The first thing the meteorite took was the day.

Its shadow crossed broken structures and bare ground. The inhabitants looked up as the sun narrowed behind the approaching stone.

Some were already leaning on one another to stand. Those carrying their young held them closer.

Everything they had struggled to preserve was here.

AMONRA arrived beneath the darkening sky.

His lineage reached back to the universe’s earliest ages. He himself remembered the first rain on worlds whose oceans had since vanished. He had watched whole branches of life unfold from beginnings too small for an eye to find.

Now he travelled wherever he felt his attention was needed.

Here, he found exhaustion in the faces turned toward the sky, and care in the hands that held one another.

Then the last daylight disappeared.

He looked up.

The stone had travelled between distant suns for ages. Within it lay the traces of worlds long scattered. Now its immense journey was about to end another.

AMONRA lifted his staff.

Violet spilled from its ancient contours and rose above him, flowing like water, loosening at its edges into dust.

He turned the staff toward the meteorite.

The violet tide surged into the sky.

Far above the clouds, it struck. At the first touch, dark stone became luminous blue-violet liquid. The change spread across the immense body as it descended, its jagged face folding into shining swells, its edges streaming into rain.

Light returned to the world beneath it.

It reached into the broken structures and revealed the faces of those still holding one another.

For a while, no one moved. They had prepared themselves for the blow.

Then someone opened a hand.

The first drop touched it and vanished beneath the skin.

Blue-violet light unfurled through the fingers. An old scar thinned and disappeared.

Nearby, an elder let out a startled breath. Their hand slipped from the shoulder that had supported them. Slowly they stood upright, then laughed.

The one beside them kept an arm outstretched a moment longer before letting it fall.

The rain entered stone as readily as flesh. Within a bare rock, tiny branching lights spread through depths that had never held a root. A green shoot broke through its surface. Two small leaves unfolded into the falling light.

More drops disappeared into the ground. Between the ruins, shoots pushed through the cracks.

All around AMONRA, faces lifted. Hands opened to the rain.

He lowered his staff and knelt beside the rock. His hand rested upon its surface, beside the small leaves.

Billions of years had brought him here, attentive to the stone beneath his fingers and the fragile life emerging from it.

The more of the universe he understood, the more of it he cared for.

Above him, the last of the falling mountain became rain.