Grounded Goddesses

Chapter One: Grounded

POV: Luna

                When I awoke the earth felt oddly still.  Quiet.  The sand beneath my back told me I was on some sort of beach.  I opened my eyes to an open, empty sky. Past the water which I guessed must be a lake was the first hint of light, or maybe the last.  I wasn’t sure if it was dawn or twilight.  The end of night or the end of day. 

                I also had no idea where I was. Or, I realized, who I was.  I looked around and found another girl a little way down the beach.  She had long, wild red hair and was wearing a simple white dress.  The same as the one I was wearing.  Maybe she knew what was going on. 

                I forced myself up and began to crawl towards her, feeling somewhat shaky on my arms and legs.  Maybe we had been in some sort of accident. 

                At the same time, the other girl looked up and noticed me.  She sat up quickly.

                “Who are you?” she asked in a commanding voice, but I could still hear the fear on the edges of it and see the worry in her amber eyes. 

                “I don’t know,” I responded honestly, quitting my slow progress, “who are you?”

                She glared at me, I wondered if I had done something to offend her.  Finally, she whispered, “I don’t know either.  I was hoping you would.”

                I shrugged apologetically then turned to look at our surroundings, hoping to find some other possible clue. 

                The other girl must have done the same and she found them first.

“Look!” she exclaimed pointing at a pair of nice-looking hiking backpacks leaned up against one of the trees surrounding the small beach. 

Had we been on a hike together?  I didn’t feel like I was strong enough for that, but maybe that had something to do with whatever happened to my memory. 

I finally managed to make it to my feet and joined the other girl at the backpacks.  She had begun looking through the light blue one, so I unzipped the navy one, starting with a smaller pocket in the hopes of finding a wallet, or some other form of identification.  I got lucky and immediately found a small silver wallet with a star on the snap clasp.  I opened it and dug a license out of the little windowed pocket that was too difficult to see through.

The girl in the picture had long platinum blonde hair and light blue-grey eyes.  I looked down to where a matching strand of platinum hair was hanging on my chest and realized this must be me.  Though oddly I felt no connection to the girl in the picture.  Or maybe that was normal for memory loss.

I then looked to the right.  Name: Luna Sky

“It says my name is Sola Sky,” the other girl, Sola, announced.  She was holding a gold wallet in the same design as mine and staring at her own license.  She looked as confused as I still felt.

“Mine is Luna Sky, does that make us sisters?” I wondered.

Sola looked at my license, comparing the two, “twins. Look at our birthdays.  September 23rd, 1999.”

Twins. “We don’t really look it, do we?”

“Must be fraternal.  Think our parents are a bit obsessed with the sky?” Sola joked.

“Why?” I asked, still trying to figure out how we could be twins, or even sisters really.  Apart from our very different hair colors, Sola was tan and covered in freckles like she spent a lot of time in the sun while I was almost ghostly pale.  Our eyes couldn’t be more different in color, although I guess they did have a somewhat similar wide, circular shape to them.  For that matter we were the same height and had similar builds, maybe we weren’t as different as I initially thought.

“Sola and Luna? Sun and moon?” Sola was explaining.  I wondered if our personalities were different too.  She seemed a lot less concerned about the situation than I was.  Or maybe she was just using her attempt at humor to hide her own fear. 

“What else was in your bag,” I wondered, resuming my search through my own, “anything suggesting where we are or what we’re doing?”

“Seems like survival supplies mostly,” she held up a first aid kit and bag of non-perishable food, “I would guess we were hiking except that doesn’t explain the creepy ritual dresses.  Do you have any candles in your bag?”

“Ritual dresses?” I frowned, not following.

“Come on, Luna, who goes hiking in long, all white dresses?”

I shrugged, “apparently us?  My bag doesn’t have a change of clothes, just a rain coat.”

“Same with mine.  Also, where are our shoes?  There’s no way we walked very far in these little ballerina slippers.” 

I glanced around.  She was right, so maybe we hadn’t hiked far, maybe we had left a car nearby but there was no clear path away from the beach. 

“We need help, like medical help, so we need to get out of here,” I decided, returning my bags contents to where they had been neatly packed. 

Sola nodded in agreement, throwing her supplies back into her bag hastily. 

We shouldered our bags, but then we remembered that we had no idea which way to go. 

“We have to run into someone eventually, right?” Sola asked, “I vote we pick a direction and walk until we find a road.”

“We don’t want to waste more energy then we have to though,” I cautioned, “we should really think about this carefully.”

“What is there to think about? We have no idea where we came from and there don’t seem to be any signs giving us any hints.  We’re clearly not getting any help on this tiny deserted beach, so we need to go find it ourselves.”

“There must be something!” I argued.

“Luna.  As much as I wish we could just retrace our steps… well did you notice that there are only footprints leading away from where we were sleeping?  And these shoes… not only are they wrong for hiking; they are in perfect condition. And my water bottle is full, this backpack looks new….  How we got here?  I don’t think we walked here ourselves.”