Prologue

It was quite absurd to experience your own death outside your own body, right? For some reason Ishtar happened to be pulled out of her body, which caused her body's accident and ultimately death. Strings, connected to the stars, pulled out her own soul and everything around her sped up. She was guided to the stars to find herself in a new world. Mages and knights fought. Wars. Blood spilled and the scene sped up again.

A small house inside a small village between mountains and forests, occupied by the corpses of the villagers, still possessed a weeping voice. And she was pulled inside the small home to be met with a small girl. She bawled her eyes out and screamed her throat raw. The end of her string was a child with fair caramel skin, full dark chocolate hair and eyes of the darkest night.

"Someone help me!" The girl cried out.

Ishtar was pulled in even closer. She wondered why a tiny person had to be alone, crying by herself in front of her dead mother. Yet, she also wondered why everyone inside the town died.

Ishtar reached out to the girl, her fingers tapped on her shoulder and the girl turned, looking directly at Ishtar.

The girl sobbed and wiped away her tears. "Are you here to help me?"

Ishtar didn't know how to help, she was dead herself.

"I don't want –" She sniffed her snot up. "I don't know what to do anymore. I don't want to hurt." The girl jumped up, running to a herb shelf and taking a small notebook from the kitchen, returning and placing it back down in front of Ishtar. "You are this, a guardian from the stars." She pointed at a badly drawn person with a star on the body.

Ishtar shrugged and she didn't know how to answer without a body or voice. She opened her mouth but nothing came, so she thought and connected her mind to the girl. "I don't know."

The girl rolled onto her butt, gazing into the distance and probably thinking. Ishtar was unsure of if children could even think, but then after a long five minutes of rolling on her cheeks she stopped. She bit her cheeks and lips, trying to come up with the best words and then she spoke. "Don't protect or guide me, guardian. Live my life. I don't want to feel sad or be hurt, I don't want to live. You live my life."

And the string dragged Ishtar into the girl after hearing her wish, unable to have her own choice in that matter.

That has been fourteen years now. Nerium, the small girl, had been quiet inside the body that Ishtar controlled now. She lived and kept living. Seeking knowledge was Ishtar's greatest pleasure and after finishing her exams as a court mage in astromancy, she sought out the rarest type of magic. Time magic. Only experts in astromancy were allowed to venture down that path through a mentor.

[Why time magic?]

'It is a challenge and not everyone can do it. But I think I can' Ishtar smirked as she leaned on the rim of the ship, rocking back and forth towards the nameless island.

[Cocky, and look, there is a floating island. That is where we will live now?]

Ishtar hummed a song from her distant memory when she used to live on the Earth, one even Nerium liked. 'Until I learned time magic. Then we can do everything we want.' Ishtar thought to Nerium.