Star Shine -- Introduction.

Sometimes, words fail you.

Love is only a four-letter word, with no meaning that translates from one person to another; it is a bond between two, and sometimes more, people, expressing a range of sensation from jealousy and loss to victory and union, and everything in between.

Pain is only a four-letter word; to someone with a limb being sawed off by a twisted prison warden, it is absolutely meaningless, lacking the credibility of a decent scream of cerebral terror and shock.

Star Shine, when he had a human name, could have told you that.

They say, "Time heals all wounds"

Star Shine adds: "Yeah, when its not inflicting even more."

His story, as all stories, starts with a drum beat.

Let's rock.
----------------
Eli Morris, born in nineteen-hundred-sixty-five, vanished from normal life when his father walked into a drug store to buy a box of condoms and two packs of Marlboro's, in 1980. Since then, its been nothing but fun for his entire family. His father, Walter Morris, was a witness to the Mafioso-wunderkind Tony "Gillette" Lascerta of Sicily getting his prescription filled. The prescription was for a bottle of over-the-counter speed-analog, marketed as a diet pill. While getting it filled, he inadvertently bumped into Wyatt Lewiston of Ft. Worth, Texas, recently parole-violated for robbing a drug store, the Walgreen's he was visiting being his fourth in as many days. The resulting gunfire sent Wyatt Lewiston to the morgue, and Tony Lascerta to jail, where he, in a moment of panic and confusion, admitted to dealing narcotics.

His resulting trial hinged upon the testimony of Walter Morris witnessing the execution-like murder of the erstwhile robber, Wyatt Lewston. The jury found the first four shots acceptable responses to someone's life endangered by a drug-crazed gunman; the two shots which went 'up' Wyatt's still-living body, however, were seen as 'excessive'. He received a life sentence, and issued a death sentence of his own against the man and family which supported that man, who helped put him away for eternity. The edict was called 'vengeance', but it was simply business as usual. The difference became clear, later.

Walter Morris was a walking corpse from then on; every move he made, he had six men with guns on him at all times. At first, uniformed officers, then Federal Agents. then at the end, four hitmen and two gangsters hired to get rid of his corpse with a fleet of garbage bags and cinder blocks at the end of the docks. This ends the saga of Walter Morris.

Left without a family, Eli Morris was castaway in the ocean of life. Foster homes. Group homes. Mental homes. Juvenile facilities. Correction facilities. Eventually, a prison sentence, for arson. All in the span of eight years. Life can sucker punch you so hard, your spirit never draws another breath. His seemed to die of asphyxiation, until he found a place in the chemistry lab at a community college.

At this point, life is over as he knew it as a human.

One night, while online, a blackjack blow to the skull rendered him unconscious; the subsequent trip through the Hedge, into the Briar Patch, handled the rest. He did not sleep the first night; he spent it in tears, getting acquainted with his keeper and newly-assigned task: chained to an anvil and forced to drag it about as he went through his routine, he would be the smith of the instruments of delight and wonder, of terror and agony, some of which would be used on his body, mind, soul, and anything else which the jailer, Steelsmile, could touch, which was more than enough for anything sentient to find comforting.

For the next seventeen years, he endured agony, bliss and heartache, feeling the pulse of the world ebbing away from him with each tortured breath of his iron-dusted lungs; with every pound of his tortured frame, he felt that much more disconnected from his birth-world, anchored in every way that could matter to the world which was his hellish prison, his blessed lair of unearthly delights. This was the second-worst thing he ever saw in his entire life. Words couldn't describe the brutal sensations, the fierce love he was compelled to feel for his fellow captives, for their suffering, for their eventual deaths and deprivations he grew addicted. He knew what they called him: warder, kapo, sellout, snitch, Steelsmile's bitch, or worse: the affectionate nickname he gave his favored "creation" with the filed metal teeth like the sparkling lights in the night skies -- Star Shine. He was all that, and worse; he signed up for it, thinking it would lessen the blows, rescind the horrors, take back the terrifying vista of his world into something only partially insane, or tolerably Hellish. He was wrong, and would be proven so with every falling night.

In somewhere in 1985, the warden of the Briar Patch introduced a new prisoner, recently arrived from inside the Hedge; someone who'd made his own Devil's deal with the Hobgoblins, the Others, the perpetually Lost: his name was Jeeter, and he was also an Artificer, a Smith who was all-too-willing to teach. He didn't teach the trades; he exchanged knowledge. For every bit of trivia of the 'real world', he would give up a piece of knowledge he'd accrued in one sort of world or another: a Contract made easier, a Clause made more amenable to all parties, the way the Escaped Ones made their ways through the Trods, into the World of Births. He also taught something else he knew: survival through the spectacle of fearsome deeds.

"It is not the size of the dog in the fight," he had tattooed across his back, "but the size of the fight in the dog."

He instructed Eli Morris in prisoncraft; how to build a shiv from nothing, almost literally. He learned about baseball teams.
Together, they suffered tortures, selling each other out a dozen dozen times over and back, begging for death.
Time healed their wounds, sealing their rifts again, forgiveness their bridge between them.

