Good morning all. I had very strange dreams last night. I can only remember it in flashes but it was something about good witches deciding to go evil. There was some sort of union meeting and there was vote. Three hundred and eighty six for and seventeen against. For some reason I was tallying the votes even though I wasn’t supposed to. Kind of wish I could remember the rest of the dream. But we must set it aside today and see what today’s prompt will bring. Are you ready? Then let’s go.
Again I think this is another one I will need to sit and think about. I kind of have a mental picture but no clear vision of where everything is going. Seems to be a theme this week. I kind of like the character though.
Thursday, November 17th: The sun was beginning to set.
The sun was beginning to set. The sky was streaked with rust brown stains as though the blue of the sky was water and the sun really just an iron plug. Garan stared at it. The great ball of yellow slipping down past the edge of the world. It was another day down. He lost count of how many it had been. At first, when he landed he tried to keep a tally.
He was diligent in carving a little line in his tally stick every day when he first arose. In those days he thought the sunset looked like crimson streamers. The reminded him of the feast day flags tied up in his home town during festival days.
Then, a few months in, Garan fell sick. He managed to pull through, mostly by forcing himself to drink fresh water and take in food even when he had no appetite for it. He knew the water would keep him hydrated but envisioned himself drowning the fire of his fever. On most days it felt as though he was just creating steam and expected it to come pouring out of his ears like an overheated kettle. Still even in his fevered delirium he remembered his training and kept drinking the fresh water. In fact there were several nights where he could have sworn he saw his old instructor standing over him reminding him to drink to keep from dehydrating and the eat to keep up his strength to fight the disease.
He pulled through although at the end he was as weak as a kitten. He used up the last of his supplies in his recovery and then concentrated on replenishing them from the island’s resources. He timed his illness well, in terms of the island’s cycles. It was probably the only thing that kept him alive.
Things were just beginning to flower when he crash landed here and made his way to shelter from the wreckage of his ship. Even with his illness his supplies lasted until the flowers turned to fruit and the first of the summer foods were ripe enough for him to eat. For those first weeks he grazed on the fresh, filling his belly and returning to strength. Then he concentrated on harvesting more than he needed for the day’s allotment so that he could have food to store for when the growth cycle ended.
By the time the plants died back, he had replenished his supplies and added a significant amount more to his stash than when he started. For a while he would eat well. The problem was that he didn’t know how long the store would need to last. This planet had barely been studied. Garan knew the flora and fauna and was able to separate the poisonous from the nutritious, but that had been a basic study all of them had been required to take. It was a just in case measure, meant to help them stay alive for the few days it would take for control to send a recovery team on the off chance his ship was lost with no supplies.
No one thought to tell him how long a year lasted on this planet or how the seasons ran. No one was expected to be here this long and Geran had been on enough planets at this point to know that each one kept to its own schedule.
He had been long enough here, even without knowing the exact tally, that he knew no one was coming for him.
Ten til Midnight 