The Aewulnum Flowerets of Chuvushia XII 

Author: Jeremy Santiago López

“Only the wise find knowledge in the olden embellished unknown.” 

– Lieutenant  Eduardo Benítez Negrón, 2138.  

In the faraway, nebulae-wreathed, mauve-stippled galaxy of Dendrobium Orchid’s Reach,  suspended just next to its twin, coiling sister galaxy, Rhododendron’s Atonement X, one may just  find mankind’s last and greatest redeemer to be one Peruvian-native flower in its humble, ceramic  pot of fertile, nutrient-rich dirt. By it, within a tunnel of light and a tunnel of darkness, light  prospered, light became. This flower required only water, but an ounce of it, and the scorching,  embracing warmth irradiated by the primordial suns of the three, amalgamated astral systems at  about the galaxy’s edge. All systems lacked a habitable planet to call their own, occupied only by  just those three, forlorn, outwardly taciturn, enflamed, cerise-hued gnomes of suns and some  uninhabitable, indigo gas giants like the likes of Jupiter and Saturn from the Earthen solar system in The Milky Way. In truth, all except for one of the planetary structures, specifically the  Bouvardia Cluster—where Chuvushia XII, the avowed, lost garden of Eden was—was easily  decipherable by the naked eye because of its amethyst-tinted masses of land upon its cortex  blended with its bluish-purple, beige and ample oceans, its blushing clouded atmosphere surreal  and dizzyingly inviting, temptation given, not taken.  

It lingered amongst the vast, crushing vacuum of blackened and yet gleaming, star peppered net of the endless space-time continuum, a stark, colorful and florid contrast against the  dreary, swallowing, cosmic veil. Receiving light from three angles, night was not a luxury on the  lush, proliferating planet of Chuvushia XII, not ever an occurrence for space voyagers to document  on future journeys that would bring them to this ostentatious jewel of peaceful, burgeoning subsistence. Sunlight profusely bled from the three sources unto the sublimely flourishing gorges  and clearings of the slow-spinning planet, piercing even through the sumptuously dense awnings  of the maze-like, lavender, and tall woodlands infested with wondrous, fantastical, and lithe  creatures that had been spoken of before, but never sighted. Every day it was dazzlingly sunny,  and every minute Captain Matías Orquídeo Dalia laid siege to the phenomenal sight of the tri-solar  systems from the safety of the roomy, steel innards of his space-vessel: the 4-X Precursor. She was  a colonization vessel blessed and deemed by South American space travelers on her maiden voyage  as La Tempestad de los Mares Oscuros—the Tempest of the Murky Depths. Just now, he had  emerged from light speed travel with it, floating through space in preparation of a new star-jump.  

El Capitán had been glaring quietly, nearly brooding, at the three, beaming orbs suspended  as if unspeakably within the shroud of outer space in utter leisure, in zero gravity, his complexion  kissed by the three suns, three different shades of red daubing his face, a cultured painter brushing  it, painting him with the softest reds, the gentlest and the bleakest as well. It was a miracle his  beloved drooping branch of wild-cherry dyed Cantuta’s—a branch of flowers he had kept alive  during his decade-long voyage after his eventful launch from Peru, Southern America in 2146— had not drifted away with its pot around his spacecraft without any gravity detaining it.  

His mother, long, long ago, had bought him the gorgeous sapling from the marketplace she  often visited in her hometown of Lima, Peru. The last words she susurrated to him on her deathbed compelled him to take it along with him star-bound trek. Breathlessly, he melancholically  reminisced about how she told him she wished to see a cherished fragment of Peru’s garish,  poignant, and lively culture elsewhere in the endless cosmos, out of her reach, yet within it,  knowing very well that he would abide by his duty to his matriarch. Matías would not fail her,  even if his mission was altogether another of considerably different scale. He had the pot fastened  to a miniature platform out of the way and by a circular, welded and reinforced windowpane on  the left lateral of his vessel’s rounded, commodious cockpit, strewn with all sorts of gadgets and  electronics that simplified everything.  

Beyond the dangling and rosy, trumpet-figured Cantuta buds—which were still tautly and  inherently sealed up, their time of blooming not one to speak of for now—lurked the three,  illustrious, halo-inducing, lens-distorting globes in their soundless slumber, their names Epestius,  Eveskus and Asaskus, as considered by the computer and AI navigator Vales Rodger. The robotic  entity was the one responsible of most operations aboard the ship and its automated manning,  steering it closer and closer to its destination, not Chuvushia XII, but Regnius V, at least one more  FTL-jump (Faster Than Light) away from it, at least a few more weeks once calculations were  boiled down and a pen wasn’t urgently, firmly held in tension above holographic papyrus, the  paper of the future.  

Yes, it would take weeks. It would take weeks. It had taken him over ten years to reach  Regnius V, an exoplanet with optimal living conditions, and now he was one button’s press away  from it, the planet in his grasp. He’d been tasked with a colonization effort enabled by one man  piloting a planetary occupation freighter brimming with icily coated human embryos wafting and  twitching about in amniotic fluid. It wasn’t only him, however. There were humanoid, corpulent  machines docked and dormant in the robotics chamber and quadrant of the large, kilometer-long  vessel, ready to assist in the endeavor once the rapacious whale touched down and perched itself  on Regnius V with its three landing-gear legs. 

“Sire, the auxiliary systems are irresponsive. Shall I reboot them?” then droned out a voice,  monotone, robotic, inhumane and following protocols and algorithms to speak properly to its  fleshly superior, the Peruvian flower guardian.  

“No, no—let’s not do that now,” he advised, swimming through the buoyant air throughout  his cockpit, browsing controls, valves and holographic screens impregnated with navy, glowing  data that shifted constantly, a holographic map of their current position in space right by his  peripheral view.  

“But, sire, if we do not, a possible instability may occur and, consequentially, we may upset  the electromagnetic pulses around our ship due to the increasing load and stress on our engines.  Space matter seems volatile here—which is quite strange and unparalleled. My scanners are  incapable of detecting why,” the AI reasonably retorted, Cpt. Orquídeo’s thick, brown brows  furrowing in concern, judging the robot’s suggestions. “Shall I, then, reboot the systems?” the  machine pressed, urging El Capitán to permit the execution of the proposal to their untimely  predicament. Beads, if they could slither, would be running down the Captain’s crimpled forehead,  but they were flying upward, no tension able to break them, rising as droplets of sweat. After a  disquieted gulp of anxiety, he gave a commander's nod, the machine’s many camera’s heeding it, the ship’s auxiliary systems shutting down, the engines dying down, humming and bellowing until  they were silenced, steel creaking lastly.  

“What’s taking so long, Vales?” the apprehensive Peruvian enquired, his English accent  not particularly too shabby, not that it mattered, since the artificial intelligence computer would  understand him, nonetheless.  

“Impact imminent. Brace,” the computer murmured, its dry, unfathomable voice slapping  the voyager’s sanity with its blatant warnings.  

