Page 122 of Gate of Chaos


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Akoni, Keon, and Auryn were finishing up samples as I streaked in like the world’s angriest ribbon routine. I snapped my wings out, causing a gust of frigid air to blast everything and a smack of thunder hit the evil clouds above us and magenta lightning cracked through the sky.

Yikes.

And double yikes: Keon was resting in a loaf, his light-muzzle over his snout as he breathed carefully.

I dropped to the ground in land form and nibbled his finlets. He tried to speak, but deep coughs rattled his body.

“I’m… fine…” he rasped. “Just… a tickle.”

“I found flowering trees,” I told him with a mouthful of finlet.

“Flowering?” Akoni asked.

I rubbed my neck along Keon’s and entwined my tail with his. Cuddling was much easier in this form, even if this form didn’t feel as natural. Keon trilled something between wheezy breaths.

“Flowering trees. That means water. It might be underground and not much of it, but water. Without having to go to the snowball side and building aqueducts.”

Auryn asked, “Did you get a sample of the flowers?”

“No, I was afraid I’d freeze them. But that’s not the exciting part.” I gave Keon’s finlet a teasing chew and tug. “The trees! From the sky you can see they’re arranged in concentric nonagons! I mean, Ibetthey’re nonagons and if I flew out the other way, I’d find the other trees. And I only spotted two nonagons, but I’ll bet there are more, expanding outward from the complex.”

Keon cocked his head so that he could eye me with his left eye.

“And that’s not the most important part,” I told him eagerly. “The trees aren’t all the same age!”

Auryn and Akoni crowded around. Akoni asked, “You’re sure.”

“I know what a sapling looks like. Even a space sapling.” The temple complex itself was very old. A thousand years, at least. The scale-reinforced pad might be thousands of years old and date back to the war itself.

Keon wheezed. “Auryn, can you guess the age of a tree?”

“It would very much be a guess, but I can try.”

“We should do that.”

“I will look after him,” Akoni said.

“I do not need minding,” Keon grumbled.

Auryn checked Keon over before we headed out to find the trees. He didn’t need to tell me he was worried about what exactly we were breathing in with this dust.

We flew at yee-haw rates to the flower tree I had spotted. I kept a safe distance while Auryn approached, his scales glowing with wonder. He inspected the tree with tendrils of light, and carefully plucked several sprigs of flowers as samples.

I showed him one of the smallest saplings, and then a tree that wasn’t flowering but seemed mature. There were no obvious indicators of anyone having dug in the dirt to plant saplings, or to pull stumps of dead trees. But unless someone had built a tree-planting machine that trundled through planting trees in concentric nonagons,someonewas still here to plant those saplings.

Granted, a species that had mastered interstellar space flight probably could build a cataclysm-proof tree-planting machine.

“Saplings?” Akoni asked when we returned. Keon was up and about.

“It seems so. I don’t want to try to date trees, but I can tell you the sapling ismuchyounger than its companions, who are also all of varying ages.” Auryn dropped his satchel and indicated the flower samples in their little containers.

“Nine petals,” Akoni mused.

“And nine flowers on each sprig.” Keon added.

The little pods were environmentally isolated, so I finally got a close-up look of the delicate jasmine-like flowers, which were the size of my thumb print and a delicate pale pink with slightly darker pink around the edges and at the base of the flower. The center was a vague nonagon shape and covered in pale yellow pollen.

Keon heaved himself up, took a deep, tearing breath, coughed once, and said. “Good. We—”

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