“Help”

It was the last word to make it out of the human’s cracked and dry throat before she collapsed onto the powdery dirt of the dead forest. The skeletal trees were crisped on the outside, with few leaves clinging on and soon the girls body was bound to join them.

Liunwy shook her head. “I don’t understand. They loved me. Humans loved the sun and day. They reveled in me, playing and dancing. Now they scream and cry for help. You won’t even answer me anymore, Earth. What went wrong?”

The baked dead Earth made no sound save for the crackling of the wind through the scorched forest.

“I am light. I am beauty. I am good. How could this have happened?”

Liunwy turned to the lifeless girl beside her. She tried to revive her so she could ask her for answers, but it was to no avail. A journal spilt out of the girl’s fried leather satchel instead. Liunwy picked it up gently and began to read it, the edges of the pages flaking away as she read.

“The light has promised to never leave us! She has promised to never let a room be without her! We will always be surrounded by light!”

“The city is becoming hotter now by the hour. I feel tired, but I can’t think of any way to rest. The sun makes me want to keep running and playing, but I feel so spent.”

“I saw a once beautiful fern burst into flames this morning. We are having to make new wells every day. People are leaving the city. Maybe they’re right.”

“Half of the city is gone. We can’t even find them anymore. Why aren’t they coming back?”

“Everything is so dry, it’s all cracking and flaking away.”

“The city walls crumbled today in the heat. The well is dry. I’m leaving the city. I’m going to go to the forest in the distance, maybe there will be coolness and water there.”

“I’ve reached the forest. It’s burned and scorched. I can see where the river used to run, but now it’s a empty trough. The leaves have almost all fallen off the trees and covered the ground in a thick brown dust. I’m too weak to go back. I have to keep looking for water.”

“There is no water. I can’t walk any further. I can feel something coming for me. I don’t know what it is, and it terrifies me, but I think I’m going to like it. It seems like it wants to give me a rest. I’m going call it death because the word sounds terrifying and relaxing.”

“It’s coming and I can’t stop it. Maybe I don’t want to relax. Maybe I don’t want to meet death. It’s coming anyways though. I want to stop it from coming!”

Liunwy gently closed the book and laid it back down next to the girl. Liunwy tearlessly wept and wordlessly backed away from the girl, from the forest, and from the Earth. She backed away far far into the sky and pulled all of her light into herself and curled up, miserable.

Slowly someone else’s power crept over the Earth, slow and cool and thick. A storm bloomed over the Earth. Rivers flowed again, the dust turned to mud, the ash washed away, and the Earth sighed with a new breath of life. Even a tired girl took in a fresh, cool breath.

Liunwy felt a hand on her shoulder and turned to see a new face, gently gazing with a small smile. He too was beautiful and good, but unlike her, he was not filled inside with brightness and energy and zeal. He was filled with thought and depth and imagination.

“You are Light. You are beauty, you are joy, and you are good. I am Dark. I am beauty, I am passion, and I am good. You are Liunwy, and I am Desatel.”

Liunwy curled back into herself. “I am not good.”

“We are both good, but too much of one of us will destroy everything that we love. I too can and will destroy Earth even as I restored it. The earth will freeze and turn hard as stone, and it will not have simple joys and brightness to turn to.”

He reached out to her “There should never be light without dark, nor dark without light.”

She took his hand, he pulled her up, and they walked towards Earth together.