Page 67 of Silver Slayer

Vallon swore me to secrecy about their exact location,she signed, with the delicate precision of someone choosing words the way you choose footing on uncertain ground. Then her expression shifted into more deliberate.But I know where Vennox’s hut is. I can take you there. If you want to wait for him.

The offer sat in front of me, simple and clear, and I am fairly certain I answered it half a second faster than someone uninterested would have.

“Sure,” I said. “Thanks.”

After dinner, I followed Elise out of the palace. The air beneath the dome remained balmy despite the fading light of the twin suns. It was not the living warmth of an evening breeze, but something captured and held. The translucent shielding seemed to absorb the heat of the suns and trap it within Huren along with the motionless air, giving the city the enclosed feeling of a vast terrarium.

The attack damaged much of Huren,Elise signed, pausing beside a section of pale stonework.Many buildings had to be rebuilt.

Only because she pointed it out did I notice the difference. Fresh stone blended almost seamlessly with the older walls, the repairs obvious only in the cleaner mortar and sharper edges. Children chased one another along the pathways as though nothing terrible had ever happened here. Warriors strolled unhurriedly. Laughter drifted from open doorways. The city had healed, even if the scars remained.

My attention drifted to the fist-sized stones set at regular intervals along the pathways. Each glowed with a cool bluish light that softened the coming darkness without the harshness of electric lamps.

“What are these rocks?”I asked.

Solaris rocks.Elise smiled and briefly touched one with her fingertips as we passed.They're a little like your glow-in-the-dark stuff on Earth. They soak up light from the twin suns during the day, then slowly give it back after suns-fall.

“Phosphorescence.” I nodded.“That explains all the rocks in the sconces inside.”

I looked farther down the winding path. Hundreds of softly glowing solaris rocks stretched through the city, bathing Huren in a peaceful blue radiance that felt strangely natural, as though the light itself belonged to the night rather than pushing it away.

The Yulineons damaged this section during the attack,Elise pointed out.Their weapons burned through the dome in several places. Huts were destroyed, the leatherworker’s hut was nearly lost, and part of the palace was struck.

My gaze lifted automatically toward the crystalline structure behind us. I could not identify where it had been damaged. Whatever section had splintered beneath the attack had been restored so carefully that the palace appeared whole.

All three clans helped rebuild,Elise signed.There was too much damage for Huren to repair alone.

The simple statement carried more weight than her expression revealed. She told me how not long ago, those clans had been divided by generations of suspicion and bloodshed. Now all three clans lived under the same dome, setting aside old border rivalries to battle their common enemies.

As if to prove what she said was true, two warriors passed us going in the opposite direction. One wore a Huren kiltus. The other wore the breechcloth of Clan Trisess. Their conversation remained relaxed as they disappeared toward the palace.

The activity around us gradually thinned as the pathways carried us farther from the palace and the communal buildings at its base. And the closer we came to its outer edge, the more my attention shifted beyond it.

The dome curved toward the ground ahead of us, its translucent surface becoming easier to see as the light faded. The jungle beyond remained visible, but never perfectly clear. A subtle wave moved through everything on the other side, bending trunks and foliage as though I were looking through heated glass.

I slowed without meaning to.

Beyond the translucent shielding, the Huren jungle crowded close to the city. Towering silver-barked trees disappeared into a canopy that no longer reflected the twin suns but glowed with its own soft blue luminescence. Layer upon layer of broad leavesshimmered overhead, bathing the forest in an ethereal light that came from the vegetation itself. Thick flowering vines coiled around the massive trunks and stretched from tree to tree, their pale blossoms glowing softly among the foliage while countless bioluminescent spores drifted lazily through the understory like tiny wandering stars.

The jungle looked nothing like the open forest surrounding Vala's ship on the anomaly planet. There were no long sightlines here. Every opening disappeared behind another wall of glowing vegetation, another curtain of vines, another massive silver trunk broad enough to hide something enormous. The forest felt impossibly old, its beauty matched only by the certainty that countless predators watched from places I could neither see nor identify.

Somewhere deep within the glowing canopy, alien insects began their nightly chorus. Strange calls echoed through the dense vegetation, answered moments later from farther away, until the jungle seemed alive with voices. Every sound, every drifting spore, every unfamiliar plant made my fingers reach instinctively for the bio-analyzer I’d left sitting on the table beside my bed, as though eight weeks of survival could simply be unlearned the moment I stepped inside a dome.

Instead of fear, frustration flickered through me.

I wanted to know what had made that call. I wanted to know whether the second sound had come from the same species, whether they were communicating across territories, and whether the change from daylight to darkness had triggered the exchange.

Every sound awakened the same curiosity that had first drawn me into ecology. Somewhere beyond that shimmering domelived species no one from Earth had ever documented, behaviors no scientist had ever observed, ecosystems unlike anything in our own world.

For eight weeks I hadn't taken three steps without checking the surrounding flora and fauna. Now, for the first time since arriving on this planet, I found myself wishing I had it not because I feared the jungle... but because I wanted to understand it.

Elise glanced back and smiled before signing,Not much farther.

Vennox's hut stood near the outer edge of Huren where the pathways ended and the dome curved closest to the jungle. It was modest compared to many of the surrounding homes, built from the same pale stone as the rest of the city and illuminated by a single solaris orb beside the doorway.

Elise stopped and faced me.This is Vennox's home,she signed and smiled knowingly.I hope you find what you're looking for.

Before I could decide whether she meant Vennox or something much deeper, she wished me goodnight and disappeared back along the winding pathway toward the palace. I watched until she vanished between the softly glowing buildings before turning toward the hut.