Z.

The Moon was an ancient relic.  For all of time, it floated in the well of gravity around its nearby neighbor of blue and white--a colorful contrast to its own raiment of grey and brown. Cold. Distant. Still.  A silence far deeper and eternal than whether or not an unobserved tree makes a sound when falling. From the perspective of its nearby blue and white sister, the Moon rotated around her with apathy, but not without influence. That influence asserted itself subtly, almost passively, on the dark waters of the world beneath it. Even the earth itself would be pulled and stretched, undulating imperceptibly toward her as the Moon wandered across the sky impossibly out of reach.  As steady as the sun itself, she raised and flattened our tides. Her orbit guided the fertility cycles of countless generations of mothers and sisters and daughters. Her stoic glow peeked back at us from behind veils of waxing or waning shadow month after month, year after year, century after cent...