He gathered the stray hydrogen from the system's frozen comets. He sifted helium from the solar wind. He reached into the quantum foam where new elements dreamed of being born, and he stole a handful of strangeness —the rarest fuel, the kind that burned not with fire but with will.
Until the crack.
And Arvus, who had made a trillion suns without once being thanked, felt something crack inside himself. Not the Forge this time. Himself. starmaker arvus
Arvus studied the star. It was not built to last—a cobbled-together thing, rich in heavy elements, with a fusion rate like a hiccup. Any proper Starmaker would have scattered it for parts.
He heard the people's prayers, not as words but as vibrations in the dark. A child's lullaby about the sun waking up. An old woman's memory of harvests under a warm sky. A scientist's last equation, scribbled on a wall: What if we are the only ones who ever loved a star? He gathered the stray hydrogen from the system's
For ten billion years, he had drifted through the Veil of Unformed Light, pressing his awareness against raw nebulae until they kindled into fusion. He had shaped blue supergiants for empires that would rise and fall before their light reached the nearest world. He had coaxed gentle red dwarfs into being, tucking them into the arms of spiral galaxies like lanterns for lost travelers. The universe called him Starmaker, and he worked alone.
"Please," it whispered. "We are dying."
But Arvus was already fading. The crack in the Forge had sealed behind him, and the Veil of Unformed Light was calling him back to his duty. Yet as he drifted away, he left behind a single gift: a new constellation, burned into the edge of their sky. Seven stars in the shape of an open hand.