The Silence of the Stars

A broken heart and a curse. A bitter vendetta. A willing sacrifice, and an unlikely friendship to blossom into a loving, fateful and wild ballad dated one thousand years ago, in man's darkest hours. DxV Fatherson/?

Okay, seriously? Last story I'm publishing for a long while-I have to finish all the others. (Though the story about the Angel only has one more chapter.) This came out of a short story I wrote about a man named Dante and a boy named Pietro; the ending/relationship between these two is entirely your call. To be honest, from the plotline, I don't really know myself…:') :'(

Introductory chapter. After all the 'splaining is done, we can get to the actual story with Danny and the dark lord. (Nope, not a DP/HP crossover. Sorry.)

UN desiderio padre, e il ragazzo che lo amava. La loro storia è qui, dove hanno la loro vita. O Damned, Vlad, per la cattura e l'uccisione dolce Jack, un amore che come un figlio in prigione per il suo cuore! O, Daniel, il quale sognava di lutto il suo padrone come un amante, ha perso il suo padre, e morto solo, uccidendo se stesso, e, in ultima analisi, l'uomo che ha amato lui!

How countlessly they congregate

O'er our tumultuous snow,

Which flows in shapes as tall as trees

When wintry winds do blow!-

As if with keenness for our fate,

Our faltering few steps on

To white rest, and a place of rest

Invisible at dawn,-

And yet with neither love nor hate,

Those stars like some snow-white

Minerva's snow-white marble eyes

Without the gift of sight.

-Robert Frost; Stars

Forgive me, Dear Reader, if I take a page out of the Bards' storybooks, and begin my tale at the very beginning, the only way I can bear to take ink to page, and record this story. In this way, I am whimsical; and am able to become You, precious reader, with the option of putting this story down when things truly become wonderful, and be sated with the uncomplicated foretellings of 'Happily Ever After' that allow you to sleep content and warm in your bed at night, much as you might have done as a child, and hopefully, as you primarily do now.

As a disclaimer of sorts, I will warn you now: If that is what you seek, then proceed ONLY to a given point. I will tell my listeners who are fainter (Or greater) of heart when to turn away, and the final chapters may rest unmolested. For while I feel I shall be doing this story a grave disservice by only telling the good, and omitting the ill, I believe that people adhere to their own state of mind; whether you choose ignorant bliss or terrible knowledge is none of my business whatsoever. For those who'd rather hear this love ballad unmolested, and believe that they will walk away without singular regret, please read on, and my voice will continue, though I will speak no more.

Once Upon A Time, when the Identities of Science and Curiousity lay dormant inside of their dens of human hearts while creatures like Doubt, Uncertainty, and Conformity raged like frightened soliders with heavy armory about outside, there was a small village that has no recorded name, for it is no more, and that is sufficient for me; I only hope the same applies likewise.

This village was as normal a place one could be in these Dark Times. It was built below a series of craggy and intimidating mountains with snow on their peaks even in summer, with a large steeple in the heart of the village, and a collection of stables, bars, inns, and blacksmiths nearby. The children ran about while their parents worked, much as they do now, and the tax collectors reaped much of the barley and grain from the town, much as they do now. Every morning, people gathered to Mass, left as they did the day before, with the bell tolling the hour as people scrambled to work. The few drunks and the poor lay reeling in the streets, and were the most part ignored, pardoning the former if he paid a passing priest a good sum for a holy saint bone miraculously obtained after a platter of beef at the town's best tavern.

No, nothing really stuck out about the town at all, pardoning the merchant who was the village headman, and his bizarre family history. Some people still gossiped about it when news of some scandal or ill work didn't brush their ears, though no one dared to make light of his wife, the former noblewoman. The Clergy insisted that while she had disgraced the church by marrying outside her caste, she had done well to forsake all her Earthy possessions and her comfortable home in a castle to lead a respectable existence as Jack Fenton's wife.

Jack Fenton pooh-poohed the Clergy's idea of devils sending witches to do works of evil, but was more than eager to assist the rather exasperated church destroy 'witches,' which, in Jack Fenton's eyes, could be any person on the street who so much as blinked strangely, a horse in his stables, or even a member of the clergy of the town chapel. He'd accosted Father John one sunny, interesting afternoon by insisting that the old man had been infected with the pallor of witchcraft, and proceeded, much to the amusement of the children, to stuff garlic and rosemary into the gasping man's mouth and ears. He hadn't been too tickled about that one, but what could you do? Jack Fenton was a friendly, honest fool, and while some would have loved to use his goodwill to extract everything he owned, Jack was the town fool whom somehow found his way into even the most scowling, angry farmer's good conscience. While he owned a good market, a stable, and even kept a blacksmith under his apprenticeship, he was still a kind, goofy man who told funny stories of his eccentric attempts to Witch Hunt, paid tithes, and offered parties at Harvest season and the Twelve Days of Christmas. For the Feast of the Three Kings, Jack was said to creep around the village at night, (Usually knocking over a few cans and upsetting some sleeping livestock as he moved) and drop little toys, sweetmeats, and other little expressions of goodwill into the children's shoes.