“Wh—What?! What do you mean BRACE?!” he shouted, increasingly perplexed.  “Brace. Brace.”  

Then, a loud thump, metal bending, the screeching shriller, expansive, ear-splitting, the  beastly, robust, and rotund spacecraft injured, but not compromised, its hull apparently intact.  Inside, however, chaos mushroomed, the Captain whirling around uncontrollably within his  cockpit as a result from the impact of an unidentified object, the light brought again as he braced  himself, covering his head with his crossed arms, eyes closed as the luminous systems of the ship  were flickering on. The auxiliary devices had been reinitiated by the all-knowing apparatus, the  thrum and humming of the spacecraft’s turbines and nuclear-reactor apparent, diving into his ears  with their familiar tune, the tune he had heard for over ten years, having been lulled to sleep by it  during a myriad of depressive, nostalgic nights where he missed his dear, dear spouse and their  prized, black-brown-furred German Shepherd known as Oswin.  

From the wall was ejected an arm then, rushing through a fissure, a gateway small enough  to only allow the mechanical arm through it. It propelled itself to the gyrating Captain, seizing him  to stabilize him.  

“What was that?!” he enquired, the arm releasing his torso, retracted back into its lair of  the gear-infested and numeral-glazed wall.  

“A meteorite. Its size was approximat—…”  

“I don’t care about its size, Vales, ¡por favor! Tell me something I really need to know!”  he demanded to the computer, dazed, panicky, alert, trying to crawl and claw his way back into  the pilot’s comfortable seat in front of the maneuvering stick that was currently on automatic control.  

“Sire.” A call to his master, a potent bearer of such dreadful, demoralizing news.  There was silence, the silence of crushing space.  

“A torrent of meteorites is headed our way now. I suggest you brace and prepare for an  emergency scenario.” To hear a voice, but not its breath—it stirred and had the Captain shivering  from the angst produced by the fiendish computer’s unveiling. If computers could be morally categorized, they would be devils, truly, devils manufactured and mass-produced by ignorant  humanity. The dread governed him. A cold, freezing flood was rushing through his gangly,  muscular body, a churning sea, frantic, disgustingly feverish. He understood how this ship had not  been built to endure a laser-cannon broadside barrage from a tyrannical destroyer-class space-craft,  and how it would not resist a torrential rain of clustered rocks left astray by God.  

There was silence again, that silence that gnawed at his core, scratching his bones, engendering a looping hole of disappointment. The cockpit was impregnated by a red-alert light,  flashing, an alarm thundering and drumming repeatedly, the Captain’s forty-year-old complexion  sundered betwixt blacks, between reds.  

“I am so sorry, Captain—if my apologies are a human construct you can feel better by since  my directives are only taught to replicate them—that I was not efficient enough in my duties to  have detected them earlier. I am drawing all power available, except for the energy being  consumed to maintain our embryos fully healthy, to our starboard and fore shields. Captain, please,  I would advise you once more to brace for impact.” With widened eyes, his seat’s safety harness  equipped and tightened by the belts, armrest’s fiercely, fearfully gripped, nails digging into the  cushions they had, his breath left him again, left him like it had left his mother in that forsaken  hospital in Peru.  

“Bárbara, te amo tantísimo,” (Barbara, I love you so much) he murmured in his native  tongue, shedding a tear. It could not end this way. It would not, but then the meteorites started  knocking, peppering the ship brusquely, intensifying gradually, bigger and bigger, pounding and plummeting against the energy-defended sides, blue shields rippling with each impact they tried  to stifle, to assuage, mollifying their negative effects and any injury upon the colonization carrier.  Electronics were malfunctioning all around him, sparking, imagery faltering and flickering,  holograms distorting, zapped out of existence, glitching out hysterically, each dooming,  forthcoming meteorite worse than its predecessor, shaking El Capitán to the bone. His light brown,  chaotic, all-shooting eyes were glued to a failing numeral measurement screen that displayed the  strength of the ship’s shields in percentage, its descriptions twisted. They were decreasing  exponentially, falling from a flat, well and heartening 86% to a flatline-bound 45% in the blink of  an eye, the electronic gauge tumbling lower, the once-brave colonizer now miserable and horrified,  hands and nimble, calloused fingers firing toward panels to regulate systems, assuming manual  control of the ship as he was frightened by this ill fate, overriding the computer’s dominance at  last.  

“I would not advise manual control in this situat—” The computer tried to intervene, but a  press of a button permanently silenced the diabolic supercomputer.  

“Shut it, machine! You failed me already and I will not be letting that happen again! ¡Maldita sean las computadoras!” He roared back, frantic, steering the freighter himself to  increase their chances of avoiding the incoming, sweltering hail of meteorites, each one becoming  a vaporized cloud of dust after impact, a grimy, compressed field of flinty, mineral debris that  receded behind the ship, leaving behind a trail of titanium-rock obliteration in its wake. He was  veering off the path that would lead his aching whale of a ship to Regnius V, Chuvushia XII  directly ahead, its orbit within reach, the meteoric onslaught not ceasing all the while. The ashen, brown-haired Captain was gritting his teeth harshly, breathing profusely, slowly, the piloting  joystick between his two silver-garbed legs, both hands wrapped around it as if it were his mother’s  skinny, bony, and withered, death-bed hand, the one he clutched as he moaned for her. He had been brought into this universe for greatness and he would not depart from existence until he  endorsed her request.  

The stars would not hinder him, no, they were never meant to—he’d prosper enrooted upon  the thought of keeping his mother’s wish. It was horrifying to ponder that he was being enforced to land his cruiser as a meteorite larger than a typical, for-the-family, civilian-class sky-soarer,  roughly 16-feet long, crushed and knocked out of commission one of the Precursor’s four, slitted,  ion-amped and nuclear-pumped engine turbines on its starboard side. A voluble detonation as loud  as the nuke that tickled Nagasaki in ’45 rebounded, a flare-up occurring in the peripheral view of  his gleaming, glossy and teary coppers, a tinge of orange. Flames were spewing out from the side 

wound on the vessel, rocking it toward the planet on a death dive, its nose pointing downward in  defeat, the gravitational pull of Chuvuschia XII latching onto the ship. Harpooned, it reeled in the  aching beast into it and away from the torrent of meteorites, the Peruvian Captain damning it all,  brawling till the ardent mirror of his life would be splintered, the cockpit’s exterior flaming up  once the atmosphere was breached, a curtain of pink-tinged clouds welcoming him, the turbulence  never-wracking, his heartbeat over 160 beats per minute.  

“Hold for me, please! Hold there, girl! Hold!” he shouted and cried, pulling hard on the  flight stick, teeth gritted ferociously. “¡Vamos, mi nena, vamos! ¡No me falles ahora, por favor!”  he added on, highly stressed and emotive, the rosy, now darkened fuchsia clouds breaking apart to  reveal grandeur itself, time slowing down, time being just an artifice so that brave rocketmen did  not stare at their watches too often. The deafening alarm did not ring in his ears. There was no  danger anymore. The threat of fire aboard at the ship’s aft did not bother him. He was besotted by  this phenomenon of creation, his copper eyes in awe, not knowing if he cried of joy, of dread or of hope, a glowing, red tone beginning to possess them as they sobbed, holding onto dear life, and  hoping for the best, praying.  

