When Dmitri crested the lip of the crater, the fallen star within was just starting to crack. Like a bird emerging from its egg, outer shells of rock cracked and sloughed off into glistening heaps as the being within stretched and broke free from its vessel.

Just a shard of its shell would have been worth a king's fortune, suffused such with the power of the cosmos above. Gloaming light played across the shell shards in bright auroras, dancing like a will-o-wisp across the fragments. But now, as the first one there, Dmitri was hoping for the grand prize.

Dmitri was a criminal, a rebel astrologer, ejected years ago from his enrollment in the royal academy for profane studies, and now he was graduating from heresy into treason: a fallen star was for a royal soul, regal in bearing, noble in thought. Dmitri looked more the farmer than the astrologer, or perhaps a wild brigand: he was muscular and tanned, hair shorn tight to his skull, brows heavy, face perpetually stubbled rust-red from his erratic shaving. Very unlike the pale, thin students at the royal academy, who slept during the day to better absorb the radiation of the stars, and whose only labors were reorienting a telescope. Undressed, his true nature as a rebel astrologer would be revealed: his arms and chest were thickly tattooed with false constellations, winding across his muscles in dark lines. Lacking the resources of the royal court or the bloodline of the Stellar King, he was forced into mere physical sympathy; tattooing the lines of his constellations upon his flesh in an attempt to evoke them internally.

In his ramshackle mage tower he'd been plotting the approach of a meteor, and through long nights over the last month he'd been slogging through swamps and wastelands as he'd triangulated the approach. He'd narrowed down the impact site further and further, plotting it on his star chart. He'd been exiled from the king's court; he wouldn't assume to know what the royal astrologers had noticed. It was such a small star, wandering across the cosmos; perhaps it had been unnoticed, but not likely. But the reward for catching it would be great. He had to take the risk.

That was what had lead him to stumbling around in the abandoned fields of lower Yavboros in the deep of night. If the star came down tonight, it would likely be around here. Tomorrow night, eight leagues to the west, in the Darkwoods. The night after that, eight leagues further, into Valen. He could only hope his calculations had been correct.

The star had carved through the sky like a knife cutting away the night and revealing the brilliance behind it. There had been a bright flash, blinding him, and roar of impact that knocked him off his feet, but he began blindly crawling towards it even as his head was still ringing from the impact.

The crater's lip billowed with unnatural heat, banishing the night's chill with an oppressive, alien heat: vaporized rock, molten metals, boiling godstuff. He had been chill the whole night, but now sweat poured down his skin, sticking his robe to his back.

The star's shell crumbled apart enough for the being within to emerge, standing tall, and Dmitri was paralyzed at the sight of it.

The fallen star resembled, at first glance, something like an enormous bull formed from rough rock and sharp crystal: huge glimmering horns, rough back humped bulky with muscle, massive cloven hooves. As it moved, that first resemblance changed to something more complicated.

More than anything else its head resembled a geode that had been smashed half-open: a rocky exterior that opened into a glimmering hollow of purple-blue crystal shards, with nothing like eyes, nose, a face. Massive eruptions of dark crystal burst from its skull, forming tined horns that resembled, vaguely, the wide-splayed horns of a bull, or perhaps a wide-open set of beetle pincers, with the hollow as its mouth. Threads of stiff fur-stuff, more mineral encrustation than anything mammalian, surrounded his head, forming a mane or mantle that shone in rainbow colors and painted light in a rainbow glow across anything nearby. Its body was massive, with muscles seemingly hewn from faceted obsidian, painted over thinly in mottled splotches with pebbly grey hide, and to match its bullish horns its lower body had something like animal flanks, tapering down to massive hooves -- cloven, like a bull's, but split into three shining black lobes, almost like a lizard's claws. Its hands, too, were the same kind of limb; massive black hoof-claws. As it pulled free from its shell, it moved just as easily on four limbs as on two. What was last to emerge was its tail: long and snakelike, top side coated in the same rainbow-mineral fuzz, the rest pebbly hide. The tail ended with a massive mace-like swell, chunky crystal, and it used the bulbous end to stabilize itself as it stood upright, rearing up on its legs to peer around the landscape.

Dmitri had known what he was seeking, but still, seeing a fallen star in the flesh sent a spike of fear through his chest, anchoring his feet to the ground. His heresy had been to posit that perhaps the fallen stars were not as selective as legends said: that they would accept many men as hosts, provided they had not committed mortal sins, rather than only privileging the most devout. It was one thing to think that, but it was another entirely to confront a living god with that assumption.

