The Emerald Frontier

High noon in the spring sky above Willowmere Town Square brings neither a gentle breeze nor a bird's sweet song, but rather the wet, resounding slap of three deeply improbable creatures untangling themselves from a heap on the paved stone center. Whether by an orbital pod's botched trajectory intersecting with an astral rift or a turf war gone sideways in the muck, Ocularis Prime, Nas'reen, and Fred the Centiped have arrived all at once in a bruising, limb-knotted pile right between the gallows-stone and the moss-choked channels of the pale granite fountain.