The farther away you get from the city, the fewer cars there are. Fewer houses, fewer people. More wildlife.
And then you'll see it: the very first ring of the Ternion Baldrics. Cheria.
Thin. Frail-looking. Small at first, but soon enough the length of the southern sky.
And beside it, Eleanor.
Also thin. Also frail-looking. Also small at first, but soon enough the length of the southern sky, same as her sister.
And last but not least, there was Rose.
Same thinness. Same frailty. Same smallness at first, but soon enough the same length as her sisters.
Temera took pictures of the Triplets (as they were casually known), and Mireh, while she kept her eyes on the road, watched as the rings slowly washed over the landscape, coming for them.
This side of Shishiru wasn't that mountainous, but it wasn't entirely flat, either. The highway was paved on mostly flat ground, but on its flanks were rolling hills that rolled for forever.
The city was far behind them, and the nearest settlement was kilometers away, and only getting farther, but at some point when the city was just beyond the horizon, patches of glowing flowers started popping up wherever you looked.
Barely forty centimeters tall. Fine stalks. Four large rounded pedals to each flower. No more, no less.
Transforming Halos.
They were in season once every five years, and they could be found worldwide, but their favorite place to grow was in any field at the equator. Walking around the city, you might stumbled on one or two growing in the sidewalk cracks, but far, far away from civilization was where they bloomed the brightest. In fact, the only signs of civilization out here were the occasional wind turbine in the background and the highway before Mireh and Temera. Nobody had bothered to put up streetlamps out here, so the highway was dyed turquoise by the hundreds of thousands of millions of glowing flowers around and by the hundreds of thousands of billions of twinkling stars above. It was such a sight that Mireh pulled over to take panoramas on the decently expensive camera she had bought just for tonight.
“Oh, wow,” Temera said as she got out of the car to take it all in as well.
“And this isn't even what we came out here for,” Mireh said as she took a picture. “Bet your refrigerator didn't tell you about this.”
“My what?”
“Oh. Sorry. Inside joke between Retta and me...” She looked down at her camera and the pictures on the screen. They were nice. Retta would agree.
She looked up.
A meteor.539Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡtRRtN49KBh
