The wind catches some of them, blows them across oceans and over continents. See how they fall, these travelers, these seeds of something new! They drop out of the sky in fiery halos, and people make wishes on them, call them shooting stars, delight in their presence and their novelty. Astronomers make notes. Some of those astronomers will talk during the weeks to come about the rare and beautiful comet that died in their sky, and none of them will wonder what it carried in its belly.

The seeds fall, in ones and twos and dozens. Some of them drown in the deep oceans. Others land in inhospitable soil, in frozen tundra or burning volcanos. A few even fall on city streets, to be swept up as refuse or collected by curious children who will never recognize them for what they really are. So many opportunities, even now, for discovery, and one by one, they pass by untaken. No one questions the comet. No one slices open a seed found on a sidewalk. No one looks. No one learns.

One by one, they fall, and one of them falls in a green forest on a green continent. It lands in rich and fertile soil, still smoking with the heat of its long journey. No one sees it fall. No one comes to collect or quarantine it. Still, it sits fallow for a full turn of seasons, slowly adjusting to the weather, to the conditions around it.

A year after the comet died above the Earth, the first seeds crack their shells and send down thin, waxen roots, piercing deep into the ground beneath them. They begin to draw water and nutrients from their surroundings. They begin to grow. Inch by inch, cautious to the last, they begin to grow. Some sprout in sun and some in shadow. One grows in the heart of a desert, sending its roots spiraling deep in the quest for water.

Still they are not noticed. Still they are left alone.

At the end of a week, there is a sprout where each of the surviving seeds had been, their green skins underlaid with a thin sheen of blue, like the shimmer of a beetle’s wings. Half the seedlings die before they pass this stage, swallowed by grazing animals which follow them into death a heartbeat later, collapsing into anaphylactic shock.

At the end of a month, each sprout has become a stalk, unfurling delicate, fernlike leaves covered in stinging hairs similar to a jellyfish’s nematocysts. Another quarter of the seedlings die entering this stage, collapsing under their own weight as they fail to properly account for this new world’s gravity.

At the end of a month, buds form atop the strengthening stalks, purple and white and red, streaked and gory. Each bud opens on the third day after its formation, turning a sightless eye toward the heavens, almost as if they can remember coming from those vaunted heights.