God Dreams: Sun and Moon

Note: This is based off one line from the song "Sun and Moon", which was stuck in my head for days.

It is for all of us, as we step forward into the darkness.

There was once a boy who lived in a castle. Hs skin was as pale as fresh winter snow and his hair glowed, even in the dim firelight of his windowless castle.

Endlessly he walked, wandering from hallway to hallway in his magnificent castle. He could not remember beginning his journey, nor could he foresee its end because so large was his castle that he had never crossed the same room twice. The rooms were all unique - opulently decorated in all shades of reds, purples, blues, and greens, furnished magnificently with oversized armchairs and four-poster beds. But to him they were all the same, they were all empty.

In all his wandering he had never met another soul.

Wherever his wandering had worn him out, so that the soles of his feet throbbed and his eyes grew heavy, he would settle in one of the rooms and dream. He would dream of walking one day into a room and finding another person in it - a little boy just like him, with pale skin and pale hair, or any other kind of person in any other color. And then his journey would not be so tiresome, because he would not be alone.

But after every dream he awoke to the same empty room, as alone as he had ever been. And so he continued wandering, and dreaming, and wandering, and dreaming, as if no time was passing in between. His skin remained pale as fresh winter snow and his hair glowed, untouched by joy or sorrow. Only his dreams could reach him in his windowless castle, and he dreamed on.

On a day that came as inconspicuously as all the others, he came upon a corridor where the firelight had died out. The path loomed before him radiating a coldness he had never known, and he was afraid. Through many nights of dreaming he stayed at the firelight's edge, oscillating between moving forward or going back.

If he were to turn away from the darkness, there would be nothing but the emptiness of the rooms he had already gone through. If he went back, his dreams would never come true. But if he moved forward there was no guarantee that the darkness led to light, and even if it did there was no guarantee that there was anything else beyond but more empty rooms.

But it was the unknown that propelled him forward, the uncertainty that weighed on him just a fraction less than the certainty that nothing lay behind him. And so his true journey began.

He walked into the unfathomable darkness no longer wandering, but searching with everything that he had for a sign that there might be light up ahead, that relief from this terrible, bitter, cold awaited. But there was no such sign, no end in sight.

The glow of his hair was dim without the firelight, but it lit a few steps ahead. And how he held on to those steps, taking each with care, finding relief that with each step another was revealed. His greatest fear now had nothing to do with dreams, but that the faint glow that lit his way might someday die out.

But it endured as he did, through a lifetime of searching, until one day it struck upon something unknown. It glimmered only faintly, reflecting the boy's lightness back onto him. But how his heart leapt at the sight. As he walked on the stones took on more and more of his light so that from the pale flow of his hair he was soon walking down an iridescent hallway of mirror-like corners and shimmering walls.

At the end of this splendid path was a room that was unlike any that the boy had ever been in. it had no corners, only smooth walls that reflected his image back to him - without beginning and without end. He moved into the center of the room in awe, because a light hung there that was indescribable. It was so unlike the flickering firelight that he remembered guiding his way. Somehow it was paler, somehow more like him.

But as he stepped into its glow he realized it was not like him, as its soft warmth radiated onto his skin he knew it was much more. The light melted the hard chill that the darkness had knitted into his bones, and sent warm blood rushing into the chambers of his racing heart. How could he have ever had any dream but this? How could he have lived so long without this light?

"What are you? his voice rose into the air, dissolving into the illumination that surrounded him. "Why am I here?"

A thundering laugh resounded. It struck both fear and joy into his heart. He repeated his questions.

The voice, filled with the same warmth that now ran through his veins, replied. "I am sunlight, and you are moon."

Eyes that he did not realize were shut sprang open on their own accord and he gazed at his reflection - in the arms of this sunlight he was radiant, glowing brighter than he ever knew he could. And he understood "You are sunlight, and I moon."

As he said these words the meaning of them sank into him. And his wandering, the cold, the dark, the loneliness, all made sense. And he was ready. This realization sent an immense joy bubbling up from within him so that he sang "You are sunlight, and I moon."

His song shattered the walls around him like glass,  plunging him into a darkness infinitely more vast and unfathomable than the dark corridor that had been his prison.

But he was not afraid.

The warmth of the sun radiated onto him and his glow sent rays shining down on the pale blue orb in front of him. There were people there, he knew, more people than he could imagine - but they were not like him. They did not have pale hair that could light the few steps in front of them when they were in the darkness.

He could not show them the way, he was not the sun. But with his pale light he poured onto them all the hope that he had, so that they may find as he did, that there was always another step along the way.

So there he danced, in his part of the vast darkness, singing "You are sunlight, and I moon."

And he was never alone.