Our new digital single «...When the Stars Went Out» serves as a prequel to our forthcoming album «Elements: Earth». It will be the second album in a series dedicated to alchemical elements. The first album «Elements: Air», was released in 2021 on the label Clostridium Records.

..When the stars went out, they sat in silence and gazed at the planets their father had often told them about. Three tiny figures stood motionless on the surface of a thought-driven asteroid, almost entirely covered with blue space moss. An invisible solar wind stirred their hair antennae without any sound. They had come from far away. This distant place was called the Maat Lander galaxy. Even this remote cosmic area started to receive disturbing signals that many stars were beginning to dim and then get quenched. Even the light that could go on for hundreds more years after a star had died began to disappear.

‘I didn't think it would befall us,’ Brother Sun said. ‘We should have endeavoured harder to find our father. If he had been with us, none of this would have happened!’ — Brother Moon exclaimed. Brother Earth was silent. (It is worth noting that, in the void of space, the brothers communicated telepathically.)

‘What is the nature of the force that can extinguish stars like that? — Brother Sun continued. — Who or what could so easily grab their power and light?’

‘I remember our father’s stories about an old collector of starlight from the solar system,’ Brother Moon uttered. ‘We all remember the story, but I wouldn't believe an old man could preform something like this! And we haven't even found shards of the planet he was supposed to live on,’ replied Brother Sun. ‘I remember when our father and I were draining the power from a very distant dying star, it was a long and sophisticated process,’ said Brother Moon. Brother Earth remained pointedly silent, in a telepathic way.

Suddenly the invisible solar wind died away, and something elusive, impetuous, and blacker than the cosmic void loomed up from the direction of Mars and greedily stretched its tentacles toward the shaggy Sun. ‘Look! — Brother Earth finally spoke up. — The sun is beginning to fade! If it goes out, the planet where our father was born will die!’

Setting the value of their asteroid’s protective force field to maximum, the three sons of Maat Lander bravely steered their tiny controlled planetoid toward the incomprehensible substance that was draining the power from the Sun...

To be continued.

© Ilya Lipkin, January 2022