All he had to do was present himself, and he would be judged. But for a long, long moment, all he could do was watch, frozen in fear. It was only when the fallen star started to move, loping up to the crater's rim, that his desperation rose above the fear. He stumbled forward, onto the steaming rocks along the rim, and yelled: "Divine one! I beseech you--" he started, but his voice froze in his chest when the fallen star twisted its head to face him -- rotated inhumanly on its neck, horns skewed out impossibly. It looked humanoid, roughly, but it didn't move like one would expect. It scuttled closer on four legs, gait insectile, not-quite-right.

There was a rush of superheated air as it approached, hissing off its hide. The fallen star loomed above him, so, so much larger now in front of him as it seemed down at the crater's heart. even on four legs it was taller than him, and when it stood it must have been easily twice his height.

Rocklike structures inside its hollow head twitched in insectile motions when its spoke, and the voice that emerged was deep and resonant, just on one edge of inhuman. "Ah. An attendant. How rapidly you appear." Its accent was strange, ancient.

Dmitri was tall and muscled, with a dark scowl that intimidated the villagers easily when he rode down for supplies. Now, he felt like a child speaking to an executioner. He was not a shy or fearful man, but standing here, with the fallen star before him, his tongue stumbled over itself. "Di- divine one! I-- I would serve you, and safeguard your starseed with my life!"

The firmament above was that of a civilization of gods that rarely deigned to visit the earthbound below. Once a century, perhaps, a soul of divine purity called to the gods above, and they descended to bestow upon them a magical artifact of unimaginable power: a starseed, a crystalline facet of divinity itself, which bestowed upon the bearer magical power with no equal. Those blessed became kings and queens, high priests, brilliant astrologers. They had no peer. But it had been centuries since a fallen star had blessed Roiova with a vessel, and their lineage was weak and doddering, not worthy of the slightest respect.

There was the baying of hounds in the distance. The king's hunters, perhaps, tracking down the fallen star. Dmitri reflexively looked to the side, out into the darkened fields, before he realized how obscene it would be to look away from the divine creature before him. Pure of heart, forthright of will, that was who the divine fallen stars chose to elevate -- perhaps. Dmitri had no estimation as to the purity of his soul: that was for the gods to judge, after all. He could only offer himself. But he certainly couldn't _lie_.

"It's-- it's not safe here, lord," Dmitri stammered, entire body wobbling before the torrent of power that plumed off the fallen star. "For me. Others will come, seeking your power. The descendants of the old Stellar King's court. His astrologers would have been tracking your descent too, lord."

A deep rumble buzzed through the fallen star's chest. "I see," it -- he? -- said.

Royal-blue starshots burst up from the horizon. One, then two more, as they began to triangulate and move in. That was no rural hunter gathering his hounds; that was the king's astrologers.

The fallen star looked out across the horizon. Dmitri realized, with a kind of giddy terror, that the fallen star would have been able to see over the nearby treetops. "Being hunted has never entertained me. The last king I spoke with was tedious. I will go with you."

The response was so baffling it took Dmitri a moment to even form a response. "Yes-- uh, yes, lord. Should we, ah, retire to my mage tower?"

The fallen star snorted, amused. A plume of smoky air burst from his crystal maw. "Lead the way."

---

What normally would have been a slog of several hours was compressed into five minutes, through no working Dmitri could clearly understand. Their steps moved longer, perhaps, or the land twisted around them. The fallen star had cast no spell, but perhaps the sheer force of his righteousness commanded the world to accede to his desires.

Dmitri's mage tower hardly deserved the name: once a watchtower to spy upon the neighboring province of Kanstanacy, it had fallen into ruin after the Speltseed War had reshaped the borders. Dmitri had come across its ruin and repaired it somewhat, and rearranged the fallen masonry; its reduced height barely peeked over the surrounding forest. By all rights, the fallen star should not have been able to enter through the low doorway, even hunched over, but terrestrial materials could not constrain his actions; he stepped inside and that was that.

Dmitri's dingy lamps barely lit the room, but where the light passed through the fallen star's mane it came out painting luminous rainbows of color across the far wall, churning and wobbling like the whole chamber was underwater.

This close, a visible aura billowed from the fallen star, like a thin white flame erupting off his skin. Astrologers hunted after shards of the heavens, fallen to earth, and attempted to alight their internal constellations from absorbing the radiance of the heavens. The great crystal meteor, remnants of the Stellar King's patron's descent, powered the royal astrologers, so potent even five hundred years later that those who stood before it felt dizzy in its presence -- but a fallen star in the flesh was so much more intense. Dmitri felt dazed and drunk: just the wisps fuming off his body spoke of heat, power, potency untold to mortals.

