(Rose)
Here and there, across some ruins of cities and on some maps I've seen or found, I came to understand something.
There might be another way to join the continent beside a boat.
There might be a bridge or tunnel between Great Britain and France. Some railroad map in a train station pointed it out.
I don't know if it's still there, and perhaps not safer than boat, but it is worth checking out.
Thus we left the shores and began to follow old railroad tracks.
The weather is getting better and softer lately. We must have changed of year without noticing. Not a year I know anyway.
We've seen sunken cities in lakes. We've seen marks of decay and even war. But they're old. History is a colourful thing.
As is biology.
I've begun seeing flowers blossoming around the railroad despite the rocks of the ground and the cold weather.
Some pierce the snow. Small flowers with very vivid colours.
The steel rails are decaying in this area, they're rusted all over. But those variety of flowers I do not know thrive very well around it.
Red, orange, yellow, green. Grey and black too. I didn't know black flowers existed.
I go around an abandoned train covered with trees and plants, growing from its corpse.
I thought for a second that it could be my future, but I know it's not.
If I were to die, she would resurrect me from the deads, as if nothing happened. I know her. I know she would do it, and succeed. In a way, she's done it before.
I make camp beside a bed of those small flowers of green, red and black tones. Some have bluish or sharper tones on spots. I cut my finger on a leaf trying to pluck one. It felt odd.
Blume rolled one of her ribbon around my finger like a bandage. Meanwhile I look closer at the flowers.
They are peculiar. I pluck a few more carefully. They are heavy. Far heavier than they should. I throw one into the fire. It burns oddly slowly. The flame turns in weird colours. It bugs me. I investigate further.
B - I don't see anything unusual about them. They have a slow metabolism.
R - What about their colours?
B - Pigment they make or collect it seems. The ground is quite acid around them, and they use it.
R - Nothing unusual about their pigments? They look a little different from the flowers I used to look at.
B - They use metal oxide pigments. Maybe it's the unusual thing.
R - Metal?
I look closer at the railroad. The steel is corroded very badly, it's almost gone by places. I notice buds of flowers growing inside it. That's it.
R - You meant their colours are, only, metallic pigments?
B - Yes.
I smile. They are interesting flowers.
R - They are eating the metal from the rails slowly. The amount of metal they process makes them heavier. Curious. Interesting flowers...
B - It's a cuter form of rust for you.
I keep a few of them in my bag. Maybe I'll be able to plant them somewhere else someday.
These flowers don't smell like plants, but rust. I guess they're resilient and strong if they live from such materials.
I find them a place in my backpack. I keep all sorts of things, it's getting heavy.
I still have the pouch with an egg. Blume says it's still alive, and not a bird inside. But it doesn't seem to want to hatch.
I've thrown the alcohol away. I left it inside a city in a place that should last. Maybe it'll please someone else someday.
The next day, we cross the field of flowers eating metals. They probably originated from this train yard, where they're eating every train, crane and building. They silently turn this industrial area into a flower field of vivid colours. Some flowers are bluish, blue and green. Most are radiant red, orange and yellow. Upon what metals they feed on, they adapt and change colours I begin to understand. Unless they are different species altogether already.
The trains are turned into flowery mush. The buildings slowly collapsed under an explosion of flowers growing over them.
The colours are radiant. These flowers have little leaves so there's little greenery to see still.
The tracks were harder to follow in that place because they all gathered up and some segments were already entirely dissolved. The largest flowers there were one metre tall, and their bodies were as strong as metallic rods of pipes. These plants can structure metallic elements like we do our bones I guess. They can build big steelwork sculptures.
Some of those flowers were already carrying seeds. I took some samples of them instead of the cut flowers from before.
By a long eaten train, some crates broke down, their content being eaten by the flowers with far different colours. It got me curious and I discovered coins. Money was in the crate.
Breaking the crate open, a huge amount of silver looking coins spilled all over the place in a weird ruckus. They shone a lot. I looked at them but didn't recognised anything on them. They were not pounds or pennies.
In a few years, they'll all have turn into compost for those new flowers.
Just like them, we moved on.
~