The Tenth Planet

THE

TENTH PLANET

Blooms of ice cover Persephone’s surface. Nurtured by the cold, tendrils of frost crawl along the ground, sending out shoots and branches, petals frozen in perfect asymmetry. These glittering crystals refract every color as light passes through their icy facets. The tenth planet is an undiscovered garden, radiant in isolation. Over centuries of solitude, she etches the history of the universe on the vast flat of the ocean. With geysers of heat under the surface, she carves the movement of the stars, the moment they explode, and the devouring black points in galaxies’ centers.

Her only companion, the moon, is attentive in its orbit. For hundreds of years they are each other’s only comfort as they traverse the black vacuum of space. They are enough for each other. Nothing and no one mars the perfection of the garden. The stars are blessedly distant.

As they roam the galaxy, a remote neighbor emerges from the night. He is a pinprick, barely a competitor for brighter stars, shrouded in the mystery of miles. Persephone ignores him, until he emerges, russet and ruddy, beckoning the tenth planet closer. As days spin past, Persephone creeps nearer, allured by curiosity. Closer and closer, the neighbor is no stray asteroid but a planet, her superior in size. Closer to him, she is also closer to Sol’s heat. Subliming petals crack and fragment. Climbing prickly stalagmites grow on Persephone’s surface, covering it with a guard of spikes.

One sunset, they are face to face. Persephone’s moon passes between them, trying to shield her, but too late. Assaulted by meteorites for centuries, his many eyes look on Persephone. Her garden is revealed, no longer a secret. Her countryside lays exposed to the stranger’s view. Chaos reigns on his surface: from mountain ranges of ice to oceans of gas. Icebergs drift across gaseous fumes.

He is Pluto, the ninth planet. And they are too close.

Pluto drags her by force until she is between him and the sun. His gravity locks them together. Compelled, a prisoner of his might, she orbits closer to Sol than she has ever been. His nearness creates a new heat in her. The garden she had cultivated in seclusion melts. If she cannot escape, the frozen ocean will evaporate and her record of the universe will be lost forever.

As she flees, he pursues her. Cruel Sol, with new intensity, pierces her sky during the day. At night, every night, the tenth planet and Pluto spend face to face. He traps her with his unwanted embrace.

For fifty years, the tenth planet struggles to escape, as her diary on the oceans slowly evaporates. Her surface is ravaged, the garden in ruins. With a last pull, she frees herself from her remorseless neighbor, and spins off into the night.

Nothing is left of the time before she met him. Persephone’s surface has been reduced to vapors and steam. Smog fills the air, obscuring the stars. After the last of her chronicle has dissolved, the ocean turns to gas, her diary—fumes. The surface is desolate and barren.

In the soundless void, the years pass. The ocean sinks and reforms: solid. The smog slowly settles in the growing cold. Something new emerges on the surface. The fumes take new shapes as they freeze. Gasses solidify where they are, branching out tall and intersecting. There are towering spires and mountains, like on Pluto. On the peaks bloom colorful refractions. Everything is different than before, broader and bigger. She does not recognize the grotesque disorder that her surface has become.

Centuries pass from the time of intersection. The single moon has become a poor companion. Its constant attention on the tenth planet is monotonous and predictable. The satellite is too small to be a real partner. They are not equals.

Now, the surface flourishes. The new growths are different and intriguing. The ice flowers have trebled in variety. The beauty of the past seems repetitious and flat compared to the unpredictability of the spires and profusion of blossoms. Without destroying the carefully cultivated gardens of old, nothing new could grow. Without Pluto’s interference the surface would be unchanging ice.

On the flat of the ocean, the tenth planet records a new history— of the relationships of the stars, their distances, their reflective followers, all the worlds and the lives intersecting and influencing each other. She feels alone for the first time in all of her existence.

Sol grows a little brighter.

Then Pluto emerges from his tangle of neighbors, and travels closer. The tenth planet hurries to meet her husband in the night.

Fiction The Tenth Planet About The Author

When Alexandra Faye Carcich is not writing she is studying history, weeding the garden, or walking her dog. In her spare time she teaches Argentine Tango to college students and art to homeschoolers. Her work has been featured in Timeless Tales, Enchanted Conversations, Zooscape, and Gingerbread House Lit Mag. You can read her poetry on Instagram: instagram.com/alexandracarcich

Fiction The Mysteries of Eleusis

Words by Leonora Lewis

About the story

I was watching a lecture from The Great Courses with my mother. The lecturer was talking about how the Greek Gods punished a king who thought to honor them by serving them his son at a feast. Only Demeter, distracted by the loss of her daughter, gnawed on a shoulder bone. I started thinking about the explosion that blew up the island of Thera in Minoan times and something clicked. I began to wonder if the story of Demeter refusing to let crops grow because of the loss of her daughter started out, not as a story about seasons, but a story of a terrible famine caused by the fallout from that tremendous eruption.

When I saw the call for submissions for Timeless Tales on the theme of Hades and Persephone that’s when I knew it was time to get busy on that story.