Why does the sun go on shining?

By Sylvia Thorne

“Why does the sun go on shining?

Why does the sea rush to shore?

Don’t they know it’s the end of the world?”

In a vast space, a wild mix of bold blues, blacks, purples, and whites, once upon a time, a star was born.

In this boundless and undeniably breathtaking space, stars were the guardians. They guarded individual planetary systems, organized meticulously to construct galaxies, which built the framework of Space.

This bright star carried the name “Sun”, and upon birth, she was assigned a planetary system to guard, named after her, forever to be called “The Solar System”. She would go on to guard this system for long, until her exhaustion got the best of her and she combusted in one final spark before collapsing.

As she proudly guarded the Solar System, fulfilling her duty, planets slowly began moving in. First came a couple, a large planet named Jupiter and his lovely wife, Saturn, adorned with breathtakingly brilliant rings. After them, two friends later moved in, going by the names Uranus and Neptune. She was quick to forge friendships with all of them, determined to stay close to her wards.

She found success in every attempted relationship, finding each resident charmingly amiable. That was, until one peculiar planet moved in.

After a quick introduction as “Earth” he didn’t bother with much further conversation, preferring to spend his time in solitude. But that wasn’t what made him stand out to her. Rather, it was the coat he wore. She’d never before met a planet so distrustful in their guardian’s protection, they’d felt the need to wear an extra layer of protection in the form of a coat. She found it insulting, his lack of trust in her guardianship abilities.

She would find out later on, this was far away from the truth. The coat he wore, which he so fashionably called “Ozone”, served to protect his skin, which was sensitive to the exposure of starlight, a rarely occurring phenomenon in planets.

As time passed, weird tiny spots began appearing on Earth’s body. Rashes, she thought at first, before closer examining the moving dots. In the beginning, they only appeared on the luminous blue patches of his skin, moving around slowly. Soon, more blotches appeared, residing on the green of his skin, yet remaining stationary. Afterward, more wickedly complex ones sprung up. Earth joked around, giving them all different names. The latest ones, he labeled “humans”.

These “humans” were quite interesting, Sun thought, as she made a regular habit of surveying them. She was plagued by her ever-growing curiosity once she watched humans do something very peculiar. They began marking time, creating these complex systems and methods to count and organize it, almost as if controlling it. Sun found this ridiculously entertaining, considering it was objectively pointless. Time was infinite, with no specified start or end to it. Yet, here they were, these weird “humans”, attempting to bend it to their will. They did that often, attempting to control everything, even things that weren’t theirs to control.

Endlessly curious and very entertained, she observed them daily, as they progressed and advanced. She watched them write, speak, create fire, grow plants, hunt animals…..

Watched them rise and fall, love and fight, grow up, and, inevitably, break down. She observed as they built countries and empires, fought one another until their spears were broken, blades dull, and hands bleeding. “War”, they named it. Such a simple name for something so tragic.

It wasn’t all tragic, as they discovered many beguiling things. They were constantly curious, always looking for new inventions or laws and rules to control how their world worked. Yet, every new, glorious invention had a tragic consequence they were entirely unaware of. They had ripped and torn Earth’s coat in places, stealing away bits and pieces of his protection and leaving him exposed to starlight. In the places they had ungracefully cleaved it, weird, untreatable rashes began forming.

But they didn’t seem to notice.

While Earth’s health was plummeting rapidly, they built complex machines, mechanisms, and appliances, all designed to do their tasks instead of them. Eventually, these “genius” contraptions designed to simplify their everyday life turned into a much deeper evil. Eventually, the machines started thinking for them. As the world plunged into further conflict and existence became more political, Earth fell increasingly ill. The bright greens and blues that used to cover his entire body now were replaced by dull, dreary, and bleak grays.

He was slowly decaying.

It was then that Sun realised nobody would help him. She needed to step up and intervene. She had to take down the humans.

Instead of watching the humans for entertainment, she would start meticulously observing and analysing them, carefully constructing a path leading to their inevitable ruin. This plan, however, was short-lived, as during her observations, she noticed something devastatingly terrible, yet terribly convenient for her. The humans were already killing each other.

Not with swords and spears like they used to, but with hate, oppression, discrimination, propaganda, spite, segregation, dehumanization, brainwashing, misinformation…

How had they allowed these horrible things to affect them? By unknowingly letting the very machines and systems they had constructed and controlled take control of them. Her interference wasn’t needed, it hit her then. They would die out soon enough.

The realisation would’ve cheered her up, had Earth not been deteriorating more day by day, barely holding his final grip on life. He looked horribly pale, as if part of him was already gone. She was too late. The other planets couldn’t do anything aside from watch as Earth slowly decayed more and more, looking increasingly gaunt with every day that passed by. Until one day, the last tiny fragments of him were gone.

Only his lifeless body was left.

As she mourned the death of one of her oldest friends, she noticed something horrifyingly tragic. The humans remained. They hadn’t died out with Earth. They stayed exactly the same, slowly killing each other without even realizing it. For them, nothing had changed. Their lives remained the same, only now, they lived them on Earth’s corpse.

And they didn’t even notice.

Her heart shattered into a million tiny shards watching them, the grief so overwhelmingly painful, unlike anything she’d ever known.

Despite the crushing ache, she knew what she had to do.

She had to keep fulfilling her duty. She had to keep shining.

Sylvia is a 14-year-old who recently discovered her passion and love for writing. She should've seen it coming from a mile away, considering she has always been phenomenal at writing essays, and has averaged around 50 books read per year in the last 3 years, most of them in English, despite it being her second language.

She is currently a journalist for her school's newspaper and writing as much as possible at home, trying to build her portfolio and improve her writing. "Practice makes perfect", they said. She dreams a far-fetched dream of writing a novel one day.