A/N: Hi everyone, long time no write. I just saw the new Star Vs episodes recently, and it inspired me to put pen to paper again. My last work of prose was pretty, purple garbage, and I wasn't terribly proud of it. But, I like how this one turned out and i want to continue it and focus on shorter, quality chapters. I always write 10K words in a sitting and I loose track of anything worth saying part way through, so I want to limit myself more with this and do a bit more proof-read and polish on it. My last story, which shall remain a one-shot, was titled the same as this one. I have re-titled it, because I like the title "A Wormhole to the Galaxy's Only Solitary Star," and want to do it justice. I feel like the new episodes have given me good fodder for that. Anyway, without further ado, please enjoy chapter 1.

Edit: The will of the people has been heard. Obtuse metaphor and "Pretentious Prose" are dead. Direct progression and immediate description are our new King and Queen, long may they reign!

All joking aside though, expect more dialogue and straightforward depiction going forward. I will attempt to dial the mauve back and let the story bleed through.

However, I'm really, REALLY good at getting lost in the weeds, so please: Keep me honest, involve yourselves, and provide constructive criticism.

Let's go on an adventure together.

T4E out.

CH001: The Thing is, No One Really Knows Where Tumbleweeds Go.

In this world there exist myriad concepts sought by every living thing with enough of a mind to abstract them. Many exist by virtue of the collective intelligence created by communication, of varying complexity and degree of success, between organisms. All but the most important.

These, paradoxically, exist in defiance of description. Most abstractions are bubbles, blown full with intent and carried by wind, to pop in the ears of those who can appreciate their nuance. However precious few collapse, obstinately, the instant they feel the first ticklings of a breath, as though in fear of the height, and gravity, their intended journeys would implicate; their nature implies that an inborn fragility ought to belie their bashfulness. Yet, inexplicably, they are found everywhere; weeds springing from between cobbles, inherent to the stepwise evolution of intelligence. Different sects of life have paved this path to different extents, and with varying degrees of success, but none with the brash rapidity of the human animal.

Certain feelings are older than time, growing comfortably at the weathered roots of these highways. Hunger, pain, lust, the simple positives and negatives; all of which have long since transcended simple weed-status and shade our beginnings as trees, high and broad and universal spurs to our every action. The further you walk down each road, however, the more the scale of those thorny weeds declines until you approach strange, stunted seedlings tearing at the earth on its the bleeding edge, fiercely staring down the unknown beyond. These feelings, which are geologically infantile and deeply human, pulse with the throbbing of hearts and sing with the static of a shiver.

We assign them words, and each one of us may, at any time, stoop from the flurry of bubbles whizzing past our heads to brush their leaves or prick a finger on their thorns and feel, deeply and intensely, the particular poisons they carry. We blow more bubbles as we hunch, whispering their names as though repetition could possibly lend them meaning. But four letter sounds like 'LOVE' and 'HATE,' even the more complex varietals like 'ANXIETY' and "INFATUATION,' all sound like a curse before an altar, no matter how tenderly we whisper them.

But what the hell did Marco Diaz know about plants, anyway?

He knew they certainly seemed to grow all around him in the beating California sun, defiant as a heartbeat, and that they seemed perfectly content to continue doing so, ignorant of the philosophical sediment sifting through the wrinkles of his brain. Though he was sure if they could hear his inner monologue they would wilt from second-hand embarrassment. He raked his gaze sharply, left to right, before crossing a momentarily parted river of surely near-molten metal, screaming the sun's fury back at it, high into a delfts blauw sky.

Hands, stallions burdened with absence and straining against the tethers binding them to it, pulled him across the blacktop, scarlet blinders obscuring their vision. He taunted the bullish heat with a familiar red hoodie, even in the summer's dog days, as though it had begun to pad flesh around the bones of metaphor.

The flow closed in once more behind him as his back foot forsook asphalt for concrete, and a three-eyed Moses suspended not-so-high above in the sky lowered its staff, having seen its people through the red.

Traffic lights had to be the most sympathetic part of the whole urban experience. They existed solely to facilitate the transit of him, and people like him, who found themselves in absence of one of those burning flecks that had begun to float along again, borne past like so much ash in the slag which surged behind him, filling empty space he had left. He turned, briefly, to watch it go.

