The corridors are cold and silent.  Alone he walks; he hears the jubilant music flow through the worn down halls in streams of creaking stale floors.  Colorful and vibrant streamers colored in the royal family's house hang from above from a combination of hooks and magic.  Arrangements of honeyed flora are intertwined into the faded purple and blues of the fabric as long since wilted petals lay upon the ground.  Bright moonlight flows from arching windows as beeswax candles light the inbetween.  Long since melted and remelted into puddles of wax that he has long since given up scraping from the window sills long ago covered in worn drapes.

Small warm hands grip tightly to the cold metallic surface of his gauntlets, leading him through a maze of servants hurring past in wisps of jovial laughter.  A memory of babbled words slip through twin smiles as they fade though a garden of bitter blight.  Deep forest greens and velvety reds and pinks with hints of lavender and light specks of blue blume.  A sharp contrast to stained marble columns and walls that bend and intertwine into a shattered dome of glass shards that no longer let long forgotten sunlight pass through.

Clusters of stars ever so vigilant, ever so dim; even now hang above the heavens.  Ever shining bright they dance through the crowd of flowing silk gowns and embellished cloaks as the ever frigid winter wind bites at the ever suffocating silence of the ballroom.  Upbeat music twirls and leaps through unseen bodies, into no longer there ears…all but a time he has long since lived though faded steps of another.  Through the motions of an old memory, one older than the eternal night does he sway.  As rough calloused hands lightly grip his, yet never truly breaching through his iron cage, he dances.  Spinning by stumbling feet that have long since forgotten the motions he once converted with his dearest.  As song floods his very being with whispers of words and tunes that elude his ageing mind.

The song he knows it…once he did.  For it was a tale older than he, older than the founder of this forlorn palace and lands.  The founder…yes…who…no, it is but a faded recollection.

Why is he doing this he wonders?  Nostalgia?  Perhaps…or mayhaps to feel something akin to that spark of life again.  A fleeting thought he should walk away from, but every now and then he turns back to it though these untold seasons.

Those warm hands he cannot truly recall the warmth of leave him and the music fades into the lost silence around him in the center of the dilapidated ornate chamber.  The abyssal nothingness hangs above his helmet with barely a glow resting in it.  Perhaps he presumes finally that the stars are just as wary as he.  For it has been so very long since they had rested…no?

There is a sound though the haze of his befuddled mind, a sharp clatter that pierces through his dulled senses.  As glass breaks, and grievous things are muttered as twin children weep for their parents.  

He stills.  Then he turns slowly.  His large tottering corse lumbering silently till his sight catches a star.  One, so bright…so lively…trapped within the gaze of an interloper.

It has been so long since he has seen a star shine so brightly…