The Spyglass of Whispering Stars

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It was one of those nights when the sky was so clear that even the stars' quiet thoughts could be heard—if you were listening. High above the city, on a windswept rooftop, sat a being doing just that. It had no name, or at least none it ever said aloud. But in old notebooks, it was recorded as a "star reader." It wore a hat that was far too big for its size, a cape made of stitched pieces of sky, and small gold glasses perched on the tip of its nose. Before it: the Spyglass of Whispering Stars. The spyglass was no ordinary one. It was constructed from things that were never meant to be together—a giraffe's neck vertebra, a clockwork mechanism that ticked backward, a lens made of frozen tearlight. But when you looked through it, you didn't just see stars. You saw stories. Today, the first thing that appeared to him was a dying sun, writing poems about colors in its final hour. Then: a meteor that never arrived, but carried with it the feeling of a missed meeting. And then—quite suddenly—a child sitting on the roof of a house, legs dangling, smiling at the moon. The Star Reader pulled out his ink book and wrote: "A smile that lit up the sky—Coordinates: 43° East, Time: before the first kiss." With trembling fingers, he changed the lens. Now came something rare: a constellation of memories—like soap bubbles, they danced around the telescope. He recognized the scent of a lavender field that was never entered. A touch that almost happened. A sentence that was never spoken, but years later, appeared in a song. Every night, the Star Reader gathered these fleeting things and wrote them down—so they wouldn't be lost. Down in the city lived people, animals, machines. They dreamed, they forgot. But up here, all of this was preserved. As the first light of morning groped through the twilight, the stargazer closed his book. He placed a forgotten memory between the pages, covered the telescope with a cloth, and disappeared – like mist before the sun. Some say they saw him. On the roof, above the rooftops. Others believe the telescope is just a fairy tale. But sometimes, on particularly quiet nights, the sky whispers – and then you know: someone is still listening.