How glow-worms are born

thought you'd like a fairy-tale to read now and then. special thanks for the very, very talented lauand who let me use her story. *sparkles*

Once upon a time, the Moon realized that two of her raylights were missing. She wasn’t prone to leave her things forgotten – because she knew where dirty socks belonged, when trash day was and what the ashtrays were for – so she deduced that the two rays of moonlight had been stolen. Wishing them back, she asked two of her trusted knights to look for them and to retrieve them. Because amongst the thousands stars that served her, there was a force of knights who rode the moonbeams and fought her battles. There is war even in the peaceful skies above.

The fact is that the star-knights – whose names were Roku and Shichi – went to the place where the missing moonrays should have been. As everybody knows, moonbeams follow a straight line, so the empty space that they had left behind had to point exactly to the place on Earth where they had been abducted.

After conducting a thorough investigation – that I’ll omit because it’s not necessary to the flow of the story – Roku and Shichi found a cave. There, in a glass jar of pickles – emptied, of course – were the two missing moonlight rays; trapped, swirling in search of a escape. When the brave star-knights went to twist the lid open and free the moonrays, they heard a voice that begged them: ‘No, please! Don’t take them away!’

Shichi and Roku turned around and saw a little dwarf – little even for the dwarven standards, that is – who ran past them towards the jar to hug it tight with his chubby arms.

‘If you do,’ the dwarf explained, ‘my cave will be black again, and I’m so afraid of darkness!’

‘But they’re not yours to keep’ Shichi reasoned.

‘They long to be free and our mistress misses them very much’ Roku added.

The star-knights didn’t know what to do. The moonbeams belonged to their Lady, but the dwarf – who wasn’t more than a child, it was for that reason that he was so small – woke their compassion and they didn’t want to leave him alone in the dark. After much thinking and some telepathic discussing – because the stars can talk without words, speaking directly to each other’s minds – they decided to explain everything to the Moon so that she could act as a judge and find a solution to this predicament.

And so, the star-knights, the dwarven child and the moonlight rays went to see the Lady of the Nightly Skies, to whom they explained the situation. After reflecting very gravely on it, the Moon reached her verdict.

‘Stealing is wrong’ she said to the dwarf, ‘but living alone, surrounded by darkness isn’t right, either; so I’ve decided that you’ll give the moonrays back, but in exchange, I’ll grant light to the nightly bugs so that they chase the darkness away and you don’t have to be afraid in my kingdom anymore.’

And that way, the glow-worms were born, the dwarf and the rest of the earthly creatures enjoyed the beautiful light of these nice bugs in our dark nights and the Moon kept on reigning the nocturnal skies.

~Fin~