The peaceful and scholarly Mandaarians, an ancient interstellar race who live
far from Earth, have studied the galaxy for eons. They long ago learned that the natural laws of
physics come and go with the changing of universal forces. The natural laws Human physicists have
struggled so hard to discover and define are no axiomatic true thing — they are guidelines that apply
to physical reality for a limited period of time, albeit a period that might last for many millennia.

These guidelines come in and out of truth like the ebb and fl ow of the tide. During times
of what Terrans call high magic, when the warp and woof of the universal metaphysic is saturated
with the mystical and preternatural, the greatest of astronomical phenomena begin to change. Perhaps because of their importance in the universal schema, these great phenomena bend the universe until it changes, or maybe the symbolic importance that every sentient species assigns to sun and stars invests them with the mystical. Or maybe it is simply the nature of Reality. The Mandaarians do not know for certain, but they understand the way things are (or think they do) and accept that anything more than that may be unknowable.

Some Mandaarian metaphysicians theorize that due to the underlying mystic nature of Real-ity, not all stars may be created from nebulous clouds of gases. In some instances, the Multiverse gives birth to a starling — a being who seem-ingly belongs to one of the sentient species that inhabits it, but which in time will metamorpho-size into a stellar body. Any such being would possess immense power before it became a star. Furthermore, by the postulates of psychology
and the mystic axioms of correspondence, the type of star that being would become would be influenced by the life it experiences as a sentient being before its final transformation into a star. A being raised in a gentle and loving environ-ment would become a star destined to nurture life and promote peace, while one who suffered strife, pain, or confusion might foster dangerous worlds, warlike species, or things  whose darkness it is not wise to contemplate