Neil Gaiman

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.

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

"Anything you desire", said Victoria, amused.

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.

Tristran sat at the top of the spire of cloud and wondered why none of the heroes of the penny dreadfuls he used to read so avidly were ever hungry. His stomach rumbled, and his hand hurt him so.

Adventures are all very well in their place, he thought, but there's a lot to be said for regular meals and freedom from pain.

Still, he was alive, and the wind was in his hair, and the cloud was scudding through the sky like a galleon at full sail. Looking out over the world from above, he could never remember feeling so alive as he did at that moment. There was a skyness to the sky and a nowness to the world that he had never seen or felt or realized before.

He understood that he was, in some way, above his problems, just as he was above the world.

It doesn't matter if I believe it or not, that's just the way things are.

"The little folk dare anything", said his friend. "And they talks a lot of nonsense. But they talks an awful lot of sense, as well. You listen to 'em at your peril, and you ignore 'em at your peril, too".

This I say: you have stolen knowledge you did not earn, but it shall not profit you. For you shall be unable to see the star, unable to perceive it, unable to touch it, to taste it, to find it, to kill it. Even if another were to cut out its heart and give it to you, you would not know it, never know what you had in your hand. This I say. These are my words, and they are a true-speaking.

I will tell you three true things. Two of them I will tell you now, and the last is for when you need it most. You will have to judge for yourself when that will be.

"If you ever get to be my age", said the old woman, "you will know all there is to know about regrets, and you will know that one more, here or there, will make no difference in the long run".

They say that each night, when the duties of state permit, she climbs, on foot, and limps, alone, to the highest peak of the palace, where she stands for hour after hour, seeming not to notice the cold peak winds. She says nothing at all, but simply stares upward into the dark sky and watches, with sad eyes, the slow dance of the infinite stars. (closing words)

It has occasionally been remarked upon that it is as easy to overlook something large and obvious as it is to overlook something small and niggling, and that the large things one overlooks can often cause problems.

I owe an enormous debt to Hope Mirrlees, Lord Dunsany, James Branch Cabell and C. S. Lewis, wherever they may currently be, for showing me that fairy stories were for adults too.