There once was a race of creatures who lived and died by the light of a hundred small suns. These suns described a luminous filament across the sky, and the farthest of them lasted only a day before vanishing in a flash of its own exhausted light. Just as soon as one sun died, another took its place on the other side of the galaxy, in the farthest corner of the empyrean.
Now, each one of these creatures, genderless to the last, was hatched from small mounds that bubbled up through the planetary soil, and each of these mounds was in turn fertilized by the planet itself. Just below the surface ran a network of a hundred million porous fibres, each conducting a viscuous, golden liquid so lambent and dazzling that it would blind a human eye to gaze upon it but for an instant.
Once born, these beings slowly climbed their way onto one the innumerable smooth rock formations that dotted the geosphere, and flattened themselves against it. Their skin was a leathery golden that gleamed without cease. If you had stood upon their soft soil with those suns at your back, you would have seen spread before you a glimmering forest of reflected light.
And upon those rocks the creatures would remain, sometimes for millenia, absorbing the light from above. There is no human word for what these entities, strewn across the surface of their planet, felt within them when the light reached their skin. One could describe it as a state of perpetual, unwavering joy; or as the sweetest moment of catharsis multiplied a hundredfold; or as a million other things, all of them hopelessly dark by comparison.
Their bodies did not change from birth till death. Nourished completely by light, they could have lived until the last of their burning suns vanished from the sky forever. Yet, in the end each one turned willingly to dust, and rejoined the sand from which it came. Without so much as a spark or a glimmer.
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