Word Count: 1,895

It wasn’t anything like he’d expected, but then he hadn’t known what to except in the first place, except emptiness, and the large, looming giant than hung in the sky. He thought how strange it was to see Jupiter in the dark sky where he would have seen the moon on Earth, and he wondered, in the stillness and quiet, how his world looked from there.

And it was his world. As comfortable as he was with his life on Earth, as much as he didn’t want that to change, as much as he would do anything to protect it, he couldn’t ignore the curiosity that had lingered since his trip to Europa. He needed to see, needed to know, needed to find his place, and he thought, somehow, that this would help, this would make things just a little more clear, lead him another step in the right direction.

The first thing he noticed aside from the lofty presence of Jupiter in the sky was that he could breathe—breathe as deeply and freely as if he were still on Earth.

The second thing he noticed was that he was completely alone.

He knew he should have expected that much, at least. He and Europa had been the only ones present on her moon. It seemed only natural that it would be the same here.

Ganymede tore his eyes away from the sky and lowered them, fastened them on what lay before him. His mouth opened but he made no sound, lips parted and brows slightly furrowed. He took one step forward and then stopped, not sure where he intended to go from there. There was nothing to see but destruction, nothing to see but an empty, dead world, ravaged beyond repair.

It looked as if there could have been a town there once—perhaps a city. Where once there could have been buildings, now lay heaps of shattered stone, split brick, shards of broken glass, and splintered beams of wood. A few crumbling walls stood here and there, but they were insufficient shelter, dilapidated and broken, well on their way to joining the rest in piles of fragmented debris. Once, it might have been lovely; once, it might have bustled with life. He could still see where streets might have been. The rubble did not conceal them completely, but left gaps, and some ways off, straight in front of him, lay stone in a circular shape, which once might have been a fountain.

His mouth closed as he swallowed heavily, feeling suddenly very sad, and he turned away to find something else, something less bleak, less derelict, less disturbing.

Behind him, passed a vast expanse of nothing, rose a solitary structure, partially destroyed, with its roof caving in spots and its walls crumbling, but compared to everything else around him, it was remarkably intact. It looked as if it had once been a palace. If not, then it surely had to have been some sort of grand estate, as it was long and tall – though it lacked turrets and towers, and he thought it looked much better for it, without any spires sticking garishly up into the skyline. It stretched across the horizon, and still held some vestiges of stateliness and elegance, waiting there in its solitude. Waiting…

Waiting…

Ganymede stepped toward it, walking slowly. He did not keep his gaze focused upon it as he approached, but looked around at the stark landscape, again searching for something else, anything else, any other remnant of a past long dead.

There, patches of grounded cordoned off into shapes, that might once have been beds to hold flowers and plants, but which now lay empty; he saw no sign of vegetation. And there, more rubble, but part of it had kept its shape, and he thought he could make out the tiers of another fountain. And there still, piles of broken stone evenly placed along the pathway, as if there had once been statues lining the path. He wondered what they might have looked like, but saw nothing that gave any hint.

Everything looked so barren and grey, yet somehow it was not hard to imagine how it might have been, bursting with beauty and life.

He entered the building through the main entrance, one heavy door battered to the ground, the other hanging precariously on its hinges. It was difficult to make out much of the room he entered, it was so scarred and covered with dust, and though it appeared to him so haunting and vacant, he made his way through to seek out others room, some that might be more intact, some that might hold more answers. He thought back to his excursion with Europa, and the building she had led him through, and he wondered if this could possibly be like that, if he would see anything here as she’d hoped he would there.

He wandered, with no clue where he was going, and eventually he lost track of his path, but he wasn’t afraid. The corridors were straight; he doubted it would be very hard to find his way back if he needed to. He peered into other rooms, large, grand chambers with high ceilings and ruined furniture. He sniffed the air, expecting the smell of rot and decay to fill his nostrils, but the most he got was a nose full of dust, and he sneezed loudly, the sound echoing through the empty building.

Turning onto another hall, Ganymede saw a series of evenly placed rectangles along one wall. Looking closer, he discovered the rectangles to be frames, and within the frames were the remnants of what must have been paintings, but they were so old and so lacking in proper preservation that the colors had long since blackened and faded, flaking off in certain areas and leaving their subjects incomplete. Despite their age, he could make out shapes and figures, shadows of people who stared out at him with hollow, disengaged eyes.

