Ganymede stared at the ceiling.
“Hey,” said Dal-Sun, lying next to her. “I feel like I might’ve accidentally overwhelmed you last night.”
Ganymede said nothing.
“I didn’t mean to,” Dal-Sun went on. “I honestly thought you would’ve been excited to see it. I was excited to show you. I’ve been waiting forever to show someone what I’d found, someone I could trust to understand. I thought you would.”
Ganymede said nothing.
“Was it just too much at once? Because it doesn’t have to be that big. I’ve gotten similar, smaller effects with smaller rituals. In fact, I actually have a thing I do every night where… it’s not much, but it stays with me, I can feel myself getting stronger and faster over time. I might even be a match for Martim, now. Can you believe that?”
Ganymede said nothing.
“I mean, you obviously want to reach the moon, and you already make a point of keeping yourself strong, and you’re so… you’re so pent up all the time, I would’ve thought you’d jump at the chance to just… energize yourself and be free, for once, to just do whatever you want to do and no one could contest you, and you could feel things you never got a chance to feel before…”
Ganymede said nothing.
“I guess you must still be feeling pent up. Maybe your family drilled it into you or something, I dunno. I’m a little surprised, I mean, that kinda stuff never got to me, that’s how I managed to escape my hometown. I just figured anyone who would be affected by that kinda thing also would’ve just fallen in line with everyone else by the time they reached adulthood, but I guess that’s not the case.”
“Dal-Sun,” Ganymede muttered.
“Hm?”
There was another long period of silence. “What?” Dal-Sun said.
“Why are you trying to reach the moon?” Ganymede asked, still looking at the ceiling.
Dal-Sun rubbed the back of her head. “I mean, same reason anyone is, right? Ascending to a higher plane, transforming into something greater, gaining omniscience and immortality… I dunno, whatever the moon has to offer, I want to see what it is. I want the power to be whatever I want to be. Isn’t that what you want?”
“It’s blasphemous, Mary,” Ganymede’s mother had said. “No one is meant to have that kind of power except the Alpha. Trying to attain that kind of power is the height of egotism and selfishness.”
Ganymede considered her words and felt she didn’t understand them, so she decided to ask questions to learn more. “But it’s not bad if the Alpha uses that power, right?”
“That’s right, but the Alpha isn’t like us. The Alpha is above us. The Alpha can see the direction of the entire world and all its people, and so the Alpha knows what actions will put all of us on the right path.”
“I thought we were supposed to be like the Alpha, because we were created in His image.”
“Yes, but… we are meant to embody the goodness of the Alpha, we are not meant to have the same power as Him.”
“But how can we be as good as Him if we don’t have the same powers?” Ganymede scratched her head. “Wouldn’t it be good if we could do the same things He could do? If we had multiple Alphas looking after the world instead of just one? And we could help Him, too, so He wouldn’t have to do it all by Himself.”
“Mary, stop talking nonsense! The Alpha is already more powerful and knowing than all living beings combined, He doesn’t need our help, and again, insinuating that He does is saying that you already know better, in spite of your lack of knowledge! Are you saying you’re better than the Alpha!?”
“No! Not better, just…”
“Not another word, Mary. And you can forget about having dinner tonight. Now, I don’t want to hear you talking about this again, do you understand?”
“But don’t you think the Alpha gets lonely?” Ganymede asked.
“What?” asked Jess, lying in the grass next to her. “Why would He? He’s with all of us all the time.”
“Do you feel Him here with you?”
“Sure.”
Ganymede sat up. “Like, so He talks to you? You can see Him?”
“Well, no, it doesn’t work like that, Ganymede, you know that. Don’t you?” Jess cupped her paws to her heart. “I feel His love. I feel His presence guiding me… sometimes. Not all the time. But when I need it.”
“I don’t think that’s the same thing as being with someone.”
Jess sat up now, too. “Do you need Him to be with you? Like, physically?”
