Moonstruck

𝓌𝒽𝒶𝓉𝑒𝓋𝑒𝓇 𝑜𝓊𝓇 𝓈𝑜𝓊𝓁𝓈 𝒶𝓇𝑒 𝓂𝒶𝒹𝑒 𝑜𝒻,

[𝒽𝑒𝓇𝓈] 𝒶𝓃𝒹 𝓂𝒾𝓃𝑒 𝒶𝓇𝑒 𝓉𝒽𝑒 𝓈𝒶𝓂𝑒.
Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights

In the beginning, it was just the two of them. Both had been conceived by a single singularity, sired by a storm of explosions expanding like the six wings of seraphim (mythical creatures who had yet to be dreamed up)—one from darkness, one from light. The nascent cosmos was their cradle, their nest. If immortals could have immortal souls (as, supposedly, only mortals do)—whatever souls are made of, theirs would have been one and the same. In the beginning, they were made from the same stardust; in the end, they would return to the same, too.

In the beginning, when the universe was still young and the earth still starry-eyed with naive wonder at being alive for the first time—when the stars were still settling into the sable sky—they danced in the darkness. Back then, darkness was not evil; it was a mother's tender good-night kiss, a harmonic lull, a blissful descent into the soft embrace of sweet dreams. Darkness was not frightening; it was quiet, peaceful, loving. It was simply the absence of light, before there was any light to be missed—it simply was.

In the beginning, the world was a dream. But dreams often become nightmares. After eons of wandering about an ever-increasingly dense field of stars, the one born from darkness—Illunis, as poets now call her—became weary. She tired of rest and relaxation, resented the light for taking from the dark. As sleepers rise from slumber, so she fell out of love with the universe, with the stars, with her soul. And thus, she fell out of love with her soulmate since the dawn of time—the one they call Aurelia.

Thus began the beginning of the end. She became a queen of chaos, a mistress of madness—a mere shadow of her former self. Darkness became terrifying for the first time, and her reign spread far and wide across the aging earth. Monsters sprang from shadows, devouring light and love and anything—or anyone—in their paths. Mortals—the very creatures the two goddesses had so carefully spent millenia crafting to perfection—ran rampant in terror. The world fell, and fell, and fell.

If immortals could have immortal souls—whatever Aurelia's was made of, she gave it up to protect the mortals she still held dear to her heart. Whatever she was made of, it became a river of stars that flowed into the greatest mortals of the time—kings and queens, warriors and poets and all-loving heroes—and granted them extraordinary gifts to use at night, when the terror was at its darkest and most dangerous. Under the moonlight, she taught them the art of shapeshifting, of adapting to the night. Under the moonlight she fell, soulless, her shadow unfettered and free to wander the world for eternity. Thus, Aurelia's soul—if an immortal could have one at all—still wanders to this day.

And what of Illunis, the perpetrator of all this darkness? Her soulmate and nemesis—her lover, now turned enemy—had fallen. But whatever their souls were made of, hers and Aurelia's had been the same. Just as there can only be light with shadows, there cannot be shadows without light. One soulmate cannot be without the other.

Thus, in the end, Illunis fell and fell and fell. She falls to this day, deep in sleep, dreaming of reawakening and returning, of returning the universe to the nothingness it came from. She falls, dreaming of the day she'll rise again. Dreaming that someday, she and her reign will be resurrected by—