This story is an honourable mention in the March 2022 Short Story Contest.

In the first beginning, the Moons and Stars were asleep.

It had always been that way, they never woke, they just existed.

In a much later beginning, it started with one man. There are four things you should know about this man:

1. He was very clever, from an academic standpoint.

2. From any other standpoint, he was also very foolish.

3. He was an inventor, an explorer of science, a man of experiments, although they

were generally quite simple ones.

4. He was getting bored of his simple experiments, so he decided to destroy

everything.

The man, as he was quite academically gifted, was able to find many ways to do this, and so his first idea was to blow up Earth’s Sun and Moon. He knew, of course, that this would most likely end all life on Earth, including his own. He decided he did not wish to die, because then he would never see the full extent of his greatest experiment. To solve this problem, he made an elixir to cause immortality, and drank it himself.

The explosion was spectacular. A glorious eruption. A beautiful end to a corrupted world. He laughed as the Sun disappeared, as the humans cried in the streets, as everyone scrambled to survive. In the end, they devolved into chaos, and he watched.

Before the man went into hiding, he watched the sky. There is one last, crucial, part to the story, and it is this. The Stars and Moons were a system. A community. They slept and they slept, and as sleeping things do, they dreamt. They dreamt of many things, impossible things. And then one day the dreams stopped. They awoke. They awoke the day the world ended. After discovering what had happened to Earth’s Sun and Moon, how they had been brutally ripped apart, they feared for themselves. They all went into hiding, and soon the sky was blank. A near endless vastness. A few things littered the sky, the other planets, satellites, but the once great expanse of stars was gone. And they have been gone since that day. Not even the man knew where they went.

And in this hopelessness, this barren land, there was still hope. It took years, but residue from the now obliterated Sun and Moon landed on Earth. It was their flesh, and although it should have faded, been absorbed, been nothing, it didn’t. The Sun and Moon were powerful entities, and although they had been ripped apart, they could still adapt. The remnants evolved, they evolved into us. We found relics of the humans. We learned from them, learned how to grow and harvest crops, we learned how to harness energy. We found literature, and in the year 792, we deciphered languages. We saw pictures of the once great sky, we found books detailing the way they once shone. We found the diary of the man, the scientist. It is how we found out what had happened to the planet. And perhaps most importantly, we gained the powers of our previous forms. The people of the Sun gained the power to control heat, they created fire, they could control the movements of the Earth’s crust. The people of the Moon gained the power to control water, and some, although it is incredibly rare, had the power to control the nature of Earth. Through this, we were able to survive. We used our powers to create. We regrew crops that had been dead for millenia. We formed monarchies, kingdoms.

And soon Earth was no longer barren, soon it was full of life. What later became known as the Great Obsolescence was now a thing of the past. We split into two kingdoms, Empire Lunaire and Empire Soleil. And since then, we became unstoppable.