An Eternal Moonlight Snow

A short excerpt from a character study.

I would love it here if it wasn't the last safe place in the world.

Mom says it is, though. There's nowhere else we can go. Any other place, any city, any town, any village and we'd be found right away. I don't know what would happen to Mom but they'd kill me for sure, and neither of us wants that, so here we stay, in the Greatwood. Hiding. Trapped.

Which isn't to say it's an unpleasant life. Lonely, very lonely, and sometimes it's so quiet I just want to start chopping trees down so they'll crash... but it's nice.
It's dark, here. I like that. Sunny places hurt my eyes. Mom says there's no reason I should be so light-sensitive, my father's people aren't and neither is she, but there's never been anything like me before. There are bound to be some surprises.
But yeah. It's dark here. Not night-dark, in fact it never gets completely black either, but dim and softly lit by the forever-falling leaves of the Moonsnow Trees. See, the entire Greatwood is made up Moonsnows, which are hundreds of feet tall and as big around as a house, and the branches (which don't start until like ninety feet up) are woven so thick that almost no sunlight comes through. There's no grass, just a soft, firm moss, and the branches of the trees are very thick so they almost never break. The whole forest is very uncluttered.
Here's the neat part. The leaves of the trees are always falling off, constantly, in this very slow, silent way, and as they fall, they glow. For some reason they react with the air as soon as they fall off the branch, lighting up in greens and purples, and gently burn out, so that around ten feet up, they're more or less gone. They never reach the ground. There's hardly ever any breeze here, so they drift steadily straight down.
It's all very technical I suppose, so let me put it a different way: It looks like it's snowing moonlight, forever. When I first came here, I would just sit outside and look up for hours.
I'll be the first to admit, the novelty wears off pretty quickly. And with my eyes, I have to completely cover the window in my room in order to sleep. Even the tiniest mote of light is very distracting. But it's nice to watch sometimes. It's very peaceful.

I can almost believe the world's a beautiful place.

Our home is a simple wooden shack, set into the hollow between the roots of a particularly huge Moonsnow, up against the trunk, which we use for a back wall. The remnants of an old airship make up another wall, which is kind of neat. Sometimes I sit in the cockpit and pretend to be flying.

(Mom can fly, which is kind of unfair. She doesn't do it often, something about flight being difficult in still air, and not wanting to get her wings covered in ash and leaves, and not wanting to slam into a tree and fall and break her neck, and so on, but that all sounds pretty stupid to a person with no wings, right?
If I could fly, you can bet I'd be up in the air all day, every day.)

But yeah, we have most of an old airship and all the gadgetry that came with it, which is handy. You can't exactly grow a garden without sunlight, so the replicator comes in handy, and we converted the drive Sparc to produce a little extra energy for our lights and radio. I'm not allowed to use the Infonet because supposedly nobody else lives in the Greatwood and if somebody noticed our signal it could make them curious and then next thing you know, Grandpa and his people are here and I'm dead.

Everything seems to boil down to, "Don't do THAT, Seb, or blah blah blah you're dead." It gets old. I don't understand how somebody can be so keyed up all the time.

It's lonely here. I said that before but I really need to get the point across, I think. You can't know what lonely is until you've only seen your mother and trees for three years. Still, we have each other, and some people don't even have that. Mom says I need a male role-model or I'm bound to end up 'peculiar', as she puts it, but who the heck does she have in mind? Dad's dead and Grandpa wants to kill me, so they're both out of course. And I don't know any other male people.

There isn't much to do, here. Most days I mope around and listen to the radio. People have largely given up on it in the last few years, Mom says, since a Human arrived here jabbering about something called an Internet and the next thing you know we've got one. Mom says anything the radio could do, the Infonet can do a hundred times better. I say that's a mean thing to tell someone who's not allowed to use the Infonet.
So the radio is a lot of music and political talk shows, which never amuse me for very long. Music gets annoying as soon as I recognize the wave patterns, and I hear so much better than most people that the underlying static makes it hard to figure out what the actual song sounds like. And politics on Fallen is mostly people arguing about procedural stuff like whether or not we ought to try and go to the Dusk Sister, or how best to welcome new people to the planet.
And then of course there's the religious programming, which Mom doesn't like hearing. Occasionally Grandpa will be on the radio, so I know what his voice sounds like, but I've never actually seen him. Mom says he looks kind of like me. And some Human called Jake Busey. She usually laughs at that, though, so I'm not sure if it's serious. I've never seen Jake Busey either.
But yeah, it can be pretty boring here. Sometimes I go wandering in the woods, although Mom hates it when I go too far from the house. The way I see it, if they find anything it's probably gonna be the house, so the farther away from it I am, the safer I am. But you try explaining something like that to a mom and see where it gets you. And trust me on this, there is absolutely nothing special, or dangerous, in these woods. There aren't even any bugs.

I suppose, when I think about it, that we'll probably live her forever. A long time, anyway. Maybe we can leave when Grandpa dies, although I'm not gonna suggest that to Mom. She gets all emotional when he comes up. I guess I understand.

I'd like to see more of the world, some day. I wish there was some way I could go out and still be safe. Blend in with people, you know? Look like everyone else.

Someday I'll leave here. Someday I'll see the world and they'll see me. I'll make friends and go on adventures like in the books. And I'm not quite like anyone else. Someone will probably write a story about me!

Someday I'll be free.

Reviews

[Naomi Montana Walsh]

I like this is felt like someone was writing a letter just to me describing a truly magical place , I would love those trees still it is a mystery to what is really going on and why the exile. I am the kind of person who can enjoy a story without knowing everything, but I am sure that some people want to know all the details

[Ness]

I really liked this, very innocent-sounding for him, heh. I like the title and the imagery, well done :)...and the Jake Busey reference made me giggle.

[UponATyme]

I love the concept of the Moonsnow trees. They sound beautiful. It was nice to get a little insight into Sebastian's head. At least now I know he wasn't always bent on chaos.