Dreams.
They shone in the darkest night and lit up the sky. They were dreams for sure. Something as fantastic and as impossible as the vast balls that fell down from the sky could only belong in the one place where nothing could be tied down for any reason or law: our dreams. Even as they fell down from the same midnight sky, the blazing trail they left behind lingered, as if they were leaving their mark for the whole universe to see.
That was what the two little boys thought when they woke up from their deep sleep, and the sleep from their eyes was gone the moment they saw the lights fall down.
Curiosity got the best of them, but so did the desire to share their discovery with the denizens. Their childlike energy compelled them to run to the master bedrooms of their parents, and with a fervent and breathless explanation, they managed to show these denizens the falling lights. In their separate households, one parent was trying to calm the compressed bundle of excitement with a gentle correction that they were not falling lights, but stars and meteors. The other wasn't listening at all; they were spellbound by the beauty of destruction.
The boys wanted to see the falling lights – no wait, falling meteors – closer. They would have to go to the shore. There wasn't any protest from the concerned mother who would have to wake up their son in the morning, or from the exhausted father that would have to wake up to go to work in a few more hours. They were all enchanted by the gorgeous array of lights shooting down off to a place unknown.
The two families ran out of their homes (making sure to lock the front door) and headed for the shore, where one of the uninhabited islands could be seen in the distance. They were not the only ones headed there. Several other watchers, like them, had been drawn to the magical phenomenon and wanted to discover the source of the shower, though they knew none could be found. Soon enough, the entire population of Destiny Islands had somehow awoken to the strange silence that had accompanied the blazes. Their instincts, not unlike those of moths, told them to get closer to the lights. At last, they all reached the shore, and the shooting stars took on a new persona along with 'beautiful', 'a real-life miracle', and 'scientific deal-breaker': 'menacing'.
Suddenly, the spell the lights held over the citizens broke, as the falling stars somehow became larger, more threatening. It was almost as if they could feel the fire on their faces, melting them away. They were overcome by confusion: where did the meteors come from? Where were they headed? What had caused them to form and fall down on them? Such confusion often resulted in two things: wonder, and fear. The children were still young, and did not fully understand the concept of fear. The adults were a different story. They were skeptic of the sudden occurrence of the meteor shower, and whether or not these quaint islands were their destination.
"Look!" one cried. That small world turned and saw one of the meteors (somewhat smaller than the others seen so far) fall down to the vast ocean with a resonant splash. Small waves formed and crashed down again on the sea. As quickly as the meteor fell, it disappeared just as fast. The trails of light instantly disappeared as the meteor fell into the sea. There was suddenly no sign of the fallen rock anywhere, save for the rising waves. Some people were compelled to take a boat down to the sea and look for the meteor. The rest continued to watch the meteor shower. However, the world noticed the darkness beginning to loom over them once again, and they found that the meteors were disappearing out of sight. Silence. Darkness. There was nothing left; no trace or sign that they were ever there. The meteors left nothing behind. Or so was thought.
The crowd was lulled into a mesmerized silence that seemed to last for ages. They were witnesses to something that was truly otherworldly. No one wanted to break the silence which the meteor shower had ushered in, in fear that it was some sort of dream and that it was impossible for a meteor shower to fall before their very eyes.
The air changed. Everyone sensed it, but no one voiced it, or even understood it. How could they understand that the balance of the worlds had been unsettled, and was only now falling back into a false sense of security?
How could the townsfolk of Destiny Islands know that the meteor shower was only a prelude of what was to befall their world, and their universe?
How were they to know that when the silence was finally broken by the two boys, who discovered a stranger sight than the meteor shower, that they were about to welcome a foreigner from a far-off world that they could hardly imagine existed?
How could they know that the meteor showers were fragments of worlds that lost a losing battle to the menacing and parasitic Darkness?
They had no way of knowing…that once other worlds fell, and their own world was ready to adopt the princess of Light, that everything changed.