Covetous Moon

by Edd

Luna glowered at Sol and all the other stars in the universe, and she wished to be like them. They were big and they were bright. They were immense fires burning in space.

And what was she? She was a mirror. She was rock and dust, and she reflected the light of the sun. All she did was circle the Earth, going round and round. The suns, they warmed their planets, and anchored their systems. Space bent around them.

What could she do? Besides sulk, which she admitted was one of her strongest skills. She had no fusion furnace at her core to burn hydrogen and helium. She was not nearly so massive as even the puniest of suns. Luna made barely a dent in spacetime.

Then she must do the best with what she had.

Things flashed by. After study she discovered these were rocks covered in ice, ellipsing their way from the outer clouds. After many trials she learned to focus her gravity on them, drawing them nearer pass by pass. Many slipped her influence to plunge sunward or away into interstellar space or to the planet below; one monstrous planetesimal even sending the Earth into a hazy ice age that destroyed most of the small animals living there.

And slowly, one by one, the rocks smashed into Luna.

She coordinated a thousand thousand of them, arranging it so they would all strike her over a short amount of time. It took millions of circuits of Sol, but she was proud of her accomplishment. Soon enough she would be massive, and her fires would ignite and grow.

More tiny animals flourished on the face of the Earth. They sent her emissaries, riding flimsy metal across the tiny space that separated host from moon. To each of them she whispered her secret.

“Soon. Soon I shall be a sun.”