For these reasons, and a few others, the church did not completely overtake rule of the little hollow where they all lived, miles and miles away from the nearest other post. Jack was named the village headman, though his acts as leader would be dubious and disastrous. Even the fondest of the jolly man had to admit that, especially since Jack's solution for exorcising an evil ghost from a blacksmith's shed had been to force feed 'enchanted' garlic into everyone's mouths to drive the evil spirit away. Not much had been accomplished; they'd finally had to call upon a monastery far, far away for help; and the monks sent had been rather disgruntled at the fact that the ghost already HAD been drawn away prior to their arrival….from the hideous smell of the entire village. The villagers still had to pay handsomely, of course.

But that, of course, had been BEFORE Jack had been wed to lovely Madeline de Fleur. While women in the town sent the beautiful, shapely mother an occasional evil eye in jealousy, a forked tongue never slipped out insult to her. Men were more likely to eye her, though none of them dared to say a thing. Jack's love for Madeline of France-Maddie, as he affectionately called her-was the stuff of legend around here, one of the few legends actually worth remembering.

No, no one really acknowledged that the fact that it was only by 'Maddie's' patient checking of her bizarre and eccentric husband's behavior that the village was run so smoothly; everything run according to schedule, usually neat and precise on time. She ran the town in her husband's guise the way she ran her household; with a stern hand, but loving eye. In the many years that she resided here, she'd more than proven herself to be beyond a lady of nobility; beyond one of the foolish, pale traipses of aristocrat women who could scarcely do as much as tie a ribbon or buckle their shoes on their own merit. Rain was sufficient for the crops-it seemed even it did not dare to undermine Maddie, and meekly nourished the fields so that there was plenty to salt and pickle for winter in the storage sheds, and enough to pay the tax collectors' quotas.

If a woman was about to give birth, a midwife was sent to stay with the wife in her eighth month of expectancy, if Maddie herself did not come to visit the house every day. Often, if the village midwife was busy, and could not be found, she and her daughter undertook the mighty task themselves, and tended exhausted mother and infant as though they were their own.

If a man broke a hoe out in the fields, she saw that it was replaced or repaired. If a child was ill and both parents needed to work, often times, the child was sent in care of Madeline's own two children, as neither of their parents saw fit to raise their young to be spoiled and helpless. When the poor came to her house in search of alms, they had a place at her table.

In spite of her hectic existence, she would not hire a servant or a cook; she said that it was an unnecessary expense, hypocritical to their fellow men, and besides, she would joke, isn't that why she had children to begin with?

Her cooking was superb, and much-envied. Yes, Madeline was invariably adored, and even the old women gossiping to each other before service started cast her grudging smiles of approval. The children adored her, and many politely addressed her as 'Mother.' They were not corrected.

However, as beloved Maddie Fenton, was, and though smiles bloomed on the faces of the townspeople when they beheld her, they still whispered of the tales that had stubbornly set into the Earth like thistledown, even after a span of quiet ten years passed since her arrival.

Much to Maddie's embarrassment, she was still the subject of much controversy, and, in lack of much other entertainment, people turned to murmuring about her love life, which grew extremely irritating. She still had memories of her little girl wobbling to her at not three years old, and wondering aloud why people had said that "Mama was a manipulative enchantress and a heartbreaker?"

Before she and Jack were married in this humble little town, she had been a woman of great wealth-the only daughter of a duke and his lady. She had caught the eye of a handsome young man in court, who'd been said to have fallen fanatically in love with her. He'd adored her unconditionally, and haunted her footsteps. There was nothing that he had that he was not willing to give her, or, if it could not be found, nothing that he would not venture out on his own stead to retrieve for her, whether it was the Holy Grail in the city of Jerusalem, or a simple drop of water near the end of the continents, where the world most certainly came to an end.

