A figure cloaked in black stood before her, the features of their face indistinguishable in the shadow of the hood wrapped around them.
"Miss, it's time," they said, "we have to go."
She opened her mouth to speak, the words "who are you" dying on her tongue as she recognized the embroidered symbol on the sleeve of their cloak.
It was an arrow striking the sun: the emblem of the opposing state.
"Why," she said, "why should I trust an enemy?"
"I know not," they replied, "only that it may have something to do with this."
They pushed up their sleeve, revealing a patch - no, a swath - of discoloured skin. She looked closer. The colour was that of deep and empty space: a shade that matched her own.
She looked back to the swath on her

own hand, still exposed to the dim lighting of the surrounding room.
"It must be a sign," she thought, thinking back to how the colour had suddenly changed, "It must."
She fished out her necklace, holding the pendent embossed with her own state's emblem - a bleeding flower - against the embroidered symbol of the stranger.
A sun, an arrow, a flower, and blood.
A sun, a flower, an arrow, and blood.
She stood and met the stranger's gaze.
"We must go to the land where the sunflowers are," she decided, eyes drifting from their emblems to the strange marks on their hands.
"We need to make a sacrifice."