"And if I brought you the fallen star?" asked Tristran lightly. "What would you give me? A kiss? Your hand in… — Neil Gaiman

I ran from him. But he found me and bound me with an obligation, which binds my kind more securely than any chain ever could.

Every boy in the village was in love with Victoria Forester. And many a sedate gentleman, quietly married with grey in his beard, would stare at her as she walked down the street, becoming, for a few moments, a boy once more, in the spring of his years with a spring in his step.

Few of us now have seen the stars as folk saw them then — our cities and towns cast too much light into the night — but, from the village of Wall, the stars were laid out like worlds or like ideas, uncountable as the trees in a forest or the leaves on a tree. Tristan would stare into the darkness of the sky until he thought of nothing at all, and then he would go back to his bed, and sleep like a dead man.