Location: ‘the Old Rise, buro’ Solar City, SUN COUNTRY
Time: 8am

As soon as I woke up, I looked straight ahead at my calendar. It was the day to harvest the lettuce and carrots! I hardly wanted to wait to get outside and start garnering plants that could be used for fabulous food recipes!

I got up from my bed and played hopscotch trying to jump over all the dirty clothes and open notebooks on my floor. I opened the door to my closet and went to the back wall and opened the door that was at the back of it.

It led to my sister’s room, which she wasn’t in at the moment. She must already be outside, I thought and quickly closed the door. Me and my younger sister Sunny may not have shared a room, but we did share a walk-in closet with a door at each end that led to our rooms. Since she wasn’t there, I didn’t think she’d mind if I borrowed that cute light pink shirt with the birds and flowers on it.

I put on some blue shorts and flip-flops to go with it, and put some of my hair up with a thick white hairband and headed downstairs.

My father was cooking pancakes. “Hey Dad, where’s Mom and Sunny?'' I asked pretty quickly.

“Ah, it’s only them you wanna see, not me.” he said jokingly.

I laughed. “You know that’s not what I mean. It’s good to see you. But I’m wondering if they started harvesting without me.” Dad didn’t care much for harvest season (or Fall, if you will), but he still supported us through and through while the rest of the family reaped the fields of this year’s jewels.

“Well your mom went to go start harvesting early, but I don’t know where Sunny went. I thought she was upstairs sleeping like you.” he told me.

“Hmm.” I said, thinking of where she could’ve ran off to. “Well, I’ll be joining mom in the fields, so I’ll see you later.” I told Dad.

“Of course my young gardener and chef. Happy birthday, and save a raw tomato for me!” Dad yelled after me. My father and I loved eating tomatoes raw, and I would gladly save him one. If I didn’t eat all of them first! Just kidding!

My town was full of early birds, so I wasn’t the only one awake at this time. I saw a jogger, a friend of mine brushing her horse in his stable, and two staff from the Celestial hair salon talking it up while opening up the shop. Though I lived in Solar city, basically the big apple of my entire country, it had a little historic district, an old buro off to the side called ‘the Old Rise, which was famous for its ancient buildings and old artifacts and statues that were said to stand at the time when the three gods walked the earth.

I just knew this place as home, known for having few to no cars on it’s streets, (they were replaced by horses,) open fields full of plants, and...not the friendliest of people.

I walked across the street and hopped over old man Gbeho’s fence.

“Hey! Watch it little girl!” he yelled at me.

Did he forget it was my birthday?! As of today, I was not a little girl anymore. I was eighteen and had a right to be called ‘young lady’, or ‘miss’.

I know I shouldn’t hop his fence, but past his yard is the easiest way to get to the Harvesting Fields, which were calling my name.

The Harvesting Fields were on the side opposite of the coast and more close to The Plains, the long grassy flatland home to the humongous Mount Malvada and stretched all the way out to Moon country. Out in these fields I felt free, and I loved running too. Before I got to the herbs and foods, I ran through the fields like a wild woman, imagining I was a horse free to do as I pleased. I passed bees and beetles and all sorts of bugs on my sprint.

“Hey, slow down!” an angry bee buzzed me. I tried to look back at her to see who said it, but, wouldn’t you know it, I tripped over a tree root. I fell face first into the dirt. I slowly and painfully got up to turn to see the root that had one lump of it in the air looking like it was born to trip me.

I heard laughing in the distance. I looked on to see my mother laughing at me, her long black braids, flowing in the wind.

I walked over to her, quiet and embarrassed.

“I heard that bee warn you, you should have slowed down.” she giggled.

A noisy fat bee flew right by me and landed on my head. “Told’ja” she buzzed. I could feel her tiny feet tickling my scalp. I shook my head and she flew off somewhere, probably to pollinate the last of the flowers. This is the final time of the season we’ll be seeing bees. I was actually surprised to see a few here, with Cold season so close and the ocean just around the corner at the more modern part of town.

My mother had a basket beside her and was busy pulling carrots out of the ground. I joined her, eager to harvest these delicious looking carrots.

“You’re harvesting these carrots quite quickly. Got somewhere to be like your sister?” Mom asked me.

“No. I just have an awesome plan for some of these carrots. A three layer carrot cake! It’ll have nutmeg and vanilla and, well, lots and lots of carrots!” I told my mother.

She beamed. “Your baking really is amazing, I wish the other side of the continent would come over here and try some, and then you’d really be a world-wide phenomenon.”

I looked up at my mother. “Why does Sun country even fight Moon country anyway, when we could live peacefully?”

My Mom sighed. “Because our country has had problems with the other country since forever, all the way since Eclipse was alive.”