“Amado Dios.”  

Before him was Mother Nature’s hidden playground, not God’s, for what God was there  in a condition of peril as the one the space sailor was in? A sublime vista of ruddy, mushroomed topped trees with far-reaching, thin and downward-spiraling, marble-smooth branches was before  him, arrowhead-shaped, lavender leaves growing around them, from the delicate, thin-trunked mushrooms themselves that were spewing spores, coloring the clouds he unraveled. Bluish-purple,  three-petaled flowers were protruding lengthily from the mushrooms, blooming around and along  them, florets half as tall as the trees they sprouted from. The salmon-pink sky was littered with  them while the clamoring, metal-bellowing monstrosity was about to rip through them at heights  that certainly would amuse, the plush, chromatic aberration of florae being as highly elevated as  The Andes of Chile.  

Below. 

“Mother-flower, do the infernos visit us again during our modest, virtuous bathing?” a  flower asked another, its liquified, honeyed and ethereal, otherworldly voice impregnating an open  cavity upon the planet the whale was due to be beached upon.  

“Perhaps, my flower-child,” retorted the Matriarch flower, harmonious and pleasantly  authoritative, gazing upward at the collapsing, incoming beast of human machinery. 

Above.  

“What in God’s name is this planet?!” the Captain blared in enquiry, so distant from these  echoing, channeling, feminine voices, his mind zealous chaos, bracing once more for impact,  bound to penetrate through the clotted layers of the foliage-dense, wine-dabbed forestry. There  was no time to give anymore. In the hourglass that sat by the oak-wood doors of his home, set  down by his wife ten years ago, the last trickle of sands had accumulated at its bottom. Mercilessly,  like a machete flying from the muscly arm of a guerrilla militant to cut the impenetrable  undergrowth of the humid, mosquito-infested jungles of the Amazonian rainforest, the Precursor defiantly nosedived and stampeded all the way through the Chuvushian sky-garden. It pierced its  roseate canopy, the whale jerking irrepressibly against this once tranquil, undisturbed sea of  verdure. Long-limbed, selfishly separate branches were snapped, taffy trunks were split, crushed,  and flamingo-pink vegetation was devoured by the front of the vessel’s frayed, reddish-smeared  hull. For a moment, he just closed his chocolatey eyes to see the blacks of the boundless universe he had seen for ten years. He wanted to breathe and take a moment of respite from the ambush of  the copious, inbound plethora of varied sunspecs of hot pinks, magentas, corals, rosewoods and  rouges, the resplendent, ravishing labyrinth ahead of him, the joystick held back to its fullest arch,  alarms blaring, Vales speaking, spitting out warnings related to altitude that superseded his silence,  but the damned robot would not be any more of any aid. Technology had brought them so far. It’d  bring them back to the lowest, to the very beginning. Such devastation, within such a realm of  revered majesty. The forest cried out discordantly, though mutely, as his goliath of a ship came  crashing down swathed catastrophically in flames composed of cerulean and cerise tinctures, fated  to collide with the brushwood-strewn and leafy soil by which the wiggling roots of the trees lived.  

Then the whale was ultimately marooned, touching land softly one second, severely the  second after, gliding powerfully against the earth, burrowing into it, scraping itself against it, metal  dented, blown in, titanium-riveted panels being ripped off like slick sheets of paper. In its steadily slowing charge, it was unearthing roots that shrieked in silent anguish and shoveling out heaps of  rose-dirt, splitting the soil open with its metallic, bulging underbelly. Matías’ body was jerked  forward against his seat’s own straps and fasteners, on the verge of being choked out had the ship  not come momentarily to a halt, rocking one last time forward, one last time back, before it settled  and shuddered loudly against its own body, alloys murmuring grotesquely. Matías laid on his  throne as a defeated king, a dangling, limping corpse that quickly reawakened itself to hear the  blaring alarm screaming into his disturbed tympanums, a trickle of blood slithering down from his  left nostril not because of injury, but because of the mental strain that hounded him, his fortitude  lethally scathed.  

La flor …  

Upon the pyramid … 

… a florid waft of enlivening, dripping winds  

That carry beauty in petal, not in flesh…  

It’s no barbed bristle … 

Lustrous, aching supplications of thirst … 

Bloom, swat away the doom … 

… ¿dónde está la flor?  

… ¿en la cúspide del espejo lunar? 

… from the ever-gleam, from whence she came.  

… the sap of flowers found in the palatial gardens of El Paraíso …  

No dejes nunca caer sus pétalos. 

Half-awake, bleary-eyed, the red-lit cockpit bearing no words from hopeless Vales, he  pivoted his unhelmeted head to stare portside, toward his pot of Cantutas, still inexplicably intact,  though shaken to the root, beseeching him for help with their minimal droopiness. A grieved chortle ensued, the Captain full of nervous mirth, laughing at his own demise, at his misfortune.  What tormented, jungle priestess had wished him an ill fate? What for? It was funny to have outlasted the hazards, totally comical, the windows in front of him coated with plum leaves, petals  and an awfully viscous liquid the color of purple, sliding slowly off of the cracked windows of his  cockpit. They allowed no good view of the exterior. The ship was out of power, mothballed and  out of service, perched as if out of place amongst a warren of celestial and humanly impalpable  flora, leaves and rosy petals still raining from above as meteorites had minutes before, peppering  the hull’s roof flippantly, welcoming the stranded liner into the depths of the rosewoods.  

“Computer?” he called out, weakened, disillusioned, all panels, electronics and systems  offline. “Computer, are you there? Do you copy me, Vales?” he attempted again, no response  returning to him.  

Talking to Vales all these ten years had formed in him a habit to depend on it, to bemuse  himself with its decent, robot humor. It was the voice, the synthetic company, the sense of family  he had built with it. The same one he had also thrown out through the airlock and into the vacuum  of space once he blamed it for the mission’s total failure. He was alone. It sunk in. Cruelly. It was  a thorn at his sides. What would embryos do but swirl and whirl in the safety net of their fluids  while he rotted the rest of his life on Chuvushia XII? He did not know they were trashed, each  glass canister breached. Every one of the embryos had lost its life consequently.  

After a gloomy reticence, he unbuckled himself, moving the clasps and belts out of his way  to emerge from his pilot’s seat unharmed like his Cantutas, just as traumatized, his first, heavy,  unbalanced, and booted steps carrying him toward them sluggishly, a babe to his mother. He was  unused to the gravity after ten whole years of waiting for this madness. He released them from the  bind that held them deftly in place all this time in their ceramic pot, the letter M sketched in blue 

upon it, clearly a woman’s penmanship. Safe at last in his grasp, he promptly was placated  alongside the Inca’s sacred flower, clutching it sincerely, clenching it how he would grab onto his  own, new-born babe, raising it to kiss the pot, to place his forehead against it after.  