There was one aspect of the fallen star that was increasingly difficult to ignore. He was naked, and male; between his legs, just before his tail met with his haunches, there was an immense swell of flesh. Bullish in more ways than just the horns and hooves: what seemed to be a massive, low-hanging sac, stuffed with what might have been four enormous testicles. They hung down nearly to his fetlocks, churning and shifting, and Dmitri had been unable to tear his gaze away from them as they had walked through the darkness. Only brief glimpses as his sac had brushed against his inner flanks, piling up against his ankles, had revealed the structure: each ball was lopsided, elongated and twisted, and there was an animal swell along the bottom, a knobbled lump that anchored each ball in place in his shifting sac. Above that, his sheath was almost demure in comparison: simply a torso-thick swell of pebbly flesh, anchored tight to his underbelly, nothing like the continual churn of his massive sac. He sat cross-legged upon the bare stone floor, and his sac pillowed out before him, utterly obscene.

The heat billowing off him hadn't subsided at all. Dmitri was flushed and feverish before him, intense stellar radiation flowing through him. His profane tattoos guided the energy, but merely being close to the divine beast overflowed their channels. His tattoos glowed cyan-gold as that energy coruscated into him in shaky, burning pulses of heat. Dmitri found himself panting, flushed like he'd been running, intensely aware of every drop of sweat that wound down his body -- and distinctly aware of his cock fattening, swelling in shuddering jerks as the heat and scent and power of the fallen star suffused the space. He felt woozy; drunk; if he left himself much longer he wasn't sure if he'd be able to say anything aside from slurred moans of pleasure and pain.

"I-- I swear I would be a worthy recipient! Judge me however you want! If-- if you would bestow your starseed to me, I would keep it safe tight as in any vault!"

"Oh, would you?" there was an amused tone in the fallen star's response. "And who is worthy of a starseed?"

That was the prize for making a contract with a fallen star. They were divine figures, descended from the heavens to pick out one of pure heart and noble bearing to empower with a divine blessing. The great Stellar King who had unified the six kingdoms under his rule had been selected by a fallen star. Great heroes and royal kings; those were the ones chosen by the stars. Dmitri spoke of that to the fallen star, and there was a coil of unease that squirmed within him at the figure's mocking laughter.

"Last I descended to this benighted rock, I was plied with food and drink, offered concubines and jewels, all for the gift of my starseed. Then, when they learned how it would be done, they balked. All their beneficence dried up. They thought I would waste time testing their honor; that they could only succeed by refusing. In the end, they had to school someone willing to undergo the trial." He snorted again, filling the space with the smoky scent of his breath. "I find it very amusing they don't include the details in those mythic tales of divine selection." His open maw-eye twisted to stare down at Dmitri. "You will suit well. You already have the stink of desperation about you. And--" he shifted in his seat, hind legs spreading, and the bulky mass of his immense sac spilled out across the tiles, with his fat sheath resting atop his mounded balls. "--you stink of something else, too. Admire it all you want. Your staring hasn't been subtle."

Dmitri stared, wide-eyed, as the fallen star reached down with one hand and cupped his sheath. He stroked it, working the pebbled flesh back and forth, and as it peeled back it revealed the inky onyx core. Flesh shifted, and a cord of rainbow fluid, brilliantly iridescent and staining like paint, oozed out from within.

"Your kind make suitable incubators for our young. I suppose your kings find that humiliating? You should be grateful your flesh has any use to us at all. I'll breed my starseed into you, and whatever power you can wrench from it before my young hatch will be your payment."

His hand kept stroking his sheath. Sluggishly, something pushed out from within: an immense twisting tongue of dark flesh, splattered in galactic hues from his brilliant preseed. Brilliant nebulas swam behind a star-flecked vista, only it was flecks of congealed rock, suspended in his colorful issue, all blending and blurring together into ropy cords as he sluggishly milked out more. Ooze pattered down across his sac, outlining the alien swell of his immense balls, cording down over the massive muscles in his calves, and then drizzled down to the floor below, painting bright lines across the worn masonry.

"You're all so tiny. _Barely_ suitable. It'll take time and effort to stretch you enough to host my seed without it tearing you apart. So, come. Service me."

Dmitri's gaze flit between the fallen star's fattening cock and his face -- or what the crystalline hollow that amounted to it. Seeing his pause, the beast let out a noise of irritation: a pluming hiss of steamy breath. "This is what you're useful for. Kneel."