Chapter Text
“The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched - they must be felt with the heart.”
~
Whenever your parents brought up your birth, you could never avoid hearing about the sun. They were completely obsessed with the fact that you, a child born on a planet that worshipped the sun, were born at the time of a solstice. Your whole being was hinged on that one fact—the rest of your colony praised you as their medium to connect with the sun.
It sucked, but you didn't have a choice to say no at such a young age.
“Father,” you asked one night at the dinner table, “what do we see in the sun?”
Your father gave you a look. A warning, one that only heightened your curiosity. “We see everything,” he answered, slowly. “Nothing can't be found in the sun. It gives us the ability to live, which stems into the ability to do everything we take for granted. Without it, we'd be stuck in darkness.”
You didn't feel satisfied with his response. “But there are so many other things out there. I heard it in a story—”
“Don't.” The sharpness of your father's words made you flinch. “Those stories you've seen from who knows where, I recommend you discard them from your memory. They'll do nothing but hurt your future on our planet.”
Your mother nodded hurriedly. “Yes. Please, darling, your safety is our top priority. Those thoughts are ones that’ll ruin you more than you can possibly think of at your age.”
“...Okay.” You didn’t quite believe them, but it was all you could do to not reach for that spark of hope. If you did, you knew the bad things that your parents warned you about would come to fruition.
The topic never appeared in a conversation again.
You grew up under the watchful eye of the church and everyone around you, in case you wielded some great knowledge or gift from the Sun. It was agonising for you, who never got to experience the love like that of one person towards another for being themself. Nobody genuinely cared about you —all they cared about was the Sun, and they could do that through you.
In the end, that superficial love didn’t even last more than ten years. You were left to be just another pebble in the pond, never to make an impact and just live the life paved out for you. It didn’t take long to accept that, although begrudgingly.
Soon arrived your twenty-third birthday—yes, quite the time skip—and your life was fine. The whole ‘solstice child’ thing was disappearing slowly each day, but you were okay enough with how everything had played out. You pushed your daydreaming to the side to join the church as expected of literally everyone even though you surely didn’t matter anymore, all while making sure your parents had a child they could be proud of. Having such a mundane life drew your attention away from the bigger picture that you’d been so enthralled about, and your curiosity about the Sun slowly faded until it had almost completely disappeared from your mind—
—Until today. The day when the sun turned on you, on everyone, and set your planet ablaze.