An Abundance of Sunrise

I emerged from Nemigan's cellar the next morning feeling more refreshed than I had in weeks. Nemigan was sitting on the front steps, looking around at the valley. It was that blue time just before sunrise, when there's enough light to see by, but none of the other colors have woken up yet.* He looked up with a smile, and I saw that he was wearing an odd device on his head. It was obviously handmade: a twisted length of wire held a small, flat river pebble over his right eye, like half of a pair of stone spectacles. The pebble had a perfectly round hole worn through the center.

We didn't have enough language in common for me to ask what it was, but my curiosity must have been visible on my face. With a grin, he removed the odd assembly and handed it to me. Due to the decidedly non-crocodilian shape of my head, I couldn't actually wear it; instead, I simply held the stone up to one eye and covered the other.

The dim monochrome shade of the valley was instantly alive with color and motion. Globes of light pulsed around the fruit on the trees, full of small, scurrying specks of even brighter light. Glistening bronze creatures perched, snail-like and imperious, on the charms hanging from the branches. Giant, transparent snakes rushed between the trees, rustling the leaves and grass, splitting into smaller snakes to pass around a trunk and then joining together again, snapping playfully at the swarms of red-winged beetles that rose from rocks still warm from yesterday's sun. There were sleeping faces in the trees, old and alien, and more in the clouds, and in the spray rising from the tiny waterfalls in the stream. In the east, where the sun was about to rise, I could see - not hear, but somehow see - the thundering of distant hooves, or possibly wings, and the jubilant cry of some great beast ready to burst up over the dunes…

I awoke to find myself lying on the ground, my head spinning. Nemigan had one scaly hand on my shoulder. He looked mildly concerned, but mostly amused - as if he'd just watched a child getting itself into some distressing but ultimately harmless form of trouble. The pebble was, once more, seated firmly on his own head. A sliver of sunlight from the East was just beginning to turn the trees green. I got up, only slightly shaky, and we went inside to make breakfast.

Nemigan, Chak, and Karlishek had a brief conversation before we left. I could only pick out a word here and there, enough to tell that it was mostly thanks and goodbyes, with a few directions thrown in. Nemigan looked over at me at one point and said something with a chuckle.

When we left the valley, I asked the others if Nemigan had mentioned that morning. Chak was back in his sealed wagon for the trip across the dunes, but I could hear him laughing softly through the fabric. Karlishek gave me an amused quirk of his antennae.

"Not much," he replied. "He just asked, 'didn't anyone ever tell him not to look at the sun?'"

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* Blue, the cousin of midnight black, never gets much sleep.