“Well, yes! I mean, not the Alpha, specifically. But how am I supposed to know someone cares about me if they aren’t here with me, talking to me? If I can’t see them or hear them? How is that different from being left alone?”
“You feel like the Alpha isn’t with you? Because I know He is.” She winked. “That’s why He put me here with you, see? So I can tell you He loves you, and that I love you too.”
“Okay, but what I’m saying is, how does the Alpha feel about it? He can see me, I can’t see Him. I can’t address Him. Don’t you think He’d be lonely?”
“Well, no, because not only does He hear everything we say, He can hear all our thoughts and feelings, too. He knows how you feel about Him, whether you say it or not.”
“How much does that mean to Him, though, really? Would my love be any more significant to Him than the love of one of the critters crawling around in the ground beneath us?”
“Heheh, well, if a critter loved me, I’d think that was pretty flattering.”
Ganymede sighed. “More than if a fellow person loved you?”
Jess fiddled with her paws. “No.”
“That’s what I mean,” Ganymede said, lying back down. “Wouldn’t the Alpha only truly feel love if it came from a fellow Alpha?”
A moment of silence passed between them. “But Ganymede, are you saying you want to be Alpha?”
Ganymede thought. “No,” she said. “I don’t want that kind of power...”
“...I just want to reach the moon,” Ganymede concluded.
Dal-Sun stared at her. “What, just to be on it?”
“I just want to see it,” Ganymede mumbled.
“You want to go to all this trouble,” Dal-Sun said, jamming her finger into the bed, “enough that you endanger your life and leave your hometown, just so you can see the moon? Just so you can see something that you already see every night?”
Ganymede turned her head away.
Dal-Sun sighed. “Ganymede, I relate to you so much, but sometimes you say things that are just…”
“Too simple,” Arya had said, talons brought together under her beak in thought.
“I didn’t mean to say reaching the moon was simple,” Ganymede said.
“What I mean is, you seem to be under the impression that you can reach the moon while fundamentally staying as you are.” Arya leaned back in her seat. “The chukar belief is generally that the moon is… ethereal, unknowable by mortal beings such as us. The process of returning to the moon would mean transforming in order to be received by the moon.”
“Well, maybe, but I was thinking… the act of reaching the moon, of touching the moon, would be a transformative act in itself. I was hoping… that simply seeing the moon for myself would teach me everything I need to know in order to… ‘understand’ the moon.”
“An interesting idea, but that’s a paradox, isn’t it? That you need to reach the moon in order to gain the means of reaching the moon.”
“Is it?” Ganymede avoided Arya’s gaze. “I thought it would be like interacting with people. You don’t know anything about them until after you meet them. You have no way of understanding them until they provide you with the means of understanding them.”
“The difference with people is we are all born with the means to understand each other, it’s just a matter of cooperating and using those tools together.”
I wasn’t born with those tools, and I’m still waiting for someone to teach me, Ganymede thought to herself.
“How do we know we weren’t already born with the means to reach the moon, too,” Ganymede asked, “and it’s just a matter of the moon helping us learn how?”
“You’re acting like the moon is a living person,” Martim said.
Ganymede looked down at her drink. “I think it is.”
“Seriously? Was that a thing back in your hometown?”
“No, it’s just… something I concluded on my own,” Ganymede mumbled.
Martim took a sip of zis drink. “You do realize there’s, like, zero precedent for that, right? We think the moon might have some magical properties, but that doesn’t mean it can think. Even religions that center the moon don’t see it as a living being, they only see it as a place where life was created. Or where gods live.”
“I have reasons to believe it’s true,” Ganymede said, though she was having trouble remembering what those reasons were. “Is it a problem?”
“I’m just a little put off because, like… Everyone’s working their ass off out here for their own personal reasons, right? They want to change the world. Or they want to open up new opportunities for themselves, or for everyone else. It’s not even necessarily grand stuff like that, some people just have families back home that they need to take care of, and either they see the moon as having the potential to do something about that, or they’re just here for the pay. And then you’re here, and you just… What, you just wanna say hi to the moon?”
