Scion

This story begins with the sun rose. No, that wasn’t a case of careless grammar or an inability to find the correct tense of a fairly uncomplicated verb. Rather, it refers to the ancient flora of Africa, where, as most educated people know, the whole catastrophe known as mankind began. The sun rose, yes. It was a delicate and very rare flower with the amazing ability to change colour as the sun passed across the bright African sky. In the morning its petals were a soft pink, which changed to a bright yellow at noon, and then to a flaming red and deep purple as the sun sank towards the western horizon. No one knew what colour it took on during the night, as it was too dark to see anything then. People had tried to light fires to provide the light necessary to obtain the answer to this ancient question, but the sun rose only grew in places far away from trees or any other inflammable objects, so by the time the people involved managed to gather enough wood for a fire, the sun had risen anew. Thus the mystery of the sun rose’s colour at night remained unsolved, and most people thought it was an ugly little flower anyway. Not Marsha, though. She watched it with amazement in her dark brown eyes as the little flower turned as yellow as the yolk of an egg, stretching itself up towards the warming rays of sunlight. Actually, the midday sun was hot enough to burn most other growing things into oblivion, but the sun rose was a damn resilient bugger of a plant. Nobody screwed with the sun rose, as we will see in just a little while. But first, let’s have a look at Marsha. This section would not be necessary if there’d been a photo of her at the bottom of this page, but unfortunately cameras were in short supply during this primitive period of African history. At least I believe they were. There are no clear indications as to exactly how old this story is, so theoretically there might have been cameras around. If there were, Marsha didn’t have one among her possessions.