Eclipse. I heard that name all the time, but I didn’t remember why he was so important to the people of Zemlya. What did he do again? Something for the earth. I decided to ask mom about him.

“What does that guy do again?”

“Eclipse?” Mom looked at me like everyone knew about him. “Oh, he was only the FIRST person on earth. You don’t remember hearing about this in school? The creation of people, the asteroid that banished him forever?”

I looked at my mother as if she was crazy.

“Oh fine, let me explain.” said Mom. She may have sounded annoyed when she said it, but the smile on her face told me another story. My mother was like my sister. She loved to tell stories.

“A gazillion years ago, there was a boy named Eclipse who just spawned into existence.”

“A gazillion years ago?” I asked Mom, highly skeptical.

She backtracted. “Okay, more like two-thousand and twenty-one years ago, there was a boy named Eclipse who spawned into existence in the land of Zemlya.”

“He just spawned? He didn’t come from another planet or something?”

“Yes, he just spawned! Some people say he was an evolved dinosaur or something while others say he had parents who died when he was a baby. But no one knows for sure so please stop interrupting the story!” my mother yelled at me. She cleared her throat, then continued.

“Eclipse was the very first person on earth, and knew nothing, but the sun and moon took care of him. The sun made the crops grow so he could eat, while the moon kept gravity in check so he wouldn’t float into space. Back then the sun and moon had a rotation, so for twelve hours the sun would be high in the sky and for another twelve hours the moon watched the world. Eclipse chose to work and play in the day time and rest and sleep at night. But as Eclipse grew older, he soon felt lonely. He had no one to play with, no one to talk to, so you know what he did?”

Mom left a space in her talking for me to ask ‘What?’ so of course I asked.

“He wished to the sun and moon for siblings, and soon two seeds fell from the sky. He planted one, then left to go get some water from the river to water the plant. But when he came back, the plant had already grown up and became a human boy. He named his new brother Ra, Ra of the sun. He and Ra played all day. Eclipse found out that Ra had powers, like the ability to grow crops much faster than him, and they both shared the ability to be able to stare at the sun without blinding themselves. As the night came, Eclipse remembered the other seed and planted it out in the moonlight. The next day, the plant had grown up and became a girl, who Eclipse and Ra decided to call Mawu. Mawu had the strange ability to defy gravity, and even control it. But out of the three siblings, Eclipse had the most power.

Eclipse soon found out that the sun and moon had given him the power to create humans, and control the weather. Ra and Mawu fondly looked up to him, since he knew so much about the world and Zemlya, having been there a few years longer than them. But soon, Eclipse took advantage of his power, bullying the humans and messing up the weather.

One day, when Eclipse didn’t get his way, he broke the sun and moon’s daily cycle and separated them to different sides of Zemlya. The moon stayed north near the cold forest and the sun went south near the coast. Ra hated the night and Mawu couldn’t stand the sun, so they stayed away from each other, on the opposite sides of Zemlya.

They begged Eclipse to change the world back, but he only laughed and told them he never would. Then he yelled at them for how weak they were when Ra and Mawu tried to fix the world back themselves.

Their brother’s recklessness had made something dawn on them, that their brother Eclipse was more bad than good for the world, and they knew they had to get rid of him somehow. So one day, they both said they had a surprise for him at the tippy-top of Malvada mountain.

Eclipse praised them for working together on something after all that time staying on the opposite sides of the Zemlya from each other, and was happy to go to the top of the mountain for a picnic with them. Mawu lifted her older brother off the ground using her anti-gravity properties, then once he was at the top, she called out to the moon for an asteroid to land on him. Before her brother could figure out what was going on, he was crushed by an asteroid the size of a house. That’s why Mount Malvada looks so broken today.”

I looked over to the mountain over 100, miles away, just sitting there looking like a huge chunk of it missing. My mother continued her story.

“Mawu and Ra found that their brother was right. They were much too weak to fix the day cycle. The most they were able to do was make the moon follow Mal and the Sun follow raw so wherever the two Gods moved, the celestial body assigned to them would move along with them. This couldn't last forever as even Gods can't live forever. So before each of them died, they distributed their power to move the Sun and Moon to the people in their countries. HOWEVER, two lucky people from both the Moon and Sun tribes were gifted Ra and Mawu’s most special powers, the ability to defy gravity and grow crops faster. It is believed that the royal family and moon country is who Mawu gave her powers to, so that's why they are in power. It is unknown in Sun Country who Ross gave his powers to, and that's why our people live in Anarchy, free to choose what we want to do.

To this day Zemlya is split into two parts, two peoples, and that's why we can live in a land of everlasting sun, and the moon people can live in such freezing, dark conditions.”

I let all this information weigh on me, explaining everything except for what I asked.

“That explains our way of life, but why is the Sun country and Moon country at war!?”

TO BE CONTINUED