Children of the Sun

Author : Demond Hussey, Staff Writer

She appeared as a blazing slash across the midnight sky; a falling inferno, trailing multi-colored flames in her wake. Her impact shook the foundations of the continent, causing minor earthquakes and avalanches worldwide. Forest fires raged around her crater, burning for weeks before the fire crews could extinguish them.

She certainly knew how to make an entrance.

My “extensive” knowledge of meteorites, asteroids and comets made me one of the few specialists called in when the impact zone had been deemed safe, but nothing could have prepared me for what I encountered there. My experience did not include fallen angels.

As steam from the last water-bomber was blown away by hot winds, she was finally revealed, lying at the bottom of a crater seven kilometers in diameter and six hundred meters deep. Initially, we had to wear protective goggles just to look at her as well as heat-shielded coveralls. She still glowed like the surface of a star and emitted broad spectrums of light, heat and radiation. It was utterly improbable, but there she was, a being of pure solar plasma born within the heart of a Sun.

It sounds cliché, but I fell in love as soon as I saw her. That’s the only possible description for the profound waves of breath-taking awe and raw emotion that overwhelmed me as I gazed into that crater. Love is an inadequate word. How can any human emotion approach the glory of her being?

It wasn’t her physique alone that inflamed my heart, though by human standards, she was a goddess, voluptuous and impeccable. She was gigantic at first, a humanoid roughly four meters tall, curled into a fetal position on a bed of molten granite. Her body pulsed and rippled with the vast, untamed powers churning within her. Dark “sun-spots” moved in hypnotic patterns over volcanic skin. The surrounding air seemed alive as heat waves bent her light into a shimmering, prismatic aura. I had never seen anything more transcendently beautiful in all my life.

It wasn’t her beauty alone that impassioned my soul, but something else, some unseen, life-giving energy that radiated from her infusing everything around us. Within days, the charred forest began to send forth new growth. Animals returned and flourished in abundance, drawn to her budding, verdant oasis. The ground beneath her had cooled and crystallized into a dense bed of multi-colored migmatite interspersed with precious gemstones.

But she was dying. We watched helplessly as her light slowly ebbed away. It was as if she was pouring her life into the world around us, healing the wound she had surely, inadvertently created.

My heart was breaking by immeasurable degrees, but there was nothing we could do. Over the course of several weeks I remained with her and simply wept, daring each day to draw nearer to her cooling and shrinking body, praying for some miracle that would rekindle her fading life-force. As scientists scuttled and tested, recorded and analyzed like knowledge-hungry scavengers, my constant tears evaporated off my red and blistered skin, yet I remained vigilant. No one dared to stop me and, eventually, I could lie beside her.

Not once had she stirred, but for the gentle motions of her belly, rising and falling with each breath, each weaker than the last, but as her final exhale of hydrogen and helium leaked from her, now shrunken, metallic form, her luminous eyes opened and seared into mine. In a blinding moment of unparalleled revelation, we became united in cosmic understanding and recognition. We had both been born of the same light – two Children of the Sun.