The swelter roared silently, and the river replied without such courtesy, fully underway by the time his eyes met it. Commuters on their way home at the end of a no doubt sweaty day. He averted his gaze skyward, forfeiting a one-sided staring contest, and his mind stooped to prick an incorporeal finger once more. An image as vivid as the hollow clap of his shoes echoing off the brick beside him as he started off down the sidewalk bloomed in his mind. A silhouette bathed in teal and ochre; a sunset through stained glass.

He bid his mind to stop, to give him some peace from the spectre, to allow him just once to out-pace it, but it pressed harder into the needle, drawing blood. Hormones, the hateful swear words of the endocrine system, flooded his teenage brain; the light flared, igniting coarse fire along every sparkling curve of the stained, porcelain body he now saw - felt - in the impossible detail of renaissance sculpture. Every nuance imagined vividly, from perfect hips to hair whose color seemed to match the radiance he immediately understood to emanate from within, rather than behind, her. Such fine work belonged on a pedestal, but certainly he of all people wasn't the one worthy of putting her there. He still couldn't manage to pick her up with words, let alone his quaking hands.

He shoved them further into his pockets and dug the nail of his thumb into the pad of his index finger, as though drawing blood in actuality might turn his brain off of its figurative act. The metaphor was lost on the hunk of grey matter, but the pain sent a clear message, and the scene before him stretched and snapped like lightning across a hundred-mile gap, returning to him the towering cumulonimbus clouds that sulked towards Echo Creek from the sea.

They seemed to borrow not entirely undue regality from the angle and elevation of the hill he trudged down; it juxtaposed them against a toy-model town in the middle-distance, and painted them across the split-blue canvas before him with the scale and pomp of a frame from a Ghibli production. Dark and grumbling, but beautiful, intimidating, and indomitable. All while being intangible. How he envied clouds.

Sixteen was a shitty year. Cut it forward, backward, julienne it, no matter how you sliced it, it sucked. It was the year you were just tall enough to begin peeking over the emerald curtain obscuring the scale of human atrocity, but not yet so tall as to see the consequences rendered at its feet. You began to shoulder that weight, society, and most people rejoiced as they felt it begin to settle against their backs.

Most children were plough horses, eager at their first chance to strain against a load.

Marco was acutely aware that his farmhand was lowering the till strategically, and the length of it he knew would eventually meet with earth only served to fill him with dread at every rearward glance. Though, the added burden of his perception of a wasted youth certainly didn't lighten the load.

Safest had always been his superlative. Though, recently, the connotation of the word had soured for him. Safe, to him, had by and large meant avoiding unnecessary risks, but he had begun to wonder at his own definition of unnecessary. Was finally mustering the sack to say two words to the object of his puberty-long infatuation, "unnecessary"? Was doing much of anything these days with his childhood friends, "unnecessary"? The hill bottomed out in time with his heart, and he the distant salinity of the ocean air wafting in soured his mood further. He'd gone too far again, lost in thought. He glared once more at the infuriatingly indifferent clouds on the horizon and peeled off laterally into a park that often found itself the final destination of his sky-gazing strolls.

Well shaded, and complete with a well-kempt graveyard near its rear entrance, it provided the perfect place to cool off in every sense, and escape the oppressive summer sun. Marco dropped beneath a favourite tree, a sprawling walnut, feeling as heavy and mushy as the fruits he saw littering the ground around him. A deep sigh, mixed with equal parts contentment and resignation, escaped his lips. Every day seemed to end like this lately, and there was no way he'd make it home before dark now. He relaxed into the tree's welcoming bark as the shadows around him cept longer and time seemed all at once to speed up and slow down in that way it only does when you are in the process of nodding off. Emotionally and physically exhausted, now that he was finally seated, he reasoned that a short nap under the sun would do no harm.

He awoke, some time later, to furious wind. It immediately occurred to him that the clouds from before must be irritated with his trespass beneath their sky and then, waking more fully thanks to the buffeting of the sand and leaves stampeding past his head, it occurred to him how ridiculous a notion that was. He shook the grog from his mind as he rose to his feet, creaking in sync to the tree behind him. As he did, a series of images from the time between the moments of his eyes closing and reopening flashed before him, too quick to parse in detail.