“There’s more to it than that,” Ganymede said. “The moon has the power to connect with everyone. If I can connect with the moon, then I can connect to everyone else, everyone else who doesn’t… have connections.”
“You know you can already connect with those people right now, right?” Martim took another sip. “I don’t really see you actually doing it, though. Seems to me like you like to stay quiet and hidden. Seems to me like you’re just trying to escape from doing it.”
Ganymede flinched. Zis words reminded her too much of home.
“Going to the moon so the moon will help you make friends so you don’t have to do it yourself. Pfeh. You think getting to know people is supposed to be that fuckin’ easy? It’s not. I’ve seen plenty of rich kids like you, thinking it’s just tea parties, thinking everything’s got to be handed to them on a silver platter or else it’s not worth doing. That’s not what real friendship is. Real friendship is the hard stuff. Real friends argue with each other. Real friends stick with each other through the worst of times. Real friends help each other with their problems. They don’t go gallivanting off to the moon because they don’t feel like dealing with it all.”
Ganymede had no response.
“The moon is just a rock,” Martim said, drinking the last of zis cup and slamming it on the table. “Here, though, you’re dealing with real people. Have fun with your damn imaginary friend if you want, but don’t act like you’re doing any of the rest of us favors for it. If you’re going to be with us, we expect you to work.”
Ganymede watched the moon.
Martim hadn’t been right about calling it an imaginary friend. Not exactly.
Ganymede saw it more as a potential friend she hadn’t gotten to know yet. A promise of a future encounter. A promise that she would understand someone someday.
And it wasn’t true that she didn’t work at her current friendships. She felt like she had done nothing but work on them for her entire life, and yet the more she worked, the more she seemed to push people away.
She didn’t understand the idea that friendship was only about hard things. If friendship was only experiences that made you unhappy, then why was a friendship worth having? Friendship was a struggle for her, but she did it anyway because she wanted to experience the good parts of it, not the bad parts.
And she could be happy doing hard work for her friends, too. She’d be willing to do any work that helped her friends be happy. But work wasn’t the same thing as friendship, it was just work. An axe could help you cut down a tree, an axe could help with your work, but that didn’t mean the axe was your friend.
Others would tell her what they expected of her as a friend, but whenever she tried to do those things, somehow she did it in the wrong way, and it didn’t count. When she tried to correct her actions, she did it in ways that only confused others further.
Her approach to the moon was her main example of this. Everyone she knew felt hidden from her. Even when she interacted with them, all those interactions felt insincere, surface-level. She wanted people to know that she would accept the deeper parts of them, but she had no way of bringing those parts to the surface. The moon was supposed to help bring those parts out.
Dal-Sun said she would bring her inner self out, but she didn’t. She warped herself. She made herself into something else.
And yet, she had used a piece of the moon to do it. Was Ganymede wrong about the moon?
Ganymede watched the moon.
Even now, watching it brought her comfort.
She couldn’t be wrong. She couldn’t. It was true that she was wrong about many things, most of those things having to do with other people, but she wasn’t wrong about the moon.
It was still there waiting for her, just like it had been for all those years. Just like it had been the first night that she had felt completely, utterly alone. It showed itself to her when she needed it most, and now it was waiting for her to show herself to it. Because it needed her just as much.
Because the moon was misunderstood, just like she was. This fact had become so much clearer to her, now.
She was the only one trying to reach the moon itself. It was bad enough that no one in her town even had a desire to see the moon like she did, but the Lunites had taken it a step further, they added insult to injury. They wanted to go to the moon, but they wanted it for reasons other than to see the moon itself. They wanted change. They wanted knowledge. They wanted power. They didn’t want the moon, not like she wanted the moon.
They wanted to use the moon. They didn’t love the moon like she did.
She knew what that felt like, and she decided she wouldn’t stand for it anymore.
“The moon is NOT just a rock!” she shouted.
