that had been rising in her like dawn:

“What holds them all together?”

The fire dimmed. The shadows stilled. Even the wind quieted.

“That,” the traveller said, “is what the world is trying to remember.”

He placed one final stone in the flames—a dull grey one that did not glow at first.

Then, slowly, it began to pulse, not with brightness but with warmth.

A warmth that reached Liora’s hands.

A warmth that steadied the orbits.

A warmth that reminded her of the hearths of the valley, of the shared meals, the kept songs, the stories that waited for night.

“This,” the traveller said,

“is care—the oldest gravity the world has.”

As the stone warmed, the wild orbit slowed, the splintered lights began to synchronise, and the sky above seemed to exhale.

Not into one orbit.

Not into sameness.

Into relation—a balancing, a listening, a gentle holding-together of many futures.

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The Visitor's Departure

Before dawn, the traveller rose.

“Will the star remain fractured?” Liora asked.

“All stars with many orbits remain fractured,” he replied. “But fractured things can still hold.”

He paused, lifting his cloak of star-dust.

“When you return to your valley, remember this:

The sky does not ask for one orbit.

It asks that the orbits remember each other.”

And with that he walked into the paling horizon—

a figure dissolving into dawn,

a reminder that some teachers appear only when the world itself is learning.