He sent her sonnets, gifts of bejeweled cups; exotic pets, like brilliantly colored, sad-eyed birds in golden cages. He commissioned his best minstrels to sing to her, and bought her ludicrously expensive gowns that might as well have belonged to a Queen. Obsessive to a frightening degree he'd been in his devotion, quick to draw out a sword if there was a hint of her honor being questioned, and had sent more than one lad to his death in duels before a hysterical Madeline had discovered the unlucky events, and had sprinted to stop another nobleman from dying needlessly. At her wish, he'd allowed his clean sword to slide into his sheath, and the cowering lad on the ground's blood unspilled.

But despite all of this, she'd rejected his advances and his suit, and had run away with her suitor's footman, Jack Fenton, who'd abashedly offered the great lady humble little flowers, and showed her his favorite place in the garden, where birds settled their nests in the springtime. She loved him. More than she had ever loved anyone or anything in her life. She was not simply "My lady." She was human. He saw that. And he adored her just the same.

He was honest, he was sunshine, he was sweat dripping on your brow in sincere, worthwhile labor, he was a fumbling, befuddled mess, wrote atrocious poetry, and had such a dreadful singing voice that he'd cracked a few windows trying to pipe her a lovely tune that sounded suspiciously like a trapped cat.

She disguised herself in long, dark cloaks as to slip away at night to meet him in the castle's courtyard. One evening, after Jack had blurted out his hopeless, desperate love for Madeline, she convinced one of her more romantic and sympathetic maids to help her over the gate perimeter in an enormous basket, much as Paul had done when he escaped from prison.

And, like the apostle, she believed there was an angel waiting for her at the other side, too. Jack loved her so infallibly that laboring under burning, cracked Earth alongside him was not only welcome as to be with him, but a blessing. She surrendered her fancy dresses and stifling gowns, and took to moderately fine material that was coarse in comparison. But never once had she complained since she and Jack settled down here, and lived very happily, indeed. She'd given birth to a beautiful baby girl with glowing teal eyes, long red hair, a brilliant mind, and a lovely laugh. Jack loved her zealously, and jealously. Although she was now a village favorite at sixteen, and at prime marrying age, Jack so disliked the idea of suitors that he kept an ax by the door, and was hesitant about too many of the village boys' prospects to ensure that she would marry anytime soon, though she had a healthy dowry. Maddie wanted wedded union to be her daughter's choice, as her own parents had tried to force her to marry her suitor. Forcing that on someone else simply seemed atrociously vindictive-and cruel.

After she'd ran away, her parents had promptly disowned her, of course; even held a funeral in her name with an empty casket lowered in the ground.

No matter, Maddie had told her two children. She was happy, and wished her suitor all the happiness in the world, though when she spoke of him-which was rare-she seemed nervous and unsettled. It wasn't a secret-even from the little urchin who ran about barefoot and in rags all day-that the nobleman who'd been spurned had been enraged in his despair. He'd immediately put all of men into finding her, (She dearly hoped that was just a stupid exaggeration) and, some whispered, whenever a wandering ear wasn't around, continued to ravage the land even AFTER he discovered she was wedded to another. Some said that he was a king, others said a mighty duke, or a knight who'd won the lady's fancy for a brief amount of time. Who was he? Only Maddie knew, though she never learned what became of him after she'd gone.

Some said that he'd done the unthinkable, and killed himself in his loss. It was a terrible thought, and Madeline certainly didn't think herself worthy of causing so much discord and heartbreak within one (Admittedly dramatic) heart.

Others said that he consulted with a witch to hunt down Madeline, which obviously didn't happen, considering that she lived safely in her hamlet much as she had done for years. Some went even further, and said that he'd consorted with her-just as to win her heart, her loyalty, and her prowess. But when his hideous paramour tried to confess her love, he spurned her, and she learned that she was just a tool to obtain a greater prize. In her fury, it was said that she cursed him, stripped him of his humanity, and turned him into a demon; a misshapen monster torn between life and death, forever doomed to grieving love, though he had no heart that beat in his bosom, nor no true affection from his ruined court.

Others said that while he had indeed become truly hideous, what had altered most was his soul, which had become warped with cruelty and staggering amounts of hatred for all common man, who, humiliatingly enough, stole his crown jewel away from him! Him, almost royalty, him, respected and worshipped, rejected for the SON OF A MILKMAID! Everyone mocked and scorned him, and he'd done truly ghastly things in response. Burned down houses, rounded up the poorest men in each building, and sent them to the slaughterhouse, taxed heartlessly on his lands…..

One evening, when Madeline was staring into the depths of the fire in the hearth, she slowly rocked back and forth in her chair, creaking softly in the darkness, her face lit up like a jewel from the soft red embers burning before her, violet eyes troubled.