A classroom, the understanding that someone in the room wasn't wearing pants, anxiety wrought from the burden of knowledge and an inexplicable inability to correct the bottomless party, mixed with their own panic. Twisting metal, a shriek like splitting earth, the mangled corpses of two cars in an intersection, pain that was not his own, but had claimed squatter's rights in his head. A flayed carcass, and the distant singing of burns across an endless body, each and every hair dotting its perimeter demarcating the boundaries of an acre plot of flesh, sprouting nerve endings like turnips.

Bile splashed the bottom of his esophagus as everything within him clenched at the memory. They were the feelings of someone deeply tortured. Less coherent events and visions and more representations of turmoil given narrative by his mind, though he struggled both to divorce the concepts and to reason out how they'd wound up within him.

Driven to his feet by the squall and to the edge of tension by the events within him, and unbearable urge to help someone whose identity he had no means of divining blossomed. He took off running without so much as a tender thought for the tree which had sheltered him thus far from the storm he saw explode into full view above the canopy of isolated greenery. The previously stoic and distant cumulonimbi had grown swollen and anguished; they blotted out the sky with their hulking backs as they skulked towards the shores of Echo Creek and stippled the ocean surface a mile out and with endless latitude beneath them. He turned from them and allowed his urges to both flee danger and help that unknown party threatened by it to mix in a two part rocket fuel in his gut, overcome the inertia of his awe, and carry him up the hill and away from the approaching downpour as fast as humanly possible.

Flashes of lightning cast the sickly shadows of lampposts and stop signs on brick walls before him in the green dusk as he continued back the way he'd come. The harassment of thunder and the threat of a dousing carried him further than the air in his lungs might have usually allowed, and within the space of what seemed like moments he saw a familiar sign looming out of the asphalt before him. On autopilot and fumes he sprinted the last stretch to the door, mind still wiped blank by a cocktail of runner's high and anxiety, and pounded.

"Britta's Tacos, 'fraid we're closed for the storm." A voice from within emphatically sounded.

"Sensei, it's me!" Marco screamed, battling for decibels with the din around him, "Let me in!"

The wind swung the door open suddenly enough to knock Marco off his balance, but the sturdy green frame allowed him to keep his feet. A hulking, backlit figure stood before him, blocking his path inside with a concerned look on his face.

"Diaz?" He enquired, "What the hell are you doing out in this?"

Marco briefly explained himself, leaving the part about the cryptic and gut-wrenching dream out, along with his other fantasies. "I'll never make it home before it starts coming down." He pleaded. "Mind if I wait it out with you?"

"If I say no you'll probably just sprint all the way home, and if you ran all the way here from the park I have a feeling if I do I'm going to be seeing your name in the paper tomorrow, and not in a good way." He replied. "You've got endurance in the dojo, but I know what your cardio's like Diaz."

Marco chuckled despondently as the figure stepped aside to let him pass, and he stepped into the fragrant interior of the taco shack.

"I have to finish closing up for the day and cleaning if you want to wait in the back, Diaz," He called over his shoulder. "I can give you a lift home once I'm done."

"I can help!" Marco protested, starting after him.

"Not when you aren't getting paid, kid, I could get fired just for having non-employees back here. Go chill for a bit."

Marco stopped short, and seeing that Sensei wasn't turning around to offer him a chance at rebuttal, he made his way to the back of the shack and sat down on a stout, wooden tortilla crate. The sounds of clattering dishes and bins being scraped entertained him for a few minutes, but as his heart rate slowed and his breathing stabilized he began to look around the interior of the antiquated building and take in the splendor. He had been coming to the place for years, but had never set foot in the back rooms before.

The color scheme of the walls and furnishings dated the last interior update to the early 80's if he were being realistic, and the 90's if he were generous, however what he saw of the electrical and plumbing peeking between studs on normally out-of-sight surfaces betrayed more advanced age. He took it all in with reverence for a few moments before his eyes alighted on a teal door unlike the rest.

Bored and curious all at once, a lethal combination for any teenager, Marco rose to his feet and propped it open with one hand, peering into the darkness.

"That's the meat storage!" Sensei called from the kitchen as Marco recoiled, outed as a snoop, "'Place was built on a tar pit, the hole stays nice and cold year 'round, so we keep the coolers down there. You can check it out if you want, it's pretty massive." Marco opened the door wider and the light spilling in from the fluorescent tubes on the ceiling revealed a ladder leading into a gaping hole in the ground. He could feel the draft creep past him out the door.

