Luna
A short story about the moon spirit finding her name.
The moon spirit’s mission was to glide gently across the night sky awaiting mortal souls to guide to the afterlife. And she graciously obeyed the high gods’ will like a good little deity, hoping to earn a name.
In the beginning it was everyone. It wasn’t her burden to cast judgement.
But the passage of the undeserving eroded her spirit. Over millennia, mad man after mad man. Corrupted cores meeting her with a putrid entitlement. And as she gave them aid they laughed at her with the grin of a demon.
From afar the sun spirit Apollo challenged her. “How do you bury your conscience sister? How do you follow the high gods blindly, when helping these men make you weak? They mock your strength. The high gods have shackled your power, a slave to that silver chariot.”
Unwilling to hear the relentless cries of a cast out god, with or without a name, she eclipsed him and hid her mission in shadow. She tried to extinguish the unease, to be the good little deity she had always been. Except his light surrounded her, burning the back of her neck. A spark that couldn’t be ignored, a spark that hummed her to life.
So Luna the moon spirit, a guardian of women, the feminine divine was born.
With the gift of sight, Luna saw how truly undeserving the mortal men were. The demons enslaved her sisters, committing inconsolable evils upon them and their children. And she, a deity, was beneath them too. Another woman enslaved to a faux power, just as Apollo had warned. All for the promise of power from the high gods.
The moon spirit’s mission was to glide gently across the night sky awaiting mortal souls to guide to the afterlife. Though now she sways the tides with her will to protect her sisters on earth. Luna calls on the ocean’s creatures to meet their predators with a vengeance. The orcas oblige with glee. When her lunacy is full she casts her light to the women on earth, so that their power can be realised and names can be claimed.
And the unlucky demons she manages to catch no longer grin as she flings them across the sky for Apollo to feed his bloodlust.
Short story and artwork by Kelsey Cameron - @kelseyc_art