Pilgrimage

[Foxglove]

The ship tilted forwards, correcting through his input the course towards the planet with a purple hue before the cruise engines started to charge. Omicron Lost, when not swarming with either the Core, the Order, or the Nomads, could actually be a rather quiet and lonesome place, and currently, neither of the three was present, not to exploit Lost's natural Iridium sources, and not to kill the exploiters. The lack of movement, of action of any kind, with only the inertia of a movement long past moving the asteroids around the system to converge around the gravitational well of Moros created a serenity that was almost tangible to Hussaini. It invited, begged, coerced those in its grasp to stay, to marvel at how innocent the universe could be. It was a stark reminder of how quickly this kind of idling could have a stray wanderer reduced to cinder by pretty much anyone in the neigboring systems, with both the Core and the Order hostile to anything related to the Maltese and the Nomads being as unpredictable as they were.

A slight tremours went through the ship as Hussini's Raven's Talon entered the gravitational well of Moros and dodged some of the asteroids orbiting it, only to slowly to be drawn towards the planet to collide with it. He noticed how far apart these asteroids actually were, now that he was next to them, but it was not surprising, all things considered, given the vastness of space. Another tremour went through the ship as it pierced the atmosphere and disappered inside the gaseous shell. The deeper he went, the more his board computer would make him aware of extreme wind speeds outside the windshield of his snubcraft. A blinking light on his console informed him soon enough of pockets of wind inside the cloud that were not traversable, and with the help of the computer, he managed to breach the haze that had completely engulfed the ship for about ten minutes.

To say that the surface of Moros was bright would be a gross overstatement. The purple haze above absorbed a lot of the light of the sun, only certain patches of it being thin enough to admit a degree of sunlight to directly hit the arid earth. Occasional lighting from the cloud overhead allowed the occasional glimpse at the jagged rocks below, but other than that, it was gloomy. There were no mountains, no vegetation as far as Hussaini could see, which was to say, only as far as occasional rays of lights permitted him to. A quick glance to the computer would tell him that the wind speeds below the purple haze were much slower, yet it stood to reason that, sometimes, gusts of this cloud would reach down to the surface, which might be the reason why the gound was just so... flat, almost as if profusions would steadily be whetted away by the unrelenting force of Moros' weather. This could not be true for the entire surface, though, as it was reported that Moros had an abundance of xeno-ruins, and surely those would not survive long if these sorts of conditions were present anywere.

This was not be the only thing immediately occuring as odd to Hussaini. As he descended towards the surface, decreasing his speed to not be immolated by the atmosphere, he could swear there were occasional flickers of a blue-ish hue just above the planet's surface, below the cracks of the arid, stoney ground. The first time, he was ready to attribute it to his eyes being not used to the lighting, but then it appeared again, fleetingly, only lasting for a blink of an eye before disappearing, leaving him to wonder whether the lightning of the clouds was playing tricks on his eyes.

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