Day of the dance
The elders were inside, deep down in their bunkers. They couldn’t bear to watch the sky during this week. However broad and deep this new sky was, all eyes would always travel to that one small pinpoint of bright light: the latest star to join the endless, silent choir of night’s bright passengers.
The children called this new arrival ‘The Cradle’.
The elders couldn’t bear to watch it, or think about it, or call it by its older name. Those who had survived the Days of Reckoning and had survived the journey, stayed deep under the ground and tried not to remember.
Outside, a new and fearless generation watched the sky. They smiled. They remembered.
Not the days of old. None of them had lived through those days. A few of them had been born on board the handful of ships that had made it to this new home - but most of them had never known another place, another environment. None of them shared the grief of the elders.
“Almost” one of the children whispered; “Almost time now.”
Inside their bunkers, the elders did their slow and grievous dying, second by second, hour by hour, day by day. None of them had truly survived the Days of Reckoning - not in any meaningful sense of the word. They only seemed to go forward in time but they did not. The past’s strong gravity was slowly claiming them as its last victims. They were dying - and they knew that they were dying, and they did not care.
Outside, the children were waiting impatiently for the dance to begin.
“Why are they so sad?’ one of the youngest asked.
“Because they’re stupid.” another child answered.
The rest of them laughed at this. Most shook their heads in quiet bemusement. It was stupid. It was a beautiful day, on a beautiful world. A world not touched by old wars, old hunger, old evils.
“But they gave us these!” one of the older children said, stretching her arms and raising them as high as she could.
The others followed her example.
“Yes!”
“Yes!”
“Yes!”
Inside their bunkers, deep under the ground, the elders sat silently. They didn’t need to see that bright new star to feel its weight, its intolerable weight, upon their shoulders. They were slowly dying and if they still could have felt any of the normal, old emotions, they would have felt glad to do so. This was not their world and they had no future here. So, they were returning to a past, however dark it may have been. The past was theirs and they would reclaim it in the only way left to them - by dying slowly, second by second, hour by hour, day by day.
Outside, the children had begun to dance. A solemn dance: a dance of mourning. Even if they didn’t feel the grief, they did want to honour their parents. The elders who had given them these wings, that now grew from their shoulders - forever part of them, forever part of this new world.
While the elders hid inside their bunkers, their children flew and danced upon the air of this new, and forgiving, and much lighter world. They flew; they danced; they sang their solemn songs - and they ignored the newest star, that burnt so brightly: the place the elders, before the Days of Reckoning, had called Earth.