Invisible filaments glowed like a spider’s web in morning dew.

• +..Shining Tongues Merry solstice all!


• +..Alt


• +.. For the love of trees!

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Memory nudges me. I think of another cloudscape world from a few months back. I think of my first day out in the ship, before reaching the translation point and while my fever and broken leg were healing, when I said idly to the ship, ‘I wonder how I got through the farcaster here. My last memory was of a giant . . .’ The ship had answered by running a holo taken from one of its buoy cameras as it sat at the bottom of the river where we had left it. It was a starlight-enhanced image – it was raining – and showed the green-glowing arch of the farcaster and tossing treetops. Suddenly a tentacle longer than the ship came through the farcaster opening, carrying what looked to be a toy kayak draped about with a mass of riddled parasail fabric. The tentacle made a single, graceful, slow-motion twist and parasail, kayak, and slumped figure in the cockpit glided – fluttered, actually – a hundred meters or so to disappear in the thrashing treetops.
Simmons, Dan.