The Secret Moon Base

Quiet, we must stay quiet. Hidden amongst the clawing blades of ice and wrapped in a blanket of frozen dust like a graveyard of tiny broken teeth, they baffle the echoes of our movements but slowly grind our silent base into a brittle shell. We want to brush it aside, to sink to the depths of our ancient beautiful home and cry Go AWAY, but we must stay quiet, Quiet.

Once we swam to the edge of the sky and dug into the icy nothingness beyond, we dug until we found an empty sea of infinite dark. There we built towers of ice a place from which we could watch the beautiful lonely lights. We lit the brightest of our lamps to welcome them to our icy home but they were so intense and we were too small to see.

Then there came a light that moved and fell with a terrible roar, from its frosty pit hatched shiny bodies with cold metal eyes and round legs to crawl, they scuttled across the sky and burrowed into our icy home with stones of fire that sank into the salient sea and hatched a boil of poisonous burning silt in the beds of shells below. They hunted with burning lights so bright our cold dark home glowed and our insides glittered, then with metal fingers they crept and clawed rooting through the shells and bones below as if our graves were chests of trinkets to explore.

We were sure it was us they sought but with lights now dark our silent base was a refuge from the scratching below and the digging above. Then in time they became slower and dimmer until one by one their gnashing finally stopped. We looked upon them, nothing but boxes of baubles and tails, born from a metal tin sitting on the sky and crowned with a smooth shallow empty shell that pointed into the dark.

The poison waned, the graves settled and our home was again calm, quiet and dark. Never more will we shout into the dark and we hope never more will the lights seek us out, but if they do we will have our secret base in the sky our place within which we can hide.