CELESTE

By Marcus Sun

Celeste has always been cold. Fourth from the Ra’s Star and far from its warmest light, we are accustomed to the cool embrace of our planet’s dry air. We have always sought solace from the snow capped mountain ranges of Colossus and the frost-tipped meadows of Serena. But this was not the natural cold, not the comforting air of our ancestors. This was the frigid prelude to the end.

Celeste, our beloved world, was dying. We had killed her. In our hubris, our blind march to some vague notion of progress we have struck the fatal blow. We had taken more than our home could stand to give. Even now, as my people scramble to contain the cataclysmic failure of our natural ecosystem, the planet was nearing the end of its final gasp. The atmosphere, the very cool Celestial air that have sustained countless generations of our race, was dissipating into the black emptiness of space. It is the cruel, tragic retort to our greatest failure. My greatest failure.

I am Uranus, Chronicler of Celeste. I am the director of my people during peace and war. I am the mind that connects the living to the dead, the living link to our ancestors. I am the keeper of our history, the most sacred of my duties.

It is now my duty to now bear witness to the greatest horror to befall our kind in memory.

There are some who claim that this is the price we owe, the punishment for our greed and our sinful desire for power. No doubt, we owe a great debt that can only be repaid but death with the faint hope of distant resurrection. Perhaps one day, far from now, our beloved world can live again.

But no, I will not allow it to end like this. The millennia of glory, enlightenment, and prosperity must not be extinguished in a single day. I will not let the mighty Celestials and our illustrious history to be defeated in such an ignominious way. Our world may die today, but we will not follow. We will carry on, through the pain and the loss to build a future even brighter than the beacon of our past. We will live to see our errors corrected, so that we are reset upon the Path.

Even now, the ten thousand vessels of our grand armada are leaving their berths, heaving their great pyramidal forms from the wasted red dust that was once our beautiful home. Within their bowels these ships carry the future of our people, the carefully chosen few who would be spared the cruel fate of all the others. Olympus, the Sky City, the great fleet I constructed for this single purpose: to deliver us to our salvation.

Terra, the third planet from Ra’s star, a sister planet and the gem of our solar system. There reside those who call themselves the Terrestrials, a wayward sister race who broke from our path a hundred years ago. For a century they have gorged themselves on the fruit of our labours, prospering over the foundations that our ancestors built. The time has come to break the blasphemous peace and reclaim what is rightfully our dominion. Only then can we begin to atone for the sin we have committed. Only then can we begin to find peace again.

For now, we sail away from our beloved Celeste. There was no resistance, as the blanket of moisture and gas that once protected our world thinned to a hollow imitation of an atmosphere. I allowed the pain to wash over me, to ensure that I shall never forget this sight: the shrinking sphere of my home rotating away into darkness, red dust where once green meadows lay.