"I can't clean, but I can climb down the rickety ladder into the giant hole in the ground?" Marco called over his shoulder.

"Meh." Was Sensei's only reply, almost definitely accompanied by a disinterested shrug.

"If I'm not back in ten-"

"I'll wait longer." Sensei shot back. The feeling of the phrase was comfortably threadbare in Marco's ears.

He let the door swing shut behind him and began to descend the ladder.

It was some time before Marco reached the ground. The tar pit had to be something on the order of thirty feet deep, and to say the ladder was lightly built and loosely fastened would have been a massive understatement. However when his feet finally hit dirt that seemed far too solid to belong in a tar pit, he turned and immediately spotted the massive cooler glowing with cool light in the distance. Full of uncharacteristically giddy excitement he chalked up to a mix of waning adrenaline and the familiar high of exhaustion, he approached it, marvelling at how its lip seemed to tower over his head.

"You weren't kidding about this thing, it's huge!" Marco called back up the hole. A reply, muffled by distance, sounded, but the distortion was too great to parse signal from noise. Marco shrugged and opted to carry on investigating the place, for lack of a better distraction. He had no flashlight to speak of, but a quick fish around his pockets turned up an old cell phone his parents insisted he carry with him when he go out.

It didn't have a flashlight app like most modern Smartphones, on account of it being a verifiably dumb flip phone, but setting the camera to record could steadily activate the flash at the peril of its tiny battery, and provide enough light to see by. Marco did exactly that, and began to trace the walls as they curved out and back, away from the point-source of light that spilled steadily down the shaft he had descended from.

The place was cavernous. He had expected a small hollow at best, but the area he was exploring began to feel more like a cathedral as he faced the phone skyward and realized that the light from the camera couldn't pierce all the way to the ceiling. He continued running his hand along the cool earth before him, contemplating turning back before he lost sight of the cooler and the ladder, when his hand struck something much harder than soil. He turned the light to it and saw a massive relief carving in an even, grey stone unusual in his region of California sprawling up and out from his hand in all directions. It depicted what looked like a man with a freakishly elongated head, a river, and a number of boats, before fading off on all sides into darkness.

He stumbled backward, shocked, and nearly tripped over a smaller mound of stones behind him. He whirled around and caught himself, gasping, as he realized that these, too, were no ordinary stones. A squat, circular structure lay beneath his palms, and upon closer inspection it sported a wooden lid on its upper face. Marco might have assumed that it was a table if he hadn't been able to smell a sweet moisture, akin to morning dew, leaking from between the planks.

Shaking, Marco raised the lid, and the sight that beset his eyes was unbelievable. Glowing, golden liquid thickly swirling and churning just below ground level. Not a capped off tar hole as he might have anticipated. The liquid seemed to call out to him, begging to be touched. It didn't appear metallic, and he couldn't sense any obvious heat emanating from it, so it seemed safe enough for how strange it looked.

As he lowered his hand towards it he could swear he saw the surface shift and bulge ever so lightly towards him.

Then it touched him, and his mind went blank.

It felt like being electrocuted. Every muscle fiber in his body suddenly solidified, and every tendon drew impossibly taut. He flew back from the well, whether from some force within or from his own legs straightening from a crouch with inhuman strength, he had no idea, but as he flew he felt the overwhelming sensations from his dream again, and in detail far more vivid than his groggy recollection in the park. He hit the ground an iron rod and shimmied there, elliptically, like a dropped pot lid until after a moment his muscles all relaxed simultaneously and he melted in a heap.

It took a moment for his vision to return, and for him to regain a sense of his surroundings, but the second he did he bolted before a thought, to the contrary or otherwise, could invade his still crystalline mind. He jammed the cell phone, clutched in his hand by a crushing grip, into his pocket, sprinted vertically up the ladder like a man possessed, and burst through both sets of doors separating him from the squall outside without so much as a word.

"HEY!" A disembodied voice carried from behind him, "HEY DIAZ, COME BACK!"

But he paid it no mind.

He sprinted, ignorant to the world, until he smelled the familiar scent of his bed, and the lull of unconsciousness stripped from him the burden of terror the well had instilled within him.