Planet Earth is blue 9

As I glided in through the outer atmosphere, it struck me how long I’d been away from Earth – and why I left it behind in the first place. The old pollution lingering in the higher spaces still smelled like the last breaths of a dying planet and, drifting down a little further, I could see the scorch marks of the wars that tore it apart long before I was born.

Back then, humanity had greeted the angeli as saviours in desperate times. It was said that they came from the sun and we were only too willing to call them ‘angels’. But my grandfather knew better and, because of that, my family have been hunted as terrorists for as long as I can remember.

Making for the northern forests, I reached the old temple just as a brown dusk was falling. Many millennia ago the building had been set up to represent unity between earth and sky. How it survived the ensuing destruction I’ve no idea but my grandfather had often taken me there to remind me of our potential, and it seemed an appropriate place to slide into shadow and wait for Lily.

A wolf howled in the distance.