Starry Sky 0: The Wall of Stars

(Note: Ensemble cast, plot-focused, long-form, full of heartbreak)

I once walked this land, teaching them to consider the weight of history. Yet I was erased amid the illusion known as “peace.”

The world forgot me. Steel and radiation forged a new graveyard, while humanity was shackled by ironclad laws and the gifted were imprisoned beneath chips called “control.” They fought over scraps of survival in this wasteland, unaware that this was nothing more than the final revelry.

I watched Li Zhizhan, the boy who tried to embrace the world while standing in a pool of blood.

He thought he was saving his people, fighting the arrogance of the ruling elite. He even believed coexistence was an ideal within reach. He didn’t know that every line he recorded in New Century Journal, every speech delivered on the road to certain death, every photograph capturing a smile, was merely the most fragile screw in a set of finely tuned gears, hurtling ever faster toward an ending long decided.

The truth lies hidden in the gaps of history deliberately erased. As memories begin to fracture, as “gods” watch coldly from the edges of another dimension, and as the spine of this planet is about to be snapped by something from the sea of stars, the boys and girls he considered his companions are moving, through unimaginable tragedy, step by step toward the wasteland where I once stood.

Coexistence is their most beautiful final message.

And after you have forgotten me, all I can do is watch in silence as you repeat the same mistakes.