Kiera's Sun (#2, Anshan Saga)

Chapter Ten

The strange figure with six legs was back in her dreams. This time when she ran towards it, she managed to close half the distance between them before she experienced the same level of fatigue and frustration as usual. The grass was retreating even faster, towards the figure, and Kiera could do nothing to stop it.

The dream shifted and changed, morphing into one of the fairy tales she'd been trying to tell A'Ran, Leyon and Mansr about on their trip to Qatwal. In place of Goldilocks, she saw herself walking into a house with three bears. Before she could talk to them, the dream slid away into darkness once more.

When she awoke sometime later, it was nighttime on Anshan. Kiera's head pulsed with pain, and her hair was sticky with blood. She was wrapped uncomfortably around the moss-covered boulder she'd smacked into earlier. She struggled to sit, safe from the storms in the strange bubble. The grass around her was waist high, and she smelled flowers blooming in the Anshan desert.

She touched her head gingerly. The bleeding had stopped and her hair was gummy.

Instead of the pitch black Anshan night she'd experienced in the draw, light glowed from the opposite side of the boulder. Too miserable to dare hope it was the light of a ship, she nonetheless prepared to discover what it was.

Bruises, burns and cuts ached with her movement. Nothing seemed broken, and she climbed to her feet unsteadily. One knee was unusually stiff, and she limped around the boulder to see what lay beyond.

During the day, she'd been unable to see the basin into which she'd fallen. But at night, the entire area had been covered with grass and small, glowing flowers unlike any she'd ever seen on earth. They stretched as far as she could see into the basin, a carpet of darkness that appeared almost to repel the storms sweeping by over the edges of the shallow basin.

Trees had begun to grow as well and were twice her size in height but unlike any she'd seen on Earth or Qatwal. Instead of branches, chains of broad, flat leaves connected one tree to its neighbor to create a single, solid canopy above the basin.

Kiera paused at the first bunch of glowing flowers and knelt to examine them. Her head hurt too much for her to squint. She plucked one free and lifted it to her eyes. The flower continued to glow. It was shaped like a miniature sunflower the size of her thumb.

She started to smile despite her pain. The glowing sunflower emitted soothing, quiet light. As her senses awoke from sluggishness, she heard the trickle of water from somewhere in the basin.

Kiera stood with a grimace and limped towards the sound, pausing to admire the fields of glowing sunflowers and look up at leaves as wide as she was tall. She began to make out other types of flora, some of which were nothing more than dark shapes between patches of sunflowers, and one of which appeared to be a living glow stick that grew at the bases of trees.

She reached the small spring at the center of the basin and dropped beside it, exhausted. After drinking her fill, she leaned over and did her best to rinse the blood out of her hair before sinking back onto her heels. A flicker of movement distracted her, and she waved the sunflower over the surface of the water. Its light reflected off the rainbow scales of fish darting beneath the surface.

Fascinated by what an Anshan fish looked like, she peered into the depths of the water. The fish had five fins, resembling a starfish, and an eye in the middle of its body.

"Not as scary as the cats," she murmured.

And then it hit her. The planet was not just producing flora but had begun to repopulate its critter population as well. She touched her head as she rose, grimacing at the wave of pain, and gazed around. Anshan days were longer than Earth days, and she estimated she'd been out for about ten hours.