The forest of the Sunken Crater was not composed of timber, leaf, or loam.
It was a stonework of frozen starlight.
Huge trunks of many-sided quartz, some sixty feet in width, erupted from the black fiery sand, soaring hundreds of feet into the warm violet air before branching into delicate, linked lattices of semi-clear crystal needles. The light inside the forest didn’t come from the sun above. It came from within the crystal itself. A soft, pulsing bioluminescence that shifted slowly from pale lavender to deep amber in a rhythmic ten-second cycle.
The three hundred refugees walked through the silent glades. Then, their boots crunched softly upon a carpet of crushed quartz crystals that glittered like crushed diamonds.
The air was eighty degrees warmer than the frozen peaks above. It was sweet, heavy with ozone, smelling of wild mint and clean stone steam. In the clearings between the quartz pillars, natural hot springs bubbled up through the black sand. It pooled in shallow basins of polished agate where clean, sulfur-free water spilled over stone lips into winding rills.
The refugees, who had spent months freezing in the smoke-choked apartments of Vulcan-Khorat or shivering in the hanging cradles of the outer rim, collapsed beside the heat pools.