That man had truly loved her. It was remembering his affections-which had been too lavish, too overwhelming, too suffocating-that made her feel a pang of regret for the man's sake, whom she had heard just that day from a messenger who'd run into town that he'd gone mad. Or missing. Or both.

She exhaled, and drew her fingertips to her aching temple. Ah, dear. She'd prayed for him often in church, and hoped that he would have found someone new to love by now; someone who would have made him as blissfully happy as she was. She couldn't help but feel guilty, which bewildered her. She had looked for her own happiness and found it! Was that so very wrong? She'd-

"Mother?"

Startled, Maddie looked up, rubbing her eyes. A pair of bright, benitoite blue eyes were peering down at her in the darkness, concerned. Smiling in spite of herself, the woman wearily leaned back in her seat, just as her thirteen-year-son offered her a hunk of bread, a large, steaming pewter bowl of soup, and a steaming, chipped mug of tea.

"Mother, you didn't eat anything at dinner."

"I'm not hungry."

Danny snorted, and ducked a playful blow his mother mimed sending at him, though at least she was chuckling now.

"Is something wrong?" he asked, drawing up a small wooden stool to sit beside her, much as he'd done as a little boy eager to hear stories before bedtime. "You've been very quiet today-was it the book-keeper from Premberly? He seems very nice, but I agree with Father; he comes from too far away, and-"

Maddie smiled again, half exasperated, half filled with gentle amusement as she tentatively blew on her tea with a murmur of thanks.

"Love, he asked to borrow a book from your sister; she borrowed one from in turn. He didn't offer Jack a dozen oxen on the spot and beg for her hand."

"Might as well have done," grumbled Danny, who started poking the embers with a spare piece of driftwood on the floor. "The way he looked at her."

Maddie only smiled again, expression calm, eyes glittering with a slight sense of mischief, though she said nothing.

Daniel. After one of the Saints-one of the few who'd had a nice ending, instead of being thrown into a cauldron of bubbling hot water or thrown into the sea or devoured by lions or covered in butter, seed, and thrown out into a chicken coop. He was something truly special

Wanting another pet name in the family, she called him Danny after he'd been christened, which seemed…somewhat more suitable than Daniel. Childlike and serious, handsome as a very young adult, with piercing blue eyes, (where in the world had he gotten those?) a head very much prone to dreaming in the clouds, and a kind smile. Soon enough, he'd be getting questions about whether or not a girl had caught HIS fancy.

Sighing somewhat wistfully, she only shook her head when her son sent her a curious glance.

"Nothing wrong, nothing wrong. Just tired, dear."

Danny looked unconvinced-she was almost a bad liar as he was-but he went back to tending the crackling flames, suspecting she didn't really want to talk.

"Father says we have a surplus this year with the rice….d'you suppose that means we could afford a trip to the Fairgrounds this year? For cloth?"

Maddie raised an eyebrow, still looking amused.

"'For cloth,' he says. Don't you think that I might guess by now that that means, 'So that I can purchase more strange rocks that 'fall from the sky' and swap stories with the bards that come?' Dear, wouldn't you rather do something more significant for your fourteenth birthday? The town wants to hold a small celebration, though," Maddie rolled her eyes, "We've been advised against it. After the news the….the runner brought today-"

"You mean of the lunatic noble that went missing?"

Maddie's voice became a little sharp.

"No, Danny. The other news. Pemberley might be a few days journey of here, but they've been having some terrible misfortune with their crops. And their tax collectors are getting angry."

Danny blinked. Obviously, he hadn't heard the news.

"But we've had a great season, and the Harvest festival is in two weeks. I don't…."

Maddie exhaled.

"They're our neighbors, so we've offered them our goodwill until the weather changes for the better. The surplus will be going to them." She sent a kind look at her son, who was nodding, trying to hide his disappointment. "Perhaps next year, hmm?"

"Perhaps. It doesn't matter all that much-I'd didn't give it any thought at all."

"Liar." Finishing up her soup, she stood, and gently kissed her son on the cheek, who'd only smiled. "We'll do something else."

"A dinner alone at home would be nice. I don't need anything."

"Surely there must be something?"

"No, mother. Are you feeling better?"

While Maddie answered an affirmative, and drew her baby boy for a chaste kiss on the forehead, she closed her eyes again, allowing the negativity to drain from her body.

Jack was her Earth, Jasmine her sunshine, and Daniel, her blue sky. They would be alright. God willing, Vladimir Ivan Masters the III would yet have his happiness, and let them alone in peace.

Peace! What she would never know until she hammered HIS remains into a grave with his bones.