“I need you. I need you now,” he supplicated, eyes firmly shut, lips compressed in defiance  of reality, both lips curled inward, strained out by him after speaking so briefly to himself. 

Moments later, he returned the pot to its dedicated, display platform, leaving it there for  fear he would drop it and break it. He had been ten years in space, in absolute, zero gravity, used  to flying, floating, not walking. Just now, the adrenaline rush unhurriedly was subsiding, his heart  sounder than before, his muscles aching, dragged down by the planet’s unusual gravity, more  cumbersome than Earth’s, harsher on his shoulders, his back, but the suit he wore aided him greatly  in counteracting it to a certain degree. His next move? He was fully aware that he had to assess the  damage to his freighter now, to his girl, outside exploration mandatory, a visit to the ship’s armory  conclusively required before his departure into the great unknown, greater than space itself, for he  was rooted here, found in the now, found in the present, yet never found at all.  

The usually sliding, mechanical doors were not functioning, obstructing him. Prying them  open with a verve-crowbar was a no-brainer for the seasoned space-freighter Captain, the clamps  unlatching, the door divided after three, bolstered, grumble-packed tows and heaves, harrowing  and excruciating as he thought he’d rip apart the bones of his arms, sensationally brittle. It opened 

like a clam however, the pearl nowhere in his view yet, rusty-brown eyes darting all over to  ascertain a long, ghostly, narrow, and darkened pathway that led to the different compartments  aboard the ship. Every chamber was accessible either directly by another locked, sliding door, a  central elevator for every single one of the ship’s four decks and some old-fashioned stairs  positioned strategically and architecturally well to ease navigating the innards of the beached  whale. Even in the sparking darkness, he knew his way, a ship without its lighthouse, guiding itself  by the stars and a compass, each hallway and chamber photographed in his mind, an intricate map  of the layout of the colonization freighter sketched out to the last detail in his educated self. Matías  took each stride with deliberate slowness, hugging the walls, hanging on to mechanical  protuberances that had no meaning, no use anymore, to support himself, passing one door, two,  three, until he reached the fourth, stopping as he stepped on liquid, his boots squelching in a puddle  of amniotic fluid. He paled up in the dark, taking a step back as he almost slipped and fell from  the misery, all one-thousand embryos lost, their glass tubes broken behind those doors he knew he  did not want to open. It was a tomb, he knew, his hands trembling, feet as well, but upon regaining  composure, he tanked through the retching buzz that prodded at his throat, the sickening truth too  much to bear, carrying on, an alarm bleating throughout the entire hall as red light bled in,  discordant and deafening, louder than any he had heard before.  

The Captain did not halt, unwavering in his aggressive, wrathful and passionate  progression, the crowbar held by his left hand, the shining ring of his marriage there to bear witness of what mankind’s greed can do to a man, the alarm replacing his thoughts, his pondering. Heavy  breathing was the norm, oxygen levels within the vessel depleting by the second, an abrupt,  unforetold, second explosion heard from the back of the ship, its magnitude negligible, but it  wobbled the ship to the right and almost had him falling to his knees, a wary maneuver of his body  impeding his fall altogether, landing him on the wall next to the armory’s shut slide-door. Instantly,  the crowbar was conjured, forced exerted, another clam within the aground whale opened, the  precious pearl in it this time, the walls replete with vast weaponry, strategic ordnance and armored,  silvery, bubble-helmeted spacesuits especially devised for unforgiving, planetary conditions. The  red-bathed Capitan emerged from that armory brandishing an assault laser blaster, dressed in the  considerably unwieldier, more broadly resistant spacesuit, his helmet donned, a jumpsuit overall  covering even his gorgeous, ashen-brown, shaggy hair, leaving only his sun-tainted face’s skin exposed. The suit’s battery was full, its capacity viewable upon the blue holographic visor that was  imprinted upon the helmet’s frontal glass, also detailing his heartbeat, the status and health of his  physique, and the oxygen levels of the suit. 

Into broad, breaking, and blinding daylight he waltzed after the seal from the ship’s main  airlock was infringed by him after the pull of an emergency lever by main gate. It was the only  door that could be opened in said way, every other just a dud. What was revealed on the other side  enchanted him beyond measure, the ambiance ahead of him saturated by an incomprehensible  serenity, his first, small step for Man given down the ramp that overhung diagonally downward  from his freighter. His body was peering through the door’s frame, the weapon in his grasp  weightless, as if it were not there, as if it was not necessary. He breathed against the sphere of his  helmet, humidity produced, fogging up the visor, scanning for a horizon, seeing nothing but  coalesced, sublimely rosy vegetation that was unscathed by the crashing, blazing and now latent  beast. Beyond the vegetation and around the vessel were also the skyscraping trees, a quick glance  upward assuring him that, indeed, they soared as high as mountains on Earth, their branches  extending between each of its brethren, some interconnected, others so wide apart, but never  enough to allow the common occurrence of dales thru the coppices. He was dwarfed by everything,  by everything except the flowers that bloomed all around him by shrubs, grounded as him, the man  slowly walking down the ramp as he locked eyes with one flower that possessed a nebulous  semblance to his beloved mother’s Cantutas.  

It was lankier than him, at least 7’1”, its four, wide, long, and furling sea-green mottled  petals branching off and upward of its purple-haired, awkwardly veiny, and transparent stem,  through which a neon-cerulean liquid coursed, nourishing the budding coronate-shaped, sun seeking floret at the center of the four petals, decorous pollen glands expertly hidden in the pit of  the tubulated crown. He wanted to peer down into the flower’s tube like a curious boy and his  curious dog would peer down a haunted well. Hypnotized as if by it, he ambled to it, his legs giving  full ascents, walking difficult on the soil, his feet’s traction upon it reminiscent of snow, the added  roots, vines, and other entanglements of vegetation further complicating matters, but he sailed on being the space sailor he was, circumventing obstacles like boulders, smaller, fallen and juvenile  trees that had failed to secure their own patch of land.  

The trees here fought for territory, or joined forces, clearly, their own roots wiggling about  the land in search of better nutrients, of a better grasp at the planet’s cooling core. Beneath the  ground, roots clashed silently, their movements slacken, nonviolent, florid, unseen by the Captain.  Each step took him closer to the flower, enamored, wanting to caress its soft, soft petals the same  way he had last caressed his beloved wife that last night they had joined their roots and made love.  The duty at hand was forgotten, the bidding to revise the engines, their spreading impairment, the  flaming wreckage behind, a pillar of smoke rising and vanishing altogether from it as if the sky  had a limit. The lofty, purple-barked trees were sucking in the CO2 emitted by the smoldering  ruins of his diseased whale, thin, blueish tendrils eating at the smoke, movement detected and  produced by the trees, their branches wiggling and undulating rhythmically as their trunks also  shook, leaves and petals falling therefore, the Captain frightened by the shaking earth and the  wriggling roots that surged and moved about the condensed, challenging terrain. 