He instructed Eli Morris about the world between Faerie and the Real; he was told about national politics.
United, they endured elegant dreams crafted from their own fantasies, turned into cartoonish hate-filled venom of spirit and smoke, used to entertain the often-horrific guests of Steelsmile.
The passage of nights became their bandage, layering the wounds closed through pressure and privation.

He instructed Eli Morris about Contracts and Clauses; he in turn, learned about the return of Vietnam veterans.
They were forced to kill one of their own, in mercy, to keep his tortured death from infecting the others with the viral dreamstuff that Steelsmile gave to the prisoners if he had to go on leave for a season or two, to allow them to torture themselves in his absence.
The cold stares of the other prisoners turned into something less dark, more human; they weren't hated because of what they were, just who they were. No longer would they be hated for their compliance in building the monstrosities for the jailor, but because they were still basically assholes in their own right.

Then Steelsmile returned, bearing ill tidings: a cleansweep, starting with Jeeter. Jeeter was strung up and his skin made into a windsock, lashed to Eli's spinal column as a pennant, flapping and moaning in the breeze for eternity. It retained sentience, and a damned dark one at that.

This time, it was Steelsmile's turn to be the instructor: He instructed Eli Morris in how to make Steelsmile regret ever capturing anyone who met Eli Morris from that day forward.

"I am now a biological weapon," Eli-the-Dead said to Eli-the-Living, ".. and I want to share my disease." Inking himself with a mighty Contract of warfare, of hate, of terror and pain, of strength and will, he gave himself a new image: if he must be a star and shine, behold the power of the black hole -- a star shining inwards.

That night, when the cells were being prepared for their 'cleansing', Eli lead the other Smiths into the galley; the cooks, long since members of the Artificers, understood: when a Smith takes your knife, it is either dull, or just about to enter your skull; resist, and it might cost you your life. No one resisted. Armed, they entered the pantry; the food stocks were raided, the animal pens were next: grabbing the hunting dogs used to track down the nigh-endless multitude of escapees of the Briar Patch. Steelsmile's tower, the tallest by far, in the middle of the compound, was surrounded by the other jailers.

A quiet pact made the circuit of the camp: from this day forward, no more chains and whips, no more bruised souls and ruptured dreams -- from this day forward...

"No prisoners!"

The first assault was a rush, and that rush was intense; it died almost instantaneously, ineffective as anything imagined by mere humans could ever hope to be. Skulls and hearts were filled with blistering heat and wondrous majesty alike, sometimes simultaneously: one survivor of the first rush was a man bearing a pennant in one hand and a salt shaker in the other. With a shriek of the battlecry, he leaped at Steelsmile, slamming his head against his keeper's over and over again, the iron-shod coin long-since wedged in by an errant scullery maid, his only true weapon. Every punch landed, Eli ensured made impact with his face. He bit, his teeth long and sharpened from filing and filling in with waxed iron filings from a thousand rusted buttons and lost keyrings. He fists became a projectile system for his anvil; he used it to dodge by simply throwing it across the room, forced to fly after it as shot after shot of Steelsmile fell short of the mark by inches, then feet, then by entire directions. When the time came, he looked down upon his captor, and saw the eyes which entranced him, which imprisoned him, which filled him with hateful love and wondrous power.

And he stomped them right out of the fucker's skull with an anvil in each hand.

"No prisoners."

The march through the Briar Patch was not one in silent desperation; this was Sherman's March to the sea. This was no Bataan Death march; this was a military campaign, enacted to terrify the occupants into fleeing, battening down the hatches if they couldn't. Two of the Faerie's residents made an approach, but Steelsmile's mark was one which ensured that prisoners, even if inches from the edge of the Hedge, were still in his power. Assuming them to be simply a game gone further than most, the two wandered back, unconcerned about the entire affair, considering it trifling and hardly worth notice.

"No prisoners."

Two more dull-witted Fae joined the firebrand piles; the wagons loaded with torches, burning a superhighway's width of passage through. The lumbering bulks in the shadows were cast back by the audacity, the tenacity, the sheer stupid madness of a group of escaped prisoners with the balls to march out, growing in the strength of the barbs tearing at their feet, the Brambles becoming the smoke they rasped through accordioned lungs and bent windpipes.

Arrival at the edge of the Hedge came apparent when the flames went out, iced solid and the war-cry of their own devising became a shrieking chant behind them: mercenaried souls, chained to the will of a True Fae, chasing them down for sport, for bounty, for the sheer bloodymindedness of it all.

Then the chase was on, in earnest.

They ran through the bushes, they ran through the Brambles, they ran through the places where the Hobgoblins wouldn't go. They ran so far, so fast, they burst out the other side in a tangle of limbs, confused.. terrified and utterly lost in a new world.

Since then, it's been a numbing, bumpy ride.

And, notably, still no prisoners.