The world around him was white, a white blinding haze that seared his eyes and burrowed into his brain so profoundly it made his ears ring, not a quiet ringing, but a loud almost ear splitting ringing that burrowed into his head and drilled through the small bones in his middle ear. Aside from the ringing there was only silence accept for his own ragged breathing gasping that, made the space around him humid despite his visor's inability to fog.

He stumbled over his own feet, for it had to be his feet since the ground about his was completely flat, A dessert of salt stretching for miles in all directions, pure white against the roaring power of the blue-white star, a star so bright even the sky had been bleached white. He tried to open his eyes, tried to find where he was going but was immediately blinded. He tried to scramble for the visor on his helmet but found there to be none there, snapped off.

He stumbled again, this time falling to his knees on the vast white nothingness.

He could feel the crunch through his gloves and boots, rattling up through his knees, but it was as if he stared down at his own body white against paper, in a ceaseless void filled with not but light. He squeezed his eyes shut and tried for the comm again.

"Harben- harbinger, this is.... This is Commander Vir... I, my ship.... Was malfunctioned. I Have fallen and.... I can't eyes... help, send please..... Think I may have been.... Damaged." More light, blinding him driving into his skull like screws being driven in with a power tool. He lifted his hands to his ears as the light grew stronger bringing the ringing to a crescendo.

He fell backwards barely feeling his body hit the ground, knowing that something had happened only for the slight vibration through his body, like the slamming of a door seen only in the ripples on a glass of water. Light bombarded him from above the ringing grew louder. His hands fell to his sides as he fell, mercifully into blackness.

***

There was a disturbance, they had sensed it some time ago, a distant disturbance in the distant sky. They did not see it, but felt it. Waves of sight, particles of distortion washing over them. They do not sense the light that beats down from above, only the infrared radiation of their distant star which sustains them. Besides that, the landscape is flat blackess warmed occasionally in spots of unfathomable color by the heat of their star. They can sense it like they sense particles of radio light given off by their brethren. Light is their survival, light is their spawn and their life. They sense everything, and with their light comes a great euphoria. They love light.

They float now, great billowing sails propelling them in silent, slow-motion arcs over the landscape. Below them their great flexible appendages wave and quiver, two long in the front, and a hundred shorter trailing in the back. They float, though it seems as if they swim, cutting through the light the way a sting-ray cuts through the water. They are silent, ethereal, and somewhat strange. They do not move quickly for they see no need simply floating through the white, surrounded by light and the rolling waves of radio chatter from their companions.

With the radio waves gone.

They are silent, though their world is not.

It startles them, when it appears on the horizon, a spot of light under the glorious rays of their star. It does not belong there, for, even though the ground is bright, this thing is brighter. They approach on trailing ribbons of their own limbs gracefully floating, floating, floating. They make it eventually, towards the bright spot.

It sheds light and heat, though it is covered by darkness.

The shape is not something they have seen before, it is alien and unknowable. Behind it, it leaves traces of it's path, back in the direction of the disturbance. It does not fit on this landscape, it does not belong here. It tracks pieces of itself behind it.

It is living.

That much they know for sure.

They know it is not from here.

With their sense of light they look on. The creature loses light in great swaths, it is bright, not as bright as their star, but very bright, though it's brightness is fading.

It is a sin to let anything that is bright die.

***

He awoke when he felt himself moving, felt the rattling in his feet as they jostled and crunched over salt scraping and covering the sound of the ringing in his ears. He was seeing double, the world around him was still so bright. It thunders down on him in great rays of pain. He tried to move, but he found that he couldn't. His head spun and rotated, or at least it seemed that way. He tried to open his eyes, but the light hurt. It cut into his soul until he could no longer feel but for the pain. His eyes closed, but the searing light still cut through burning him replacing the whiteness with the cherry red of his own blood.

A shadow fell over him. He could sense it with the passing of pain and opened his eyes. He could not comprehend what he was seeing, a towering shadow, a monolith slowly swaying back and forth, back and forth bringing the sun into view, and then cutting it off a moment later. Ribbons, or tedrals wave about him, there are thousands of them. He can't make them into shapes, can't determine what they are or what they mean.

Has he died?

***

What is it?

They aren't entirely sure.

What does it want?

Probably to live, but then again it was perishing, so maybe it didn't.

Maybe they should leave it back out in the void, in the whiteness, on the planes of salt.

That would be foolhardy though not to learn about something new. They knew everything there was to know here. Then again this thing was a thing they did not know, so it was only right that they should know. If they knew everything else.

Did they actually know everything?

