This story was begun as a collaboration between a man and a woman. Over time, it was brought to a fascinating resolution. But it would be interesting to see where else it might have gone. Please feel free to take this adventure down a new path:

THE STORY:

Sheltered along an underpass, daydreaming, waiting for the storm to pass.
Far away, translucent buildings, appeared to be placed on the horizon, like bottles on a shelf. Glass walls of deeply hued colors were speckled with pastel windows. I wondered how long it had been since I had even seen any artifacts from any living beings at all? Looking back over my shoulder, the remainder of the dark sheath
that slowly wandered to the West, was steadily becoming just a ghostly
vapor, dissipating over the setting twin suns .....

When I turned back, fear gripped my heart for a moment as I noticed something was moving slowly toward me. As I focused my attention, I recognized it to be one of the creatures such as those I had encountered where they had fallen along the edges of the paths I had traversed to reach this shelter. I remembered how some who were still alive had turned to me with eyes that were already glazed over in their near-death state, and yet others had fastened on me a look so full of pain and suffering I was surprised to feel a surge of anger, instead of the compassion I thought I should be feeling for their frailty. Yet as this animal emerged from the ether, it met my stare with eyes that were clear and unafraid. I sensed that it wanted me to follow it. I had been wandering in silence for so long that I was afraid my voice would fail me now in the moment when I most needed it. "What do you want?" I whispered....

... The thing gazed at me for what felt like an eternity.

Winds whistled around us as the storm surged unabated; rain lashing at the landscape as though seeking to scour from it each and every trace of the "interlopers" who had defiled it with the structures whose remnants rose from the horizon like some manner of afterthought upon a landscape some mad caricature of nature had seemingly proceeded apace to reclaim.

And yet... as I remained locked in the gaze of this being... all sound and sensation seemed gradually to vanish from my perception as though an ethereal control were being adjusted, and the sensory impressions I perceived erroneous to the link with this being were slowly being reduced to a spectral insignificance... as though they were occuring only in my mind.

At long last... as though from beyond the voidspace of millenia... it replied..

...To refine the embedment...