Moonshift

Every night at midnight, the purple clouds came out to dance with the blushing sky. Those first nights here on Venus, well those were definitely something I'll never be able to forget. But it wasn't just the sky that was enchanting. On Venus, the plants glow with an otherworldly luminescence, casting a soft, eerie light over the landscape.

When we were little kids back on Earth, I remember being told by my parents how we needed to go to Venus and Mars because the ocean tides started to change. I didn't understand there were bigger problems.

For starters, the Moon was getting further away from us. Fast. Moved thousands of miles in mere months. It was nearly a million miles further from Earth by the time I was 15. But what no one expected was that the Moon's departure would open a portal to another dimension, one inhabited by strange, otherworldly beings that sometimes crossed over into our world.

Things didn't seem so bad when I was younger though.

My first memory was of my dad telling me we couldn't take the train anymore. Much, much later I learned it was because of the East Coast flood. But the flood wasn't just a natural disaster. He told me the flood was caused by a "Mermaid Queen" who had risen from the depths of the ocean, angry at the pollution and destruction wrought by humanity.

Then something came out of the sun. The object was actually a planet. We think. We don't know because our equipment can't look at it directly without our equipment, you know, going haywire. We think it emits some kind of field or energy that envelops our whole solar system.

We can see it today even after everything that happened. It definitely looks like a planet. I maintain it's a planet. A lot of other people want it to be something else. Some sign or something.

I think it was iron from the sun. It must have been in there all along. But the object was more than just a planet, my dad used to say. It was a "celestial being" with a consciousness and a will of its own. And it was angry at humanity for the damage we had done to the universe.

There wasn't anything anyone could do…

It was worse on Earth than Venus and Mars. Through our telescopes or satellites I guess we noticed things seemed different on all the planets. Wasn't just the rocky ones that changed, even Jupiter seemed different. It lost mass somehow. It must be the field emitted by the object. That had to have done it.

But like I said, we really don't know.

Besides science seeming to fail us - we couldn't do anything about the object, or the moon, or the changes on Earth - there was a war.

People had predicted it apparently. People used to make stories up about 'Infinite War' this, 'Infinite War' that. So there definitely were, you know, prophets on Earth. But mermaids, inter-dimensional beings and evil sun monsters? I don't think anyone saw that coming...

Earth was destroyed about 20 years after we left. But in the aftermath of the destruction, something strange and wonderful happened, my dad said. Ghosts... ghosts of the departed rose up from the ruins of the planet, forming a great, spectral army that fought alongside our Earth ships and the living against the celestial being that threatened all of existence. That moment, well, all the ships in the skies with the ghosts of Earth stopped the object dead in its tracks…not before the Earth was destroyed, of course....

But it's okay. Things are okay….

We're all doing fine here. Especially now that the object from the sun is inert it seems - even though a lot of fighting still takes place there. It's not so bad under the purple skies. I'm glad dad got to see Venus before he passed away in the fighting....

Mercury is now our moon. So it looks like Earth from my childhood, but not entirely. There is much more oxygen on our planet. We think it's how Earth used to be, back when there were dinosaurs, swampy. Trees are huge. Bigger than I ever remember from being a kid. And here there are majestic, dinosaur-sized creatures roaming the planet, from fire-breathing dragons to gentle, telepathic unicorns. The last tale my dad told was that the Mermaid Queen actually made it to Venus along with some of her army led here by human spirits whose lives she vanquished. He said she protects Venus now....

Time has flown by. I'm glad to still be alive, because I love all of life and what remains with us...within our dreams. It's like a whole new world, one that isn't just beyond our reach in our waking lives - it's here. It's a peaceful paradise in a way.

But in reality, the war still rages on and not just literally in the present. It's a war against the unknown, against a force that we can't comprehend or understand. Some say that the planet-like object was a manifestation of our collective fears and anxieties, brought to life by our own thoughts and emotions.

Others believe that it was a harbinger of a greater power, an ancient force that came to claim our world as its own.

But no matter what it was or is, the fact remains that we are still at war. A war that has claimed countless lives and destroyed our entire birth world. A war that has pushed humanity to the brink of extinction.

Yet, in the midst of all this chaos and destruction, there is still hope. Hope that one day, we will find a way to end this war and bring peace to the universe once again.