How strangely you and your people speak. When I did finally rouse from my fitful dreams and half-grasped memories, it was like waking with a song in my ears, a song of lilting syllables and buoyant cadences. It was not my mother tongue, that is a certainty.

As if I had doubts, knowing I look the way I do, and all of your kin so different from me. I do not even have fur! Yes, it is obvious I am not one of you, that is something that brooks all language barriers, and even exceeds my infuriating knack for amnesia.

I spoke differently upon waking, though I have no name for what it might be. I still speak it, yet I understand nothing of your words, and neither do your people understand anything of mine. I sit here and write this, and I know my privacy would be secure even lacking the peculiar politeness your kind has. Such respect for me and my ways. Fools, all of us. Why trust a criminal?

Whatever I was before--that evil word, again--I am different now, if only physically. I am small, almost delicate-appearing, with pitiful means I would barely venture to call strength. Ha! I barely come to your shoulder, yet I have the feeling I should tower over you, just like your stories. And I am so white, so white and cold, with blind eyes that still see; I refused your mirrors after the first time, but the puddles leftover from rain taunt and torment me anyway.

Despite these things, or perhaps because of them, I am venerated! Can they not see this stupidity for what it is? Can you not?

You say nothing to them, Tsun, nothing! And I lack the means to communicate this truth. Their smiles waver back and forth between estatic bliss of those that continually see a living marvel--I refuse to use the word 'miracle'--and that of those who are amused at a wayward son who is slightly off in the head. That is how I am rewarded for trying to tell them what you will not? A patient smile and quiet laughter for my attempts at your language?

Your kin travel from the furthest reaches of the islands, even from the marvelous cities I have glimpsed in some of your timeless illustrations. They travel, to see a fraud! Why? Until your people realize I am nothing but a mortal, and a broken one at that, there will be this... idiotic awe, and I cannot stand it! This... this reverence for myth made reality, it is maddening.

I have no knowledge to give to them, Tsun! My lament, such as it is, falls as if you are deaf to it, and I fear even this quill mocks me, for I have ruined it with my vicious jabbing at parchment again. I have no magic to share with you and your people, no benevolence or peace to pass on. You know this, Tsun, yet your silence burns me greater than the scars around my wrists and throat! I am not the White One, the Great Horned Beast! I am not this Kei Lun!

Why will you not tell them the truth? I am just a pitiful refuse without a real name, and without any purpose. I came to you and yours in chains, and yet I am lifted up like a god. When they come to their senses, what then, Tsun? Why are you setting me up to repeat my ungraceful fall?

Daily, you insist on perpetuating this travesty, this farce, even with the children of your village. Damn you, Tsun. I am a monster, not a god. Why hail me as He Who Is The Falling Star?--If you know enough of my words to tease me this way, then why do you not speak up!

You delight the children with foolish stories of my descent from the sky, when all I did was plummet from a portal meant to spit me out into a death trap. Where did this madness begin?

::The last sentence is underlined repeatedly, boxed and hedged in, even doodled around, as if these five words were pondered long after candles burnt out for the day, and lanterns were lit to greet the night.::