“What’s going on?!” he shouted, as if someone could hear him, the unsettling shuddering stopping as soon as it came, the rain of flora continuing for a second or two more before a rustle  of blue fruit bushes sounded by his left auricular device. The helmet provided clear-cut, crisp and  surreal audio quality, thankfully, which only ensured that his intervention was immediate,  swiveling hastily around on his boots, his laser blaster rifle wielded in his arms, its weight once  more felt, its purpose restored, no longer as light as a flower’s glittery, serene petal.  

“Who’s there?! Reveal yourself at once to the Space Colonization Navy of the Peruvian  Parliament! By my given authority, I implore you!” he demanded to know, his words useless and  perplexing to the creatures that observed him remarkably intrigued behind a faint net of heavy leafed shrubs. The creatures’ wide, mauve eyes blinked sensually slow and softly as they gawked,  quiet, inaudible, having petals for eyelids, brushed stems for eyelashes, their upward-eddying sharp-petaled flower-heads concealed scandalously while by their two faces dangled a bofruit,  from the Akenchuan family of xeno-berries. They were known as kobaltberries, their mirror-like  skin giving a lateral view of the magnificent, svelte, well-sculpted, lecherous, fae-featured  flowerets discerned by the visor’s scanners as nothing more than the mythical florid-humanoid  femmeflora species of Aewulnum flowerets. Mention of them briefly through witchcraft conceived outlines and illustrations in a witch’s accursed incantation book could be appreciated  by any arch-witch of the Amazonians, but none had expected them to be real. His finger was away  from the trigger, coming in peace but prepared, ready to negotiate than preferring to fire upon whatever skulked behind those bushes, the Captain a scientist and altruist foremost, a soldier  second. He could not see them well from his position nor had he dared to take a step forward to  enhance the poetic imagery afore him, fingers curling nervously around the under-barrel of his  blaster, a faded, muffled ringing of a bell distracting him, but he did not remove his gingerbread brown eyes from the femmes camouflaged at the rear of the band of bushes. That is, until one  emerged, suddenly, airily, rising from her concealment to yield a spectacle. He was breathless  when he attained her, honored, the blaster lowered, pointed to the soil, the space-borne Captain  quaking in his boots not of fear, but of overwhelming bewilderment, having never seen a feminine,  flora-xeno in his entire existence.  

“Wh—What are you? Identify yourself …” he murmured, his radio-filtered voice  attempting fruitless communication, the lissome and pliant creature tilting her head slightly in  confusion, just as strangely engrossed as before, the rest of her body slender, extravagant, caked  and composed of pink-shaded shrubberies, petals and long leaves adorning the length of her thin  appendages, rolling up just at her wrists, at the joints of her leafed legs, her weight nonexistent,  vines and orchid-colored lianas serving as her awe-inspiring jewelry. Her thin, stretched out, elf 

like ears, which were prickled up by the sides of her head, were sharp leaves, too, their tips  slumped. Upon her placid, noble face, she had plump, rosy leaves to form her sparkling and springy  lips, softer than human skin, pursed up salaciously, tempted to go agape for a phallus. From the  peak of her petaled, rose-like heads protruded two antennae varnished with pollen secretors that  were easily nipped by any gentle breeze, spreading her mind throughout the planet, her essence.  She was fully nude, her sister as well, just like the planet had intended for them to be, her bust  formidable and endowed despite her inherent, elegant petiteness, nascent florets for swollen  nipples, bumpy, seeded circles for areolas, like that of a sunflower’s. Beneath, in the forbidden,  floral nest betwixt her leafy, long and beguilingly chiseled violet legs, an unbloomed bud lingered  with a slit diving further between her supple thighs, vanishing from sight. The more he stared, the more surreal it was to him, noticing now how the creature approached with its gay gait, gracefully  nonchalant, each of her steps across the devastated dale noiseless, a feathery, titillating whisper,  the tranquil flora-woman glissading to him in great, elastic bounds. Matías froze, completely  stilled, once she was peering through his bubbled helmet at him, her complex, outlandish structure  of a body hard to get a grasp on, a sudden rise occurring at his crotch, a beast tugging at military 

grade fabric, a tent imminent in his space-suit’s lower-half due to an unanticipated arousal he tried  suppressing, terror nearly nonexistent now. In his arms, he did not hold a weapon, but a flower  again, allowing the creature to inspect him further, as he eyed the petals of her head, what he  assumed was her floral mane, noticing how they originated from the bridge of her pointed, alluring  nose.  

“Mother,” she susurrated in her tongue, melodic, the chords of a harp sounding from the  innards of her sylphlike throat. “He does not breathe out fire,” she continued, circling him, her  sister emerging from the bush as well, the shyest of the two, smaller than her older florafemme  sibling.  

“What are you saying?” he asked her, his head the only fragment of his body to move with  her, disregarding her flower-sister, though aware. Then, a grip at the back of his helmet, what held  its seal and bonded it with the rest of the space-suit, alerted him and had him recoil in defense,  turning around and away, some ground made between him and the flower-faes.  

“Oh, wait, wait. Y—You cannot remove my helmet. I don’t know if it’s safe to breathe  here yet. I don’t even know if you two are harmless,” he informed, matter-of-factly, throwing out  a scan with his visor to begin assessing the atmosphere’s quality, the readings returning sooner  than later to inform him that oxygen made up at least 85% of the planet’s atmosphere. With so  many plants depending on the oxygen, especially these flora-women, it was not a surprise. It was  odd to see that there were not any other creatures around, not even a flightless bird, an aerial frog,  a six-legged elk, or a meager, three-tailed feline with gecko-paws. There were, however, iris 

colored bees, their lilac honeycomb nests high in the trees, harmless, lacking stingers because  evolution had not required them to defend themselves here for over a millennia—what would they  defend themselves against? Here, the bees lived in an interdependent relationship alongside the  Aewulnum flowerets, pollinizing them in exchange for their periwinkle honey, which the flora 

femmes themselves ate as a treat, not as their main sustenance, the light of the three, red dwarfs their one, true source of alimentation via a radically overdeveloped process of photosynthesis that  eclipsed the Earther’s process by a grand margin.  

“The air is breathable…,” he remarked somewhat mystified, tempted to remove his helmet,  to take a good whiff of the atmosphere for himself, a voice telling him that it would cost him  dearly. The flora-fae eyed him, approaching again as if instinctually, her sister at his rear, joining  her to seize the seal of the helmet again, its clamp. Gripping vines sprouted out of their blue leaf 

nailed fingertips to grasp it and pull on it, a release of compressed, sizzling air ensuing, a light thud  heard once more on the ground, the flower ladies glancing down with their violet-jeweled eyes to  find his dropped blaster rifle. Right after, his hands aided them in the removal of his helmet, placing  it next to the blaster to then turn and face them both. He took a lungful, the immediate, permeating 

fragrance of the flower-women inundating his nostrils, a floral scent as fragrant as a rose’s  pleasantly invading him, becharming him instantly, pupils dilating, eyes widening, the quality of air better than that of Earth’s. A comparison blew it out of the water entirely. This was oxygen. He  breathed and breathed, eyes closed, his skin struck suddenly by a mosquito-like prick, alerting him,  eyes opening to find that the women had been banished from his perception, his frantically twisting  head scanning his surroundings for them, his search fruitless, calling out to them loudly, but no  answer was there. When he remembered the plant he had first seen upon walking down the ramp  of his freighter, he spiraled around to return to it, befuddled as he found it was no longer enrooted  where it had been, the gun and the helmet by his feet.  

