Bauble is not a magpie of great purpose. He is not drawn to the sun or the wind or the softness of dusk. He is drawn to what glimmers — the cruel, delicate glint of lost things. A bent thimble winking through the frost. A coin blunted by years in the dirt. The glimmering eye of a pocket watch long stopped. Momentos with no memory but their shine.
London, sprawling and ever-breathing, is a city of abandonment. Beneath its towering facades, tucked into forgotten crevices, live the relics of human neglect. The lost threads of time, unraveling into dust. And Bauble, the magpie, has learned to collect these threads as if they were the very fabric of his existence. For what is a magpie if not a collector of that which has been discarded, that which has no place left to belong?
One evening, as the River Thames breathes in the dark, a low tide unfurls its secrets along the shore. Bauble alights on a slick rock, scanning the horizon. The glint of something unseen calls to him, hidden in the dark like an unspoken promise. And then he sees it — a flicker, a shimmer. A glint to sharp it cuts through the heavy night. Not a trinket. Not a thing that could be stolen. But a star.
It is delicate, resting just beyond reach, caught between the tide of the world and the air above. Bauble tilts his head. He has never seen anything like it before. Not a star he could simply fly and take. No, this one sits at the edge of the heavens, above the darkened city, waiting to be claimed
And so, he does.
Bauble rises from his perch, wings slicing through the night like a dagger through silk. Higher, higher above the rooftops, above the London skyline, above the endless grey of human hands that never look up. He soars into the midnight sky, his heart pounding in the hush of the wind. He doesn’t pause, doesn’t think. His eyes are fixed, unblinking, on that glimmering point, that fragile thread of light.
With a swift flick of his wing, he reaches it—the first star. It feels cold beneath his claws, like the weight of untold centuries pressing down on him. It shudders in his grasp as it remembers something it has long since forgotten. For a moment, the star flickers, hesitating, before it yields. And with that, Bauble pulls it free.
He doesn’t stop to question why. He doesn’t think of the vastness he’s disturbing, the lives he’s stealing from the endless night. He only feels the rush of power, the dizzying thrill of taking what was never meant to be touched. One star falls from the sky, its delicate light wrapped in his claws like a stolen secret.
Bauble plucks another, and then another. One by one, he tears them from the heavens, one gleaming jewel after another. The stars become souvenirs to him — bottle caps, broken coins, little lost things to be taken, hoarded, and kept close. The sky, once infinite and pure, begins to shift, to tremble under the weight of his collection.
No one notices. No one looks up at the emptying sky. No one sees the small tremors in the constellations, the way the familiar patterns begin to distort, the stars losing their places, falling like delicate notes from a forgotten song.
And yet, Bauble knows. He knows that he alone has rewritten the night. The stars, those once-pristine relics of distant worlds, are now his, each one a testament to his quiet rebellion against the universe’s indifference. They are his to hold, his to arrange. He is not just a magpie now; he is the architect of the heavens. Each stolen star is a thread, woven into the dark, like trinkets scattered across an endless void.
Finally, when the sky is no longer whole, when the constellations are a chaotic jumble of mismatched light, Bauble hovers in the silent night. He is not satisfied. Not yet. His wings beat softly in the cool air, his eyes searching the emptiness where the stars once shone, but now only his stolen treasures gleam.
But now, Bauble has a new idea.
With one final beat of his wings, he dives, plummeting through the night. And as he does, his claws, once wrapped around stars, now grasp his hoarded treasures—the bent thimbles, the rusted keys, the broken watches—and he begins to replace the stars. One by one, his little treasures fill the void, scattering across the heavens like glimmering tokens. Bottle caps glitter where once there had been constellations. A discarded earring catches the light where the great Orion once lay. A cracked pocket watch takes the place of the moon.
The night sky is no longer a canvas of distant, cold light. It is a tapestry of Bauble’s quiet rebellion, a patchwork of what has been lost, and what he has taken. The stars no longer burn with the fire of distant worlds, but they shine with the stolen beauty of forgotten things — forgotten, yet eternal in their smallness.
And Bauble, satisfied at last, watches the world below, oblivious to the silent shimmering spoils above, He has written his own sky, stitched it together with the little lost things that glitter in the dark, and left a sky that will never be the same.
He is no longer just a magpie. He is the thief of stars, the architect of a sky remade — stitched with the glimmer of lost things.
And somehow, that feels brighter than the heavens ever were.
Written by Lila Choudry from Longwood, FL
