Starfire

Chapter 19: -Suns Unsetting-

An endless ringing filled Najma's head, taking up all of his thoughts. He almost convinced himself that it was his alarm clockand it was time to drag himself out of bed to get to work... it didn't sound right, though. Nothing sounded right.

   He shifted, suddenly uncomfortable, and that was definitely wrong. The surface beneath him was hard and coarse. He wasn't in his bed? He never slept anywhere else. Not even accidentally.

   He couldn't be in another room, and he never rolled onto the floor, so why...? He clearly remembered falling asleep in...

   Actually, he didn't remember.

   He couldn't remember where he had fallen asleep the previous night. That was very odd. In fact, he didn't even recall sleeping. His eyes snapped open, and that was when he remembered why he hadn't done so sooner: his face was pressed against a blanket of thin, sharp, but pliable blades of—it shouldn't be possible—grass.

   He tried to sit up before looking around this time to spare his eyes the unforgiving grass. The only problem was, he couldn't exactly sit up. He was in his Yu-Liang form, which only served to confound him further. He couldn't even remember the last time he'd Shifted...

   He shook his head and rolled onto his stomach. Though his was sore, his movements felt freer than normal. He wasn't hiding. He was himself again.

   A jolt of panic speared him. Someone would surely see...

   He opened his aching eyes with a newfound urgency, and then he took a good look at his surroundings. If there had been any doubt before, there was none now; he was not about the Intrepid. Unless, of course, he had finally gone crazy and was hallucinating.

   The grass was grey, with an undertone of washed-out green. The flowers dotting the grass were the color of dust and nearly blended in, but the blooms were so delicately, complicatedly beautiful that he stared at one for a minute at least. The sky was golden and red and violet and indigo and a thousand other hues, as if it was stuck in a forever-sunset.

   He knew instantly where he was as soon as he turned to that many-colored sky. He wished he'd looked there first. Then again, if he had, he never would have looked away.

   He was on Mikrask—the Land of the Unsetting Suns. It was a nice planet, and widely accepted as such by many people who had a hard time agreeing about anything. The facts popped into his head unbidden, from a foggy grey area that allowed no passage. What was back there? why couldn't his mind access the things hidden there? it was so frustrating. His memory had become less and less reliable...

   He shook his head. Back to the task and subject at hand: Mikrask and figuring out how he was here.

    The planet wasn't very advanced technologically, and most of the tech that they actually had was from other civilizations that came to visit and then accidentally left something behind. It would be swarming with tourists and the like if there wasn't a myriad of laws preventing any more than forty-thousand off-worlders at a time.

   The native population of the glowing, perfect world was a green-skinned race named after the planet itself: The Makkas. At first glance, the aliens' skin was a similar swampy shade of green to the grasses that grew in wide prairies over the whole planet, but if proper time was given to examine them in the right light, the silver blood in their veins shone faintly through their skin in strikingly swirls, which made them sparkle in the light of the ever-setting suns. Najma remembered being quite taken with them, at once point.

   If only he could remember so much about useful things, he mused bitterly.

   It wasn't the worst place to wake up, but the thing that bothered him was the fact that he couldn't remember how he had gotten here in the first place. His head was buzzing with the ringing sound that refused to leave his ears. His eyes stung.