Days passed living within the crashed freighter with the airlock open to breathe.  

Matías did not grow hungry because he ate from the twenty-year-long stowage of food  rations aboard the damage-contained vessel, accustomed to the same ration he had eaten the last  ten years—white rice and pork. Showering was problematic without power, however, but upon  further investigation of the woodlands, he came across a river peppered with pebbles and small  boulders upon which frogs, if the planet had them, could perch themselves to await their soaring  prey. Into the shallow, cyan river he plunged fully naked, his suit folded neatly by its banks with  its helmet atop the pile.  

The temperatures were not searingly hot as he had expected, not too cold either, just mild  enough for bathing. He was free to scrub at his respectably muscly arms with his personal sponge,  his hirsute chest cleansed, his legs brushed, even the phallus he had not caressed tenderly in so, so  long received love, the flower-women from three days before having burgeoned in him a yearning  for rapture he had not been struck by since he left his wife on Earth. Truth be told, it was a  remarkable feat he was not too worried anymore about whether or not the ship just a one-hundred  meters from him as he coolly cleansed himself, specifically its nuclear-reactor, had a fatal  meltdown and detonated like a nuke. It was better to die than remain stranded here, without his  wife. He would not see Cristofer anymore at the local pub to share two or three pints of craft-beers  with him. He would not get to play with his brother’s children, Daniela and Jacinto on the  weekends. He would not get to spend a lovely evening with himself, staring at the sunsetting  horizon, basking it in while next to his dearest daughter, Luciana, while she made sandcastles,  thinking her father would be the proudest. His emotions bled from his body painfully slow, oozing  out of the pores of his mind to fall and sprinkle into the running, teal river, its water comforting  him, the froth from his soap taken away by it as it fell from his body, too.  

“Ay, Bárbara, how can I get out of this one? The ship’s wrecked. Maldita sea, the ship’s  wrecked. The embryos are gone, I know—all of them. Carajo. I just don’t know,” he confessed to  her, from Chuvushia XII to Earth, unreachable, his wet hands in his sodden, curly, brown and  shaggy hair, flustered and despairing. “I don’t have the answer for this one. You remember that  Chemistry test you were taking in 2126? The one you left one blank question in because you just  did not know the formula for it? You tried getting that formula from your head. You dug in it. You  clawed out your own brain matter to get it. I remember, Bárbara, and that is exactly what I’m  doing now. It hurts to think so much and not know the answer, to be so smart and yet have my  actions be in vain because I’m fatefully doomed,” he murmured melancholically, sobbing, his  saline tears wringing unto the fresh, sweet water of the bubbling, dainty and meek river, shoulders  rising and descending as he leaked, broken, his glass shards welcomed by the river every time he  spoke. “No sé, no sé, no sé,” he repeated her words on the last hours of her exam, shaking his head, the one she was given another chance for the next year after battling for the right. “I don’t have a  second chance here. Whatever sick test this is, it is my grave,” he decided, the soothing current  and the depth of the river inviting him to lay, to float what he could so he could stare into the tree  trunk and leaf-littered skies, the canopy so far away from him, the clouds today at least dispersed  enough so that he could see some of the heightened flowers that bloomed from the branches.  

“Matías …” suddenly a voice came, womanly and familiar, a splash of teal water exercised  as he rocketed immediately unto his rear, panicked and desperate, a never struck, hands beneath  water supporting his weight. Pollen had been released. It scattered in the air.  

“¿Bárbara?” he asked out in return, hopeful, color returning to his pale, strained, Peruvian face, knowing that voice. He heard it drunk at college parties, heard it when he swore her vows to  him, heard it when she giggled each time after a dumb jest from him regarding potatoes. It sounded  like Bárbara’s and he was too sure of it, betting on his life it was her, zipping eyes trying to acquire  her figure in the rich, rouge shrubberies all-around, to put her imagery upon the voice. He ensured  he did not forget her by placing a picture of her on his cockpit’s glass, just a glance away from  him. 

“Here I am,” she responded, a wispy, low purr, Matías’ head choosing West as its preferred  direction as it came face to face with a stupefying presentation, his Earthen wife strutting toward  him in the flesh, her milky, sun-smouched, and tear-shaped udders swaying and heaving with each  prance, their stout skin rippling, her majestic hair a spatial cataract of obscurity that flowed down  her shoulders and angelically curved back, her steps silent. 

“How can this be?” he questioned, terrified but enraptured, a net of lustful haze cast on his  thoughts as blood was pumped into his veiny, clamoring cock, the Captain absentminded.  

“Don’t question it, my love,” she murmured back, taking a splashing step into the river, the  surface distorting them, another issued, rushing through the river to embrace him as if she hadn’t  seen him in so long, pressing her breasts against his burly, hirsute chest, glued onto him, digging  her head and her lightly browned, plump lips into the nape of his neck, one impassioned kiss given.  The thrilling peck coursed and swelled through him like a rogue wave thereafter, captivated,  thankful, his sheathed member slithering out of its cocoon, its engorged head piercing the tension  of the water’s surface, peeking through, stretching out further.  

“Is this really you?” he queried, battling the temptations to give in, but the pollen had  inundated the environment, microscopic, her mind in his thoughts, rooting itself in him so  lethargically.  

“The Bárbara you kissed in the Cathedral of the Virgin of Rosary in Abancay, sí,” she  assured, confident, the giggliest she has ever been, mischievously bubbly, tracing her surreal,  human fingers across his chest before that one hand rose to cradle his cheek, caressing it like a  flower. No more was needed, nay, no more. They united at once, kissing hectically in the shallow  waters of the river, just now near its right bank, the crazed lovers knowing no cease-fire, her lips  just same as ten years ago, her body, though curiously wraithlike on this planet, suffusing the same  warmth he had had the decency of experiencing alongside her on their Earthen bedstead. Nothing had changed. He groaned into her as their lips clashed like petals would, stroking their softness,  embracing her, sifting his fingers through her copious, fair, shimmering, onyx and seamlessly interminable hair, his cock throbbing now underneath his wife’s succulent, thick thighs. A hand  snaked around to her rear to grasp her rotund arse, the skin smooth, undoing himself while he lost  himself to this planet’s mind-altering ruses. The pollen had been released by none other than the  Aewulnum floweret, the first of the two sisters to approach him three days earlier. She had been tailing him all this time. After she had consumed mineral water from the river through her freely  retractable violet roots, she knew all she needed to know about him. For three days, ever since she  smelled him like he smelled her, ever since she marked him with the prickle of her one and only  bodily thorn, she had been stalking him so that she could reproduce with him for the benefit of the  planet and its complex ecosystems.  

