Snow: Inktober Appropriated Short Fiction

It had snowed for a million years before my boots made their prints in the drift. There were no clouds on this airless moon, even of methane - they had frozen out when the parent planet began its march away from the sun some point during the trial of Galileo. It was the planet's RINGS that did the snowing.

There had been another moon once - of rocks, oozes, and most of all water ice. It had strayed into the planet's roche limit and been crushed into those glittering rings. Not all its water had been frozen though; under the thinnest of protective ice shells life had evolved - and thrived.

I picked through the snow and pulled out a ray-worm. It looked like it belonged in the frozen food aisle. As I put it in my sample bag I realized this was the value of my life. To be alive, and here, to know that others had been once.