Lake Austin

Time: 11am CST (12 noon EST)

Location: Britain Hall

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Light fell down from the deep dark and broke against the surface of the waves. It spilled down into the silence, softly it swept across the open spaces and seemingly brought the stars to the bottom, so they could seep into it. It was one of them after all, in all it’s raging tempestuous tenacity, and its warmth great fingers that thrummed against the things below. The sun rolled across the water as it looked onward.

At the edges of the water there were thin spindly and thick roots. They turned and shied from it at first. It was new in the darkness. A strange foreigner in a distant land, unwanted, unwelcome and too different. Yet overtime the roots soaked it up too as they had the air first, and then the water second. Until the root stretched into long thick limbs, and a strong heavy trunk. So that they flowered when the light broke against them, and grew green lengths against their glimmering graces. And the green burgeoning with a new filling heaviness because like aching dreams that danced in the dark, that rose in places and opened sharp pink blue petals to the light. They drank greedily from it, gorging themselves on the sun and drunk from it would close in it’s absence until it returned. It the only thing that could sustain them.

Near the water a wispy, rasped voice spoke. It stood near the tree and touched it with spindly light advances. “Hush. You will be different now.” The melody crawled along the heavy length.

The tiny blooms waited and listened. It was different than the cold harsh wind, and the empty lonely rock that pressed against the roots.

“Wake up and stay for a while. The different is good too. It is harsh and vivid, not lonely and quiet. But the discordance is pleasant if you listen.” The raspy voice spoke, it growing sweeter by the moment. Like something sugary and tart.

Underneath the gentle strokes, the blooms opened slowly, staring at first the dark night sky and the ten thousand pinpricks set out against it. The blooms stared at it and listened the sweet voice that washed against it. It waited and listened: it learned patience. When the light came again, the heavy warmth that spilled on the water’s edge the blooms nearly closed, except for the insistence of the now melodious voice brushed ever so gently against them.

So the blooms waited for the sun in it’s stark, sharp, painful brightness to grow high into the dark star filled sky, until it made them wash out. Until the sky was no longer quite as dark, or quite as star filled, or even quite as empty and cool. It was warm now, and the blooms drank greedily of it again. The outside of it’s bark felt warm to the touch, and somewhere in the distance were strange sounds it had never heard before. All of these things it had missed before as it slumbered. But it no longer felt tired as before, as if it too needed to rest when the brightness came. The world felt like the voice had proclaimed: different.

As the sun fell upon the heavy bark it a mottled mixture of deep blues and blacks, freckled all over with bits of white. Reflecting the place from which it came, once in the dark only and covered with stars. And over time it had grown from the tiny sapling, into a strong giant that covered the great shore. From the size of a pebble, into something that towered over the cities of the otherlings, and even their tunnels that stretched onward for miles was tiny in comparison. For where they crawled in the earth, it numbered a great many times more in the sky. But then they were not the first.