"How many others have been trapped here like me?"
His gaze briefly flickered, and for a moment, his confident exterior wavered.
"There have been... others," he replied, but there was a hesitation in his voice that made my skin crawl. I tried to suppress a shudder and turned away. Whatever reassurance I was starting to feel had evaporated. I felt his scrutiny, and he didn't need to see my face to read my emotions.
"It's not what you think, Tilly."
But I wasn’t buying it.
"Of course it's what I think," I replied, turning sharply back toward him. "What else should I be thinking about? Taking a walk in the garden and admiring the view? How many other lives have your actions disrupted?"
"I know how wrong this sounds," he said, raising his hands as if to calm me, "but this has been our way since our star-boundlives began." His voice dipped, the mask slipping. There was a heaviness, as if the words itself carried centuries of weight.
I felt the colour drain from my face. Star-bound. Bound to what? To the curse? To the stars themselves? That hit me like a brick. He had to be lying. Or worse—he wasn’t. “Star-bound?” I echoed, my voice tight. “What does that even mean? Are you… something close to an immortal?” Even saying that out loud sounded surreal.
Cillian's jaw tensed, the slightest crack appearing in his composure. “Not immortal,” he said quietly. “Just held in this life far longer than your kind. The curse stretches our years… it doesn’t spare us from endings.”
"That’s not what I said. What I meant is... no system is perfect. Tilly, look at your own world. Just as different nations on Earth have their customs and traditions, so do we. Look at the wars and strife in your world before judging us so harshly."
I stared at him, stunned. He was comparing this to politics, to history, and to human failure. He spoke like someone who had watched empires rise and fall, not just read about them.
"Wasn't this why your parents wanted to raise you in a quiet village rather than in London, which is your birthplace?"
How would he know where I’d been born? It didn't matter. I wasn't about to let him throw me off this path of questioning.
"That's true; humans are their own worst enemy. Don’t think I don’t understand that. But if you’re star-bound, you must have benefited from your longer lives and experiences, which I thought made you superior to humanity, as Torin says. If that's the case, how can you possibly justify your actions?"
"Don't expect perfection. Even in ten thousand years, humanity will never achieve it. It's not possible for any of us." His voice was persuasive. I felt myself being drawn in by his logic, but I had to resist. He spoke of time like someone who had lived through far too much of it.
"That’s true, but if you're star-bound, shouldn’t you be superior to humanity? Shouldn’t you have learned something in all that time?" I replied, my anger gave me the strength to push back. If he was half-immortal, then why did he still act like this?
"How do you know where I was born? How do you know my parents moved to a quiet village to raise me?” I asked, hoping to catch him off guard.
"Tilly, we know all about you. We certainly didn't decide to take you on a whim. Why else do you think we came to your world?” He replied with unnerving confidence. It was as if he had seen every detail of my life, like he’d been watching longer than any human ever could.
"Seraphina says your world is called Elora. If I can learn more about it, perhaps I can better understand what you want with me." I said, hoping to gather information that might aid my escape.
He stared off into the distance, as though glimpsing a place only he could see. His eyes filled with a sadness that touched me.
It's not so different to yours, but different enough. My people communed with nature and the arts. We looked at the universe differently than how people of your world look at Earth. Here, your people are controlled by their beliefs and the contradictory mandates of religions. In our world, we don't abide by such mandates. We're taught to worship the beauty, energies, and powers that surround us."
I felt the stirring of a connection. The philosophy was beautiful, but their means of taking me from my home didn't fit with it.
"From birth," he continued, "we're taught the importance of the energy around us. The mind, the body, the soul, and the universe are all connected, and we're all part of it. Once we learned to connect with the universal spirit, we learned to respect it. Only then did we experience the magic around us. Your people simply don't have that connection, as your minds have been cleverly pushed along the wrong path."
I glanced at the lovely view beyond the windows. Perhaps others on Earth had felt no such connection, but I certainly had.
"I think you're wrong. I have felt connected to nature and art my whole life”
Cillian closely regarded me.
"Then you should be able to understand. Once our people became connected to the universe, they worked together to build a world that was both powerful and peaceful. We helped each other and became stronger." His expression darkened.
"But then Vareth’s Curse shattered the light from our world and forever changed our destinies."
This must be the curse Seraphina had spoken of. I knew instinctively I wouldn't be told more about that yet and I instead circled back to the immortality. An area I felt was safer ground, which meant Cillian was more likely to open up about it. Maybe I would learn something I could use to my advantage this way.
"You say you live longer but will you eventually die? I mean, no one can live forever, can they?" I asked, trying to understand the limits of their lifespan.
