Stargazing With Luna, Your Lover

>You lie on the cold lush landslip between reeds and water, the cool spray of a tumbling brook kissing rocks shining your shoes with pleasant murmurs.
>Beside you rests Princess Luna, your first, last, and only friend between here and Earth. She embodies stardom and exhibits constellations for you, a personal planetarium, too keen on impressing you by your reckoning, but the foibles of estranged nobility seem distant when she's so sweet on you.
>To think that someone who holds sway over this cosmos deigns you fit for their bedside. You shiver despite her warmth. The stars shift with azure legs running across your chest, holding you dear. Luna corrects them.
>"Be cold not, betrothed. What I speak of isn't foremost in my mind, but instead your utmost comfort. Feel not fear to interrupt me."
>You run a hand from shoulder to cannon, marveling at ethereal fur thick enough to guide between fingers. The ghostliness of it breathes in you deep and births a pounding smile in your heart. You grasp and pull her close.
"I shiver not from chill, but awe, Luna. You still seem as a dream to me—take ease. I feel the tension."
>You massage her cannon, swimming through verdant fetlock tuft to thumb at her frog and sole.
"I still feel ungrounded. It's silly, but I do."
>Luna, quiet, swings her foreleg down and cranes across you, head tucked and ear close at heart, "Find your ground with me. Tell me of your old nights, that mine be all the more made for you."
"I love your nights as they are, Luna, and I would like them to remain as such. But..."
>You pull your arm back from her hoof and find her neck, tracing her name with feather-touch.
"To compare might help. Where I lived there was never night. An amber glow reflecting off factory belching made even the deepest hour traversable. My day demarcated solely by the clock on fetters I carried in my coat's pocket, not even the moon graced me with her presence."


>You find a knot and work circles through it. Luna snorts, adding a skip to your beat. Small things about her bring you the greatest joy.
"But, in my childhood, too far and with too much snow for hogsheads to be built, the expanse opened for me every clear night. And such a sight it was. I never tired seeing that beautiful darkness where the wonderment of mankind twinkled and died."
>"Died? Speak not with such warmth of death. It's too troubling."
>Your hand retreats into her mane, cupping reflected clusters and watching them splash with every gesture.
"Space has an infinite beauty to it, Luna. An infinitude man was never made to reach. May I tell you of the paradox?"
>"You may."
"From here, do we not see your grandeur at the height of its magnitudes? We seem so near as to pluck from your canvas as we see fit, yet only the distance lets us appreciate it. The insurmountable space between two seems so thin that we could scarcely slip paper between them."
"We did not understand that some beauty may never be touched. It disappears when chased. Innumerable souls sought that voyaging the stars, and yet only disillusionment awaited us. Space, Luna, was a lie."
>She curls around you, honey on a comb, "Your truth is all I wish to be."
>You smile, hand never leaving her, finding the spot between her ears that causes them to flick when scratched and delight in the mellow hum your touch is greeted with.
"Please, allow me to finish. When one reaches 'out there' for something to hold, there is nothing. An incomprehensible length between 'here' and 'there,' both left and right, makes you frightfully alone. When mankind chased the stars, he left delight for desolation. Curiosity killed him. What did he find? Rocks. Dullness. Specks and smudge and Monet. There is nothing up there for man. Not even our Moon, not anymore."
>"Tell me of Mankind's moon."
"We killed her."
>She brings her barrel against you, the shudder worming through her throat cut off at the head.


"Her beauty, we admired since we first walked. Every dappled mountain, every freckled sea. We held her in such high regard that we would keep by her time, observe the wisdom in her movements to glean truths about our nature, that we gave her a name. Luna."
>"Yes?"
>A deep chuckle springs forth, booming over the river's idle chatter.
"Her name was Luna. Luna inspired us so that we consider it the tipping point when we sent a few of our own in a foil-thin rocket out to touch her and succeeded. That was when we killed her."
>"Why? How? You wouldn't...?"
>Her head tilts up to look into your eyes. They shimmer with fire and love. A stroke of the cheek comforts her, but she doesn't turn away.
"Never. But when we went up there, we were robbed of her beauty. Luna was never like our home. Despite all of the guidance we took from her, she could never hold us close. As the sun shone upon her, she would render us into fat. And turned away from the sun, freeze us. She had no air, no fields, no river-valleys or much of anything at all beyond a bone-dry hell. So we worked out her price per pound and consumed her whole to fuel our next folly of love, kissing the stars. That dream died, too, within my time there."
>Your lips meets her snout, touching base before reclining again to gaze overhead. The blush and silence fulfill you.
"But I never gave up on it."
>"... It's not fair."
>Luna rolls atop you, engulfing your vision with your love's deep blush and wet eyes, "Try as I might to tell you what worlds I would do without to have you by my side, you manage to make me feel a filly without effort. You're not fair."
"Not only am I not fair, but selfish, too. I've stolen Luna for myself."
>"You...!"
>She silences your laughter with a loving lashing of lips and tongue, sinking deeper, pulling harder, making the cold lush landslip between reeds and water a bed.