It seemed so. They knew of the salt, and atmosphere. They knew of the chemical structures, and the atomic particles. They knew of the particles that acted as waves, they knew of their beloved light, and it's tendency to behave similarly. They knew of gravity and quantum law and that they were on a sphere that simply orbited a large sphere of fire. They knew their light would be gone some day, and they knew when that day would be.

They were not worried.

They new a great many things, and this was a thing to know.

It was clear they needed to know more.

***

It Is a trick to learn about something that cannot be known, a trick to determine that which has no base of reference. The do not know this thing, this thing that lays before them warm and flickering with its pulsing light. It is a good light, warm and steeped in life. However, it is symmetrical two limbs for either side and a trunk in the middle, that is a start.

It does not float, that much is clear, behind it it left tracks in the salt, the shapes are oval in nature or somewhere between an oval and another shape, it matches the bottom of two of the appendages at the base. So it moves, somehow, on two appendages without floating. Touching it, for their tendrils are very sensitive to touch, they feel at its shell, or it has to be a shell because the shell does not give off its light. The light is from the inside, from behind a clear layer.

The shell has a structure, it is very uniform, nothing that comes from nature. They can make things like this, though they do not bother to do so, for what does that have to do with light? So this creature wears a fake shell, that seems reasonable. Looking through the clear layer, at it's true shape, the creature is very....

Squishy?

Yes that appears to be the correct term, though they cannot be sure. Perhaps it is not squishy and they are just misleading themselves based on appearances. But if it is not a shell for their squishiness, than what is the shell for? They can see it's temperature, the warmth of the light can tell them that, and it seems as if it would be comfortable. The surrounding are only a little cooler than its body.

So if that is not the case, then what is it.

They look closer, for that is their desire, and the light helps them to see. They must use other types of light, they must use these lights to see inside, and inside they find the shell does other things too. The shell holds gas, a gas that surrounds the creature on the inside, for the creature on the inside is smaller than the shell on the outside.

They can test this gas, and that is where they find it.

It is a very strange mixture of gases, mostly nitrogen, but some oxygen and carbon. That may be a problem, for their planet is very high in oxygen.

Another group returns, the group that continued onwards to find the disturbance. They did not get close as they sensed a great heat from the thing that had fallen from the sky.

Fire.

Fire was not good when your planet had much oxygen, and you floated with hydrogen on your insides.

It seemed as if the two things were connected.

Perhaps the thing came from the fire, or from the thing previous to the time when it was on fire?

But that was assuming time was linear.

The thing's light is fading, that is a bad sign.

It may be required for them to remove the shell.

They need to figure out how to do it though, the creature has appendages on the top that it does not use for walking, and at the end of those appendages, it has tendrils like theirs only shorter and more rigid. It is small, so they can assume the thing uses those to do its tasks.

They are right, they find the answer, for if you twist at some parts and pull, the thing comes off.

***

He woke up to the sound of frantic beeping.

That was not a good sign, that was his atmospheric indicator determining that he had a suit breach. Despite the ringing in his ears, he knew enough to know that. He didn't know where the light was still too bright and his body was still in pain. But then, he felt it.... Something cold against the skin of his hands.

He knew nothing should be cold since the inside of his gloves were very warm.

He tried to open his eyes, finding that, strange, there was shade, and though it was bright, he could finally see. Thinking was harder though considering the pain his was still in, the throbbing of his head the the diplopia that mirrored every image over itself.

He felt sick.

The suit continued to beep.

He heard the sound next, and knew what was coming. The soft scraping and snick just beside his neck.

Air rushed over his face, the beeping grew louder.

And then the world coalesced around him. To his sides it was bright, to bright to look, but above him it was less so, he could stare upwards now, and he wasn't immediately dead, though his helmet was gone.

Something had taken off his helmet.

Why had it taken him this long to realize it?

He turned his head trying to find the source of his imminent death, and stops

This time, it does not take him long to register surprise.

***

They were right, and wrong, the creature was squishy, though no completely, and now it was moving responding to their touch.

It hadn't died yet, so that was good, though it did not get up and move like it was supposed to.

They reachout touching at it, at it's strange appendages at the end of it's upper limbs, at the soft fibers atop it's head, and the strange rubbery surface about the top which gave off a great amount of light.

It is silent as far as they can tell though it had many strange openings in its body that flexed and moved. It's light is still fading. They use their light again to look and found something very strange, a symmetrical pattern of scaffolding that held up the squishy parts of the creature. This scaffold is generally open except for the one about the head which is closed. There is lots of heat there, and their light could see inwards, a building pressure.

That did ot seem normal for it is not symmetrical like it should be.

They could fix that.

