1.04-Spores of Adaxerxes

Get the Soundtrack ⁠here⁠: [Transcript]I must confess Adaxerxes is one of my more frequent stops. No shame if you’ve never heard of it. You buy an atlas from a Ugrian outpost and it’ll have the names of everything else in the quadrant. Just not that.Nothing remarkable there. Adxerxians don’t like to advertise. Small fellas, maybe sixty centimeters. Mostly alpine mountains watered with acid rain. PH of the whole planet is skewed that way. Couple friends there always like to make fun of my poncho when I visit. Ship gets a deep clean just from the ambient phosphoric acid. I like to chew chalk walking around to cut down on the effects. People call out to me on the street saying “Grimgag” which roughly translates to “he with a busy jaw.”Patina clouds drizzle copper sulfate coloring all the cooking fires turquoise. The locals like the catch spiced. I’ve grown a taste for it over the years but Kenigan likes to poke fun at how much I need to drink to cut heat.Behind the village are the Xerdika Mountains. Razor thin peaks tall enough to brush the limits of space. Only thing up there are the herjack spores. In what passes for summer on Adaxerxes you can see the capsules burst. The spores aloft are a flotilla of gold and bronze. Some drift down into the valley smelling as sweet as pepper flora. I remember the first time. Kenegin’s brother, Kehigai, woke me up at midnight, didn’t tell me where we were going, handed me a pack and started marching. We climbed so high the air got thin. Kehigai finally sat us down on an outcropping. The unhurried dawn started creeping up on us. Herjacks behind us started popping and the binary sunrise kissed the horizon. Frozen acid in the air turned the sky aqua-marine. Rays like fingers reach out and all of a sudden we’re in a glowing world. The spores dancing in the new day sun.When communes or Wrots or anyone asks why I’m on Adaxerxes so much, I tell them it’s an obligation. I do my best to make it as dry as possible. Maybe that way those precious sunrises can still belong to Kenegin and her family thousands of years from now.