It took the better part of what felt like hours before the trees finally thinned, and Ash stepped out into the wide, quiet clearing where the pull under his sternum had been leading him the whole time.
It was smaller than he'd expected, and stranger — a near-perfect circle of bare, packed earth, ringed all the way around by the same black-barked trees, their luminous violet-tinted leaves leaning inward slightly, as if the whole forest had been built, deliberately, to frame this one small space. Overhead, where the low bruised-violet sky should have continued unbroken, there was instead a gap — not an opening exactly, more a place where the sky's texture thinned, revealing, faintly, the suggestion of true dark behind it, and stars that didn't twinkle so much as sit, patient and unmoving, waiting.
He stood at the clearing's edge a long moment, taking it in, some instinct he didn't yet have a name for telling him that this particular quiet deserved to be respected rather than rushed.
"Alright," he said, out loud, to the empty circle, to the waiting not-quite-stars overhead. "Where is it."
The pull under his sternum sharpened, drawing his attention down and to the left, toward a low mound near the clearing's exact center, and he crossed toward it slowly, crouching, brushing aside a thin layer of fallen violet-tinted leaves to reveal the gray, unremarkable stone half-buried beneath.
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He almost laughed. After the long, lonely walk, after the careful, deliberate frame the whole forest seemed built around, the fallen star itself was so plain it was almost funny — small, dense, dull gray, nothing about it suggesting anything as grand as its name implied.
"You don't look like much," he told it, quiet, fond despite himself, and reached down to close his fingers around it.
The instant contact was made, the low hum he'd been half-aware of since entering the clearing sharpened into something almost like a held breath, and every one of the black-barked trees ringing the clearing went, all at once, perfectly, unnaturally still.
Objective complete, the voice said, gentle as it had been the whole Mission, giving no warning at all for what was about to arrive in its wake. Reward: recognized. Delivered.
Ash had time for exactly one more thought — I wonder what this one will show me — before the memory that wasn't his own arrived, and tore the quiet, careful peace of the clearing apart from the inside out.