2.04 - Fruits of Divinity

[Transcript]Temis Beta has an orchard that was cozy enough. Client wanted a delivery sent to Trinity Breach out in the Alagda Quadrant. Ayin and Veshinai territory. Fulcrum diodes out to that part of Apotheosis are watched by Slavers. Hamark isn’t humanoid and Zery is amorphous when she wants to be. So I stayed behind on this one.Temis Beta is uninhabited. Swevor mite colonies organize seed pods on their own so I wasn’t surprised by the neat rows despite no one living on the planet. Or so I thought. Didn’t see any mites or their bore holes around the trees. Figured the ship landing had scared them away. But then I took a closer look at the trees.Starlight white leaves. Chains made of marble wrapped around their limbs. Skinless fruit hung from the boughs. Rows and rows of a ripe crop. I reached for one but hesitated, a sudden uneasiness grabbing hold of me like this wasn’t for me. Like I was being tested. Like I was being watched.Alert, I walked the soft regolith around the trees back to my landing site. Or I tried to. There was no clearing any more.Nothing. Even my footprints were gone. Just Rows and rows of ethereal fruit trees, all identical-ephemeral.It should’ve gotten dark. The suns overhead should have moved. Or had it always been just the one in this system?The sky was a bright teal and the air was sweet. I sat back against a tree. “I need to keep looking,” I told her. “Can’t. Rest. Yet.”Her palm cupped my face gently, soft as flower petals, then her arachnid eyes tense. Leaves blew by, drifting in and out of her figure like water over stones only this river was deep. Something vast, ideal, and unlike the grasping claims of a Wrot or Peraphim—divine. And then…hot sand. Windswept. Around me lay dunes, my back against a gnarled gyoshin stem withered and dead in the midst of that desert. Hamark and Zery were just as confused when they picked me up. Hadn’t they left me in the garden?Hallucination, Zery said. I would agree but there under the on ramp to the ship sat a beautiful, skinless fruit. A small piece of a paradise I was never meant to see.