The Light in Aquala

The trail they were now on was the one they had climbed earlier that day, but the evening had transformed it completely.

During the day, they could see every root, stone and tangled vine but now darkness was covering the path as they ran. The faint Neon glow of the vegetation became increasingly noticeable, and they instinctively knew this was important.

Mara noticed a huge number of small flowers, clustered alongside the trail that had been pale violet earlier in the day. Now their petals were purple with a faint turquoise light on the edges. She stopped without warning.

Lena glanced back. "What's wrong?"

Mara pointed. The flowers were moving, their petals opening and closing slowly, while the turquoise light traveled from one flower to the next.

"I’ve never seen any of these flowers move like this, and they were all a completely different color when we walked past them earlier today. It’s amazing, they are even glowing with light now."

Lena leaned closer. "Everything tonight is new and we need to keep moving."

Mara ignored the comment and watched carefully. The glow moved again from one flower to the next and Mara's scientific curiosity immediately returned. She reached for her instrument.

"No Mara, we don’t have time for this. We need to get back." Lena exclaimed, her voice full of exasperation.

."But I need to get a record of this before it’s too late.” pleaded Mara.

Lena hesitated and her expression remained determined as she gently reassured her. "We need to get home first. On the way back, we’ll stop and you can take all the recordings you want. It is just too dangerous stopping in the middle of the jungle at night."

Mara listened to the jungle that was full of sounds: insects buzzing, night birds calling and the screeching from a troop of monkeys nearby. She knew her sister was right.

Before leaving, she quickly reached out and touched one of the petals gently with her fingertip. The turquoise glow intensified beneath her touch, spreading through the flower's delicate veins and into the stem. Mara watched, fascinated, as the color continued traveling downward into the leaves. She pulled her hand away and the glow remained.

"That's never happened before. The flowers have always responded to the Season change with their color gradually shifting over weeks, sometimes days. But this." Mara gestured at the flower, which was still carrying traces of turquoise. "This happened in seconds and it responded to me so quickly."

Lena frowned. "What does that mean?"

Mara was already reaching for her instrument again, this time with more determination. "I don't know yet but I need to take measurements and record this. It could be instrumental in figuring out what is causing all of the new phenomena we’ve seen tonight. It has to be related somehow."

This time Lena didn't argue, but kept watch while Mara worked, her eyes scanning the surrounding vegetation. The jungle was almost pitch black, full of the strange nighttime calls of creatures and her imagination started working overtime.

Mara's instrument hummed softly as she positioned it near the flower. A series of readings appeared on the small display, numbers and patterns that she'd seen before in different contexts but never combined quite like this. She frowned at the display, tapping the screen to bring up a reference file. "That's odd."

Lena looked over. "What is?"

Mara held up the instrument so Lena could see. "This pattern here, the frequency of the color change, the rate of diffusion through the plant tissue, matches something I recorded earlier this season."

"From where?"

"From the spectrometers at the Academy, when we first detected that the Season change was happening three weeks too early. The readings were unusual then since they didn't match anything in the historical records." She paused, looking at the flower, then back at her instrument. "Now I'm seeing the same pattern here, and I saw it near Aquala."

Lena absorbed this. "So what you're saying is whatever is causing these changes here really could be connected to what happened tonight at Aquala?"

"I can't know for certain yet." Mara tucked the instrument back into her belt. "But I really do think everything is related and this Season’s changes have caused Neon connections to be much stronger and they are spreading much quicker than usual."

A rustle came from somewhere in the undergrowth nearby. Both sisters tensed, turning toward the sound. A small creature emerged from beneath a broad leaf, a tiny lizard with iridescent scales that caught the light from their Neon glows. It paused, looked at them with bright black eyes, and then scurried across the trail. As it moved, its scales shifted from green to a purple and then to a turquoise that seemed to match the colors of the flowers.

Lena exhaled. "Even the lizards are changing."

"They're all responding to something powerful." Mara watched the creature disappear into the vegetation on the other side of the trail. "Nothing in the records at the Academy has ever been this powerful. I have absolutely no idea what could be strong enough to affect so many things over such a huge area so early in the Season"

They looked at each other with wide eyes, then Mara quickly packed up her equipment, they each took a long sip of water and continued running downwards back to the village, stumbling occasionally in the darkness of the jungle.