The other three–Martim, Arya, and Dal-Sun–all turned to look at her. She huffed. If she was going to help the moon be less alone, the first thing she needed to do was prove to others that the moon was a living being, and worthy of love.
“Look how beautiful she is!” Ganymede continued, pointing towards the moon as ardently as she could. “Look at her, look at the light she’s giving us! Look how she watches over us every night! Look how she waits for us every night! Look at her right now, and tell me she’s not alive!”
Somewhat to her surprise, the others followed her command, and looked to the moon. Dal-Sun squinted. The others followed suit.
Then their expressions started to change in ways Ganymede wasn’t expecting.
Their eyes widened. Arya brought her talons to her beak. Martim took a step back in shock. Dal-Sun’s mouth opened, then broadened in glee.
Ganymede looked to the moon.
It didn’t look right.
It was subtle, but there seemed to be waves of light moving across the surface, shimmering, similar to how a pool of water could reflect shadows on its surroundings. As Ganymede watched the shadows move, she realized the light seemed to be coalescing into a single point, a pinprick on the moon’s surface.
The longer she watched, though, the darker the shadows grew, and the bigger and brighter the pinprick of light grew.
The rest of her group was making exclamations of some sort, but Ganymede could barely process it now. She could only stare as the bizarre scene unfolded on the moon’s surface, as though the light of the moon was slowly being sucked into a single spot.
Then, all of a sudden, there was a big flash centered on that pinprick, just for the briefest of moments. And then the shadows returned to light, and the moon’s appearance was now the same as before, as though nothing had just happened.
Ganymede continued staring for several seconds. “What the FUCK was that!?” she heard Martim say. Though a part of her considered looking back to the group, Ganymede couldn’t tear her eyes away.
And then, all of a sudden, the pinprick of light came back.
Ganymede stared at it. It was growing again. It was very slow, and there weren’t shadows on the moon to accompany it this time, but it was definitely growing. She was sure of it.
Once again, Ganymede ignored the sounds of the people near her as she continued staring at the spot, and eventually, it started growing to a point where Ganymede realized what was happening.
Whatever the light was, it was coming towards them.
Ganymede’s mind raced as she watched it, trying to think of what it might be. But of everything she had read in all of her books, in everything that she had discussed with the Lunites, she had never heard of anything like this happening. As much as she tried to prepare herself for what was about to happen, the fact was that she had no idea of what that could possibly be.
The light rapidly accelerated in growth, becoming more visible, the closer it came. And then, just when Ganymede thought it might very well envelop all of them–
In a single instant–
She saw what was in the light–
A great white beast with massive wings–
And then it struck the earth.
Another flash of light at the instant it landed, in the spot where it landed, in the middle of a mountain close enough to be visible on the horizon.
A few seconds later, there was a loud rumble, and the ground shook beneath them. Arya gasped and lost her balance.
Then it passed, and all was quiet.
Some period of time passed, but Ganymede couldn’t possibly measure how long it was.
“What the FUCK!?” Martim screeched. “WHAT the FUCK, WHAT THE FUCK, WHAT THE FUCK WHAT THE FUCK!?”
“OH MY FUCKING GOD!” Dal-Sun shouted, jumping up and down, alternately pulling at her ears and pointing towards the mountain, a wide smile on her face. “DID YOU FUCKING SEE THAT!?”
While Dal-Sun laughed, Arya was still on the ground, half-whispering, half-muttering, saying some long string of words that Ganymede couldn’t understand. She sounded upset.
Dal-Sun turned around to address everyone else. “Okay, obviously ALL our plans are canceled and we are high-tailing it over there RIGHT FUCKING NOW, and if you disagree, well, so long, fuck off, good luck, have a great fucking life, holy SHIT holy SHIT I CAN’T BELIEVE–OH MY GOD–” and then she started running off.
Martim followed her unsteadily, pleading with her to slow down while still in the middle of shouting various expletives. Arya stayed on the ground, still muttering to herself while starting to cry.
Ganymede stared at the moon.
The moon seemed to stare back.
