The shuttle crashed onto the hot, blood-red sand of Planet Kraken with a deafening metallic screech, skidding three hundred yards before grinding to a halt against a jagged obsidian outcrop.
Inside the wrecked cabin, dust settled over forty-seven terrified, coughing humans. The descent had been brutal, but they were alive.
Kyle was the first to kick the warped emergency door open. The moment the seal broke, a wave of suffocating, sulfur-heavy heat washed inside.
'Why does this remind me of that place.' His immediately frowned, the moment he came in contact with kraken corroded air.
He stepped out onto the red dunes, his boots sinking into the grit. Skyward, the horizon was dominated by an impossible sight: the planet itself wasn't a standard sphere, but a vast, oval-shaped heart suspended in the void, pulsing with a deep, rhythmic red light that felt like a slow, cosmic heartbeat.
"Out! Everyone out!" Kyle called back, helping Marcus lower an elderly woman through the hatch.