It unnerved him, and once he came to the last one in the line, he turned quickly away, taking another hall to escape from the sudden discomfort that turned his stomach and squeezed his chest.

He followed one hall, and another, and another, until finally he came to a hall as haunting and still as the rest, but less beaten, less worn by time. One side of the hall bore a long line of tall, arched windows, some broken, some cracked, and others seemingly undamaged. On the other side of the hall was a wall of window-shaped mirrors, some shattered, some split in so many ways he could not have made out his reflection within them, and others in relatively perfect condition. Interspersed between them were smaller statues, golden cherub-like shapes raising candelabras which might have once shed light in the hall, and above, hanging from a painted ceiling whose shapes were as faded and flaking as the portraits he’d seen before, were numerous gold and crystal chandeliers. A few had fallen, lying in twisted heaps of broken crystal, but other that and the imperfections he’d noted previously, the hall seemed as if it had barely been touched.

He paced the floor slowly, glancing out the windows – at the bleak landscape, at Jupiter above – and then into the mirrors, passing those that showed nothing more than his distorted figure, before coming to one that had only a single crack trailing diagonally across the curved top.

Ganymede saw himself for the first time.

He’d never bothered to look before, to see what he’d become, aside from glancing down and behind to examine his outfit. He’d avoided windows and glassy store fronts, anything that might have reflected a faint image of himself, and chose instead not to know, as if he could ignore what had happened to him if only he failed to truly acknowledge the change in his appearance.

He didn’t think he looked much different. He could still see himself there, scared and lost. The hair had not changed, and the eyes were the same, staring back at him with mingled dread and wonder.

For just a moment, he thought he heard a whisper, a quiet murmuring, breathing his name.

“Ganymede… Ganymede…”

He glanced behind him. There was nothing there.

But when he looked back at the mirror, something happened. A flash of something, quick and fleeting, a reflection that was his own, but different somehow, though he didn’t know why. All he knew was that, for the span of a few seconds, it was not Paris staring back at him through Ganymede’s face.

As quickly as it had come, it was gone, and he stood there as alone as ever, but distinctly aware that there was something here, something about this place that spoke to him – a whisper, an image, a distant, ephemeral memory.

He lifted his arm, positioned his feet, and looked in the glass as he did nearly every afternoon on Earth.

He closed his eyes and thought he could hear music, far, far away, faint and unrecognizable, but there. Voices, too, from somewhere, laughing and cheering and quietly chatting, saying things that barely registered, at least nothing so much as the continuous refrain of “Ganymede… Ganymede… Ganymede…”

His feet moved, his arms swept through the air, and he was dancing through the hall, careful of the broken glass that crunched beneath his feet, avoiding the chandeliers that lay crumpled on the floor, which echoed the tap-tap-tapping of his heels. He opened his eyes and passed another mirror. He saw himself, moving to a song he alone could hear, and behind him, all around him, the faint, phantom figures from a distant time. They were there, and then they were gone, and when he found another mirror they were back again, never the same people, as if the hall were filled with countless ghosts he saw only as reflections.

The motions were unrehearsed, familiar only because his body bent and stretched in similar movements and positions almost daily – a sad, mournful ballet for another time, a nonexistent people, and a lonely, dead world.

It must have been bright once. It must have been beautiful, extravagant, and alive. He knew it must have. Yet now it was nothing; now there was no one. Everything was gone, gone, gone.

He stopped as the music faded further and further away, finishing back in front of the mirror where he’d begun. There, again, a different image, the flash of a reflection that was both his and not. A smile, the smallest upturning of reddened lips, lovely but strained – lonely. It didn’t reach his eyes.

Just like the first time, it was gone in an instant, and Ganymede saw nothing but his confused face staring back at him. He backed away, glancing up and down the hall, but there was nothing more to see.

He’d been here too long, he decided. It was time to go.

He summoned his phone, held it in his hand, spared one more glance into one of the mirrors and saw no one but himself standing there. He shook his head and closed his eyes, and as he pressed the center button, he thought he was beginning to understand what Europa had meant.

One day, he would come back. He had to. It called to him, softly whispering his name.

“Ganymede… Ganymede…”