They know how. Though, the creature has gone limp under their appendages, they still work. It is their duty to save all sources of light. It didn't take them long to release the pressure, and once that is done the light grows back up pulsing more evenly. Their radio chatter is one of incandescent excitement. Merrily, they float about in circles basking in the light from outside pleased that this little glimmer of light is still here.

***

He woke up without a ringing in his ears this time, and the light from outside wasn't so horrible on his eyes, though he still attempted to shade his vision. It was a struggle though, trying to remember where his limbs were and what they were doing. He was still having trouble comprehending his place in space and where all his appendages were.

Something caressed the side of his face.

He tilted his head down flinching back and the strange blue-tipped thendral pulled back away from him. At first he thought it was some sort of snake, and nearly panicked, but that didn't seem right, so he followed the body of the tendral bak and upwards.

Still groggy, that didn't stop his mouth from falling open in stunned amazement.

Stunned amazement as the alien creature floated over him.

***

The creature notices them now, they cannot tell how since it does not respond to their light, it is completely silent. They reach out with their tendrils feeling the creature, the fibers on its head, the soft outer covering. It pulls away from them at first hunkering bac against the ground, but as they continue, it seems to grow curious responding to their touch with touch of its own.

Its five protrusion appendages reach out trailing gently down their skin.

They tremble with delight.

It continues to reach towards them with it's strange appendage, and one of their number reaches out wrapping a tendril around the appendage searching and feeling at the structure underneath. The creature is gentle and does not pull away. THey like this creature, it makes light and though they cannot fathom or understand it, there is something about the way it touches them.

It seems curious, just like them.

Just like the did before, it wraps its own protrusions around their tendrils. It is warm giving off heat with it's light. This close, it's heat is like the face of the sun cold spots giving it distinct character as it plays with them, though something is wrong. It's light isn't working again.... Had they done something wrong."

***

He was growing very dizzy, and the muscles in his face would not stop twitching. He gently unwinded a tentacle from his wrist careful not to spook the creature that floated over him. It was curious like you would expect an octopus to be, and it did remind him of one like some weird sort of elephant squid. It was large, maybe six feet in length from the bottom of it's two long tentacles to the top of it's 'head'.

On either side of its body, there were two large flaps, which it slowly used to maneuver flopping back and forth as it floated. IT floated primarily with the help of some sort of sack on the back of its body, not dissimilar to the Vrul. It had four eyes in a diamond pattern towards the top of its head, though as far as he could tell it did not hear seeing as it had not reacted to his voice.

Did he sense a sudden agitation in their numbers as they move in again beginning to prod at him with their tendrils once more.

One brushes itself down his face again, feeling at his head where, he had received somewhat of a knock during the crash. The dizziness was getting worse, as was the facial twitch.

He knew these signs, and desperately reached for the components of his suit, lying neatly beside him. The creatures pulled away floating about him in a wide circle.

He pulled a glove on and snapped it into place.

He turned to reach for the other finding one of the creatures had wrapped a tentacle around his other glove and was slowly reaching out towards him.

He took the offering gently and snapped the glove on.

He turned for his helmet, but had been beaten to it. With delicate movements slowed as if they moved through water, two of the creatures maneuvered the helmet over his head lowering it down and twisting it until it snapped in place.

Oxygen levels high, toxicity imminent, lowering oxygen output.

He took a deep breath. A tendril patted the outside of his helmet like an old granny pats the cheek of her grandchild.

He couldn't help but smile stroking his hand along the length of the tendril like he was petting a dog.

***

The light has returned, they are pleased, though they worry as another disturbance breaks the atmosphere. It is bright, bright like a second star, but it is fire, and fire is dangerous, they pull back watching as the fire descends from the sky. They do not move though, the creature does not move, but they cannot be sure it sees the disturbance at all. Things died down, and then a group of small lights appear over the wasteland.

They move without floating leaving trails of light behind them.

They pull back as the things pull closer slowly moving towards them. It is as if they are communicating with each other though there can be no possible way for them to do so seeing as they do not make noise and the light they commit is a steady pulse. They emit light like the first and slowly approach in a group.

The creature is not alone.

There are more of them, and they descend from the sky to walk on the ground.

As they observe, the first creature reaches out to them like it had done before. They are hesitant, but they follow suit wrapping tendrils around the proffered appendage. It returns their touch with touch of it's own, and the group of its friends follow.

Another holds out an appendage like the first, and though they are cautious, they give it over, and the creature is just as gentle and curious.

They like to think that the creatures are thanking them for helping one of their own, and sadly they have to watch the creature go, wobbling back across the salt to return to the sky from where it came.

They were not likely to understand the silent creature.

But they did appreciate its curiosity.

The little light that had come to visit them, before returning to the sky.

Like a star