It was not Bárbara kissing him. He would not know until it was too late that it was Khantua  Buxifolia, a one-thousand-twenty-seven-year-old Aewulnum floweret at the peak of her youth  seeking a flower-lover. He’d be her gardener now, madly in love with his blossom, as madly as he  cherished Bárbara. No longer were his reveries untainted, her floral perfume overflowing in his  nostrils, the pollen stuck to their bristles, poisoning him with glamour, the idealistic conception of  beauty and eternal servitude to the one Great Mother of Chuvushia XII. Each time he breathed, he  breathed harder with the strain of copulation upon his thumping, pumping heart. Only after a  handful of minutes of kissing did the two separate, his vision obscured, the Peruvian, human skin  of his beloved migrating toward rosier, recognizable tints right before his eyes, the weightlessness of her body sound, water and honey coursing through her to form sap, making sense, but he was  too enticed, to wrapped up in this flora-femme that was descending down his hairy chest. She was  planting kisses along the way that would summon flowers after ninety days, till she reached his  bulging, thrillingly girthy and long spear of veiny, Peruvian flesh, her head a flower’s head again,  the pollen-crawling antennae pulsating slightly as she continued to snigger melodically like a harp,  charming and delectable in an elegant way, a wet, rosen petal for a tongue coming out. It was  shaped like an inversed arrowhead leaf, a peaceful snake’s titillatingly forked tongue, lapping  ravenously at his lance’s hairy foundation, avoiding his seed-brimming, leathery sac of balls. From  the base to the top, she sailed with that petal-tongue, tawny, cold sap leaking from it to lubricate  him as she did so, those petaled eyelids slowly crashing down and rising as she stared innocently  at him, ebbing and flowing like a frothy wave by a beach, aiming to please and to relieve, his blues  known by her, his fate unfair. Reaching the apex of his throbbing, outrageous cock, she swallowed  him into her petal-coated throat, evocative of flesh, indeed, just softer, the softest softs, just as  damp, the battle between cold and warmth an otherworldly, fondly exasperating and overwhelming  feeling. The Captain grumbled of satisfaction like a virile man as he let his head fall back to float  in the water, allowing her to bloom as she longed. The nectar her petal-tongue radiated dripped  onto the river, falling off his bushy thighs, drifting in wobbly, oily bunches, isolated from the blue green aqua as she prompted him to succumb, to give in.  

His cock was deep-rooted in her stem’s hugging, milking and soft flora-esophagus, a wave  of petals dancing across his length blissfully as it ploughed through her throat, Khantua bobbing  up and down upon it rhythmically, gagging without challenge, slobbering it up with her thickened,  viscous flower-sap. The man’s crotch was enflamed, muscles strained as she, a nimble, tactful 

embodiment of gracious bafflement in the form of a floral xeno, chaunted all the while, filling up  their immediate surroundings with divine, corded resonations that rivaled a heavenly, symphonic orchestra, challenging the fizzy stream they performed their pre-coitus within. However, her  chanting was muffled since her petaled, oral cavity was occupied with its revered purpose, inviting  him to release, to send forth his seed so that she may reproduce via her mouth. Her petal-cunt was  another corridor for impregnation, too, throbbing between her leafy, vine-shrouded legs,  effervescent, its grandiloquent musk a scent so rapturous and unremitting in its spread through the  air. Her flower-cunt wished to fully bloom, a redolent upsurge governing the Captain. She was in  the process of booming, her soddening sap flowing out of her petaled labia lips, her budding clit  so sensitive, sopping wet, lines of her oily nectar running down the river, purifying it with its taint.  

Matías could not withstand such an onslaught on his cock, overwhelmed with sensation,  trembling and breathing profusely, sweating, the beads on his foreheads rolling this time, gravity  affecting them, his heartbeat rapid drums of war. Then the flood gates were broken and out came  ropes of pearly-white seed, rope upon rope of the viscous, searing man-nectar, threatening to  scorch her throat, but it wouldn’t, the flora-woman’s petal-lips forming a seal around the base of  his shaft, swallowing every tendril of white as the Captain shook. Water splashed, feet fidgeted  and fought and his head plunged itself underwater from the sheer intensity of his first climax, the  aphrodisiacal effect from the pollen having set in fully in his poisoned body, the transdermal invading sap further heightening the sensory points on his aching, life-giving, Peruvian, curved  cock, leaving him no room for hesitance. He made love to her because he loved, indeed, this flower,  entranced by her features and her performance, both carnal and musical, primitive. When the  flooding in her throat ceased, he quelled, the waters gushing past his body, wanting to let go of the  rocks and pebbles he had confiscated in search of clemency. He wanted to drift, the post-coitus,  misty bliss ubiquitous, feeling lighter. When she retracted herself from him, from her mouth  emerged his receding, sap-smeared and seed-coated cock, slithering out like a worm, one last nick  and lap of her forked petal-tongue caressing his still seeping cockhead, teasingly, lovingly.  

“It is time, Mother,” Khantua said in Harpanian, her voice no longer that of Barbara’s,  rising over Matías in his inebriated state of languor, in his vulnerability as he thought he had just  been orally satiated by his true love, who was praying to God for his safe return back to Peru.  Illusions. Mirages. Poetic entrancements. Khantua’s impermeable leafy, overwrought, flowery,  lavender, limber and fae figure dwarfed him as he daydreamed, positioning herself above his shaft,  the aphrodisiacs from her pollen, the floral scent that enveloped and imprisoned him, allowing it  to remain erect, rock-hard, pushing it beyond its biological human limitations. With a flowery,  nimble-fingered, and graceful hand, she obtained his cock, aligning it with the thick-petaled labia  of her sap-dripping, clenching foyer, leading him into her soon-to-bloom flower-cunt as she went  down on it, slickening it up all the way down to its base as she let out a harpic, prolonged croon of  pleasure.  

