By morning, the pale flowers around the stream had folded their petals against the ground. Nova had watched them standing upright the night before, so the change caught his attention before he even finished packing. The water still ran over the same dark stones, and the wind was hardly strong enough to move the grass. Yet every flower leaned east, as though something beyond the hollow were pulling at its roots.
"You'd think I'd be used to plants behaving strangely by now," he said.
Lunaris was occupied with a beetle crawling over his boot. The Auri, meanwhile, examined the flowers, then lifted its head toward the suspended ridges drifting above the plain. One of them had moved across the stars during the night. Its long underside now cast a narrow shadow over the hills to their north.
Nova followed its gaze. 'The ridge moves, and the plants move with it. Maybe they're feeling something I can't.'
