• On the eastern edge of the world, perched on a perilous outcrop of black rock that juts over the abyss, there is a white tower.

    This is impossible. You know it to be impossible. But it is true, nonetheless.

    The waters of the encircling seas pour endlessly over the edge, leaping in wild cataracts, dissolving into sprays of white mist long before falling. A permanent rainbow hovers about a mile off the edge. A few ragged wisps of cloud drift here and there, and beyond them, there is nothing but the starry sky. Below, nothing but a lightless emptiness. Here, there is silence; even the rushing water and falls that should be thundering are soft and quiet as dreams. Noise does not carry well here. The universe dilutes it. The abyss withers it.

    The tower is a smooth, perfect, unbroken column, made without crack or seam, as if carved by magic from a single mountain of marble. No windows or doors mar its smoothness, and its island is the only thing that breaks the perfection of the world’s end. The only interruption in an otherwise unbroken circle.

    At the tower’s peak is a room of silver and glass, with a great silver dome. Every morning, as the Sun rises from his sojourn in the Underworld, you ascend the tower’s many stairs to greet him, to the great silver minaret at the tower’s summit that gleams blindingly in the dawn. It is this light that the men of Arabia saw in days gone by and called the Morningstar, Prince of the East and Herald of the Dawn. It has been known by many names since: Lucifer, Bringer of Light to the Romans, Venus to the Greeks, Eärendil and Gil-Estel, Mariner and Star of Hope to the Eldar. All of them are names for the same thing; that brilliant, far-off silver light that heralds the end of night, the death of darkness and the opening of the day, the great mirrored dome that catches the light of the rising sun.

    Here, at the edge of mankind’s realm, where reality ends and belief begins, the truth is stretched so thinly that the idea, the metaphor and the actuality are one and the same.

    And so, that which rises over the edge, turning water to steam by the gallons, is not a blazing sphere of gas, but a man. Every morning, you stand in your glass room and sing his praises. Hymns to the dawn.

    He turns his eyes on you and he smiles, and he is radiant and terrible and beautiful beyond anything you have seen in your life, and your heart aches with a terrible joy. You know that you are nothing to him, less than a grain of sand, but still he deigns to smile at you. You love him, but he will never love you back. You are too far beneath him.

    Nonetheless, you are happy. You are content here. You love him and he accepts your love, even if he does not return it. He knows, and that will be enough.