Matías groaned audibly, stridently, reawakened and snapped out of his stupor, his jaw  plummeting, the wet flower’s flora-vagina consuming him wholly, Khantua’s leafy, pacifying  hands pressing onto his chest, their lightness exerting no force upon him that would encourage him  to sink, her wide waist, never used to bear a child, straddling him as it arose and plunged against  El Capitán’s daunting flesh-lance, impaling herself on its eight inches. The innards of her vaginal  passage were wreathed with petals much denser, much spongier, as if she had just charged him  into the fountain of her flower sap, her fluorescent honeypot. Oh, and how vivaciously she mewled  and melodiously intoned for him, philharmonic and plangent, a genuine femme-connoisseur of the most finely conjured wails of delight bewitching him with ease, vines and roots sprouting as they  once had from the tips of her willowy, sprightly fingers, slithering through the forests of his chest’s  hair like serpents, an oversight that would conquer him. Water splashed and fell off her, sticking  to him, meshing with the sweat he gave, ridden beautifully by her as she began spreading more of  her roots on him, wriggling around his body quite steadily. The femme-flower was grinding herself  against him as best she could while doing so, making life, making love, pounding herself into him.  He swore he would hear the impious clapping of meat that is widely recognized amongst humans,  but he only heard the gentlest thuds of her verdure against him, sounding like a harmless slap  against a shrub. Curiosity bothering him, he shot his hands toward her thighs to grasp them firmly,  feeling her for the first time with them, caressing her, astounded by the non-rasping, luxuriant and  petaled, silky skin, scurrying upward to her moving waist, thrusting into her, eyeing her with his  hazy vision, unaware that she was gazing upward while she rode him, the summit of her flower head developing its petals, shepherding them out, seeking the sunlight, tickled by the few stray  trickles of pillars of light from the three red dwarfs that stabbed through the skyward canopy.  

“Become the Ever-Father,” she mumbled through Harpanian mewls and chord-strikes, her  breasts’ nipples beginning to curlicue, star-shaped petaled flowers emerging on each of her  bountiful, sap-filled fertile dunes, her arms extending outward after she had severed the self scurrying roots that had sprouted from her fingers, the flower-femme’s leafy feet enrooting  themselves beneath the waters of the river as he thrust into her, forever planting herself there with  him inside of her, pumping, pumping, her movements just bound to conclude, her climax  imminent, stimulating, buds emerging from different parts of her body, from the lianas that spun  about her body. She was near, and so was he.  

“Mother, he is here, and he does not breathe fire,” Vibrant, orange-rose, shallow, bowl-like  shaped florets surged by her hips, above her blossoming, pulsating clit, a hooded, helmeted,  forward-drooping color-changing petal growing over it to conceal it and protect it as she trembled,  her pollen-tipped antennae incandescent, shining, her flower-head unraveling more and more. She  was bound for her peak, absorbing that cock of his, welcoming him into her womb, one last thrust  the decisive blow, condensed ropes of alabaster man-seed poured out, overflowing in her, planting  the seed that would grant new life. Then, suddenly, there was a pop, her rosy petals at last surging  fully, unfolding to produce a deep-bowl shaped, shrouding flower, her floral mane blooming as  her singing became shriller, though no less melodical. He was battling against his climaxing  groans, jerking wildly like an animal in her, his eyes out of orbit, just whites, Matías now in the  seas of rhapsody without a compass. He was the one to move last, Khantua allayed and rigid, her  crouched, floral body posed with open arms cluttered with funnelform peach-rose flowers, her  eyes’ curtains lowered, the noble flower’s complexion poised, caught in its last stage of  expression—exquisite contentment. 

The roots on him had not stopped growing. They writhed around his body, garlanding him,  the vines and roots sprouting flowers of their own, like hers, though diverse. It wasn’t till the  stimulant pollen’s effects were waning leisurely that he reacted to the atrocious reality that he was  being cocooned and sepulchered seemingly alive with her. His diminished state impeded him from  liberty, budging blandly against her, his cock still in her womb, which had shut itself permanently  around his base. It was too late. Eventually, he’d be coated in the lush lines and fronds, the silence  disturbing, but the pollen had him in her grasp once more, her mind never leaving his, intertwining. 

“Our Ever-Father has reached his blooming zenith.  

Rejoice, sisters of the suns, rejoice! 

Oh, Matriarch, blessed day!  

Blessed day!  

Become a sun-child, Orquídeo.  

Become from darkness,  

Light. 

Mother shall welcome you into her flowerbed, into her Ever-garden,” Khantua spoke again  in the form of a ritual, her full, petite frame glittering after having mated successfully at last, her  thriving form a lush, festooned overabundance of immaculate, near-sacrosanct creation, her  forgiving luminosity muddling his vision further, her metaphoric outgrowths and blossoms  incomprehensible to him, but they were jubilant, so happy to be born, to feast on that light that  came from above. The trees around were quivering again like they had three days earlier, this time  curling away from where the concluding coitus, the lanky, towering trees raising up their branches  altogether to allow light to penetrate the dell by the river from a small, small sky-hole that bled  light like a stage’s spotlight upon them, red light from only one dwarf, Eveskus, the darkest of the  three red brothers, covering him, the clouded, rosy sky mottling out its two brothers, every flower  that grew from her and him veering their petals and heads toward the sun, embraced by it, hugged  by the Ever-Father. Khantua received His warming affection, shedding a tear of sapphire sap, her  One Sapphire Tear hardening instantly and gluing itself unto her leafed, orotund cheeks. She cried  of pure joy, absolutely blooming, her mind exposed, her body one coursing with bright power as  she embraced back her cosmic, uplifting Patriarch. 

With the roots now up to his neck, he preferred to gape at the immense poetry ahead of  him to welcome this serene misfortune that had become a fortune, not understanding her tongue  of petals and flowery invocations. And yet, he was captivated by her musical performance of a  language, quietened, a shameless death embraced, closing his eyes as the vines slithered ominously  and slowly over them until they suited him completely, his flesh hidden, a root-cocoon of a man,  a Father, mankind’s last hope no longer fearful. Atop his head formed a bulge, roots rising,  intertwining, curling into one another to form a helix strand. It was the stem for a nascent,  upcoming flower, growing, an infant bud appearing, lengthening, and reddening, another coming  out along the rising, curling stem, another as well. Verdant, earthly leaves led along the stem, his  mother’s celestial and beloved Cantutas flourishing in seconds from his head when it took them  months on Earth to do so, still dormant and withering aboard his ship, brought in at last into  Mother’s Ever-garden, a Peruvian-native flower married to its exalted, flourishing, Aewulnum  flora-femme under the consecrated crimson light.  

“He is with us Mother, He is with us,” Khantua murmured melodiously, fulfilled.  

“And with us He blooms,” another voice returned, the trees curling back to minimize the  gap through which a crimson sunbeam poured through, shrinking the one ray, the entire forest  honing it in on the center of Khantua’s vulnerable cognizance, the flower-head’s epicenter. It was  a wispy essence of sorts, malleable, white light interacting with the red one that stroked it, the trees  shaking their branches, a slow, drifting rain of petals, flowers and leaves peppering the majestic,  uncanny and transcendental scenery as the fae-featured, beautiful and stunning flora-creature beamed a smile, the Cantutas ascending, pulled by a mild magnetic force to come to kiss the xeno dryad’s lips for the first and last time, united.  

“May the Light guide you, Sunsister Khantua,” the Matron spoke, her mellifluous, harpic  voice encouraging her daughter to proceed, a deceased woman’s wish accomplished by her  spacefaring, quiescent son. 

“In the light,  

may you find Her. 

In the misty Ever-gardens, 

may She cool you. 

Bloom, Ever-Father, 

And let no gloom fool you.”