Flora and Fauna

Jarring violence lead to a darkened path

But as expected, it doesn't turn sunny the next day.

Unexpectedly, it was definitely light outside. Light brown, golden in the barely visible sun, scratches against his window panes as his cottage wavers underneath a sudden, fierce sandstorm.

Tighnari was engrossed in a sweet dream that describes a world devoid of woes that plague him. A world where rainforests were rampant across Sumeru, and the Desert is still a beautiful expanse of golden terrain. Somewhere where both cities and villages are neither inferior or superior to each other. Where there was no xenophobia in between the vast differences of citizens that were supposed to be whole.

One world where the world isn't so fucked up as it is now.

He trudges through the vivid greenery that the rainforest offers him. In this dreamy world, he is someone who knows every inch of his rainforest that he swears to protect. Not merely a young man attempting to smuggle seeds out of Akademiya laboratories to examine their growth, but a proud mother witnessing and catering to a flora's life. A leader to a group of people passionate about wildlife, and to change the rainforest for the better, and not someone who cowardly leaves Sumeru City in a way that disdains others, and estranged himself from his family and friends.

Cowardly, he supposes that's what he is. Where is his courage in reality, whereas the illusion of himself within that ambitious dream is everything he is not?

And so his eyelids flicker, as those heterochromatic eyes slowly open. They glaze over with tears, not with sadness, but exhaustion.

The dream was much too real for him to simply dismiss it as a dream. A life that he longs to fit himself into graces its presence into a life that he admittedly does not satisfy enough with, and dissipates away with the remnants of the warmness of an unclogged sun, the humidity of a thousand lively creatures within a thriving forest, and the happiness he feels, simply feeling the veins and stems that runs intricately through a single leaf.

Tighnari places an arm over his eyes and he once again descends into a barely shielded darkness.

He collects himself, willing his being to walk away from the numbness of sleep. Today is a new day, different from yesterday, and will be contrasted so vividly by every other day in both the past and future. Today he will tend the greenhouse like every other day, but there will be another surprise found within those glass walls that held miracles that not even the Akademiya researches could amount to. Maybe the padisarahs -  those with the bluish tinted purple edges -  will finally bloom. Perhaps the vine of the Kalpalata lotuses will intertwine amidst the man-made structure reminiscent of its natural habitat.

Or, most importantly, the golden petals of the single Sumeru Rose, magnificent and mutated, will finally come into being.

Okay, Tighnari chuckles tiredly to himself. Not that last one. It's barely made its way out of the soil the last time he's checked up.

A deafening crash startles him fully awake. There was no sound more terrifying as Tighnari rushes to clasp his ears downwards towards his head, his brain twisting together in pain at the violent sound.

Screeching and sounds of vicious scratching persists long after the initial noise. Paying no regards to his wearing sleepiness, he stumbles off of his sofa and strides over to his windowsill. The venus flytraps stand as still as they were the night before, and were the only witnesses to the heavily damaged window panes, the flowers that yields to the relentless winds, and the start of a terrible disaster that has bestowed itself upon Sumeru City.

"...What?" Tighnari utters out in absolute disbelief. Untimely, the first thought that pops to his mind was a taunt of the incapabilities of Sumeru City's Akademiya to keep a disaster out of their core city, the downtown and the gem of Sumeru. What followed soon after was a timely worry, so heavily and urgently needed, about his greenhouse that could in no way withstand a natural disaster of this scale as far as he remembers, and the safety of the citizens that reside below the waterfall.