Silence.
Not the gentle hush of sleep or solitude, but the silence that comes after death.
It stretched wide across the cracked plains of Virelia-7, a once-thriving battlefield turned to rusted bones. Monolithic remains of war machines lay shattered under twin suns—limbs torn, cockpits cracked, metal carcasses split open like hunted beasts.
And at the center of it all, he lay still.
A boy. Barely fifteen.
His uniform was scorched, shredded. A broken pilot's gauntlet dangled from his left hand, its circuits flickering like a dying heartbeat. Blood caked his forehead, but the wound had already dried. His breath came in slow, even waves. Somehow, against all odds, he had survived the war.
But he remembered nothing.
Not his name.
Not his clan.
Not the war.
Only sky.
He opened his eyes to the wide, burning heavens—pale blue streaked with crimson clouds. He blinked. Then blinked again.
"Where...?" His voice cracked, unfamiliar even to his own ears. He sat up, grimacing as pain lanced through his back and ribs.
Everywhere around him, the graveyard of giants groaned in the wind. Massive mechs, some nearly a hundred feet tall, lay broken in the dust like fallen gods. A symbol etched on a nearby torso caught his eye—a lion's head torn in half. And not far from it, another insignia, this one shaped like a twin-bladed wing.
He didn't know what they meant.
He didn't know anything.
But something inside him stirred. Something deeper than memory. A pulse. A rhythm.
His fingers closed around a half-buried metal shard—more instinct than thought—and in the distance, a low rumble echoed across the plains.
Something still moved.
Something still hunted.
---
He stood, legs trembling beneath him, bones aching with the weight of survival. Ash clung to the sky like a fog of ghosts. The air stank of scorched metal, leaking coolant, and something far worse—burned flesh.
Bodies.
Dozens.
No—hundreds.
The boy staggered forward, every step a fight against gravity, nausea, and the blank void where memories should be. The first mech he passed had collapsed on its knees, its pilot slumped forward against the shattered glass of the cockpit. Through the cracks, the boy saw the remains of what once was a man—face frozen in silent horror, a gloved hand still gripping the control levers.
Another mech had fallen backward into the dust, a gaping wound cleaved through its torso. The pilot's seat was ejected midair—now resting in a twisted tree of rebar, charred limbs dangling like a grotesque marionette. He turned away, bile rising.
The silence had returned—but it was no longer absolute.
There were things moving.
Small, black shapes flitted between the wreckage like shadows with wings. They descended with clicking beaks and glossy feathers that shimmered oil-black in the twin suns. The boy crouched low behind a collapsed arm of a battle mech and watched.
Black ravines.
Not birds. Not quite.
They stood on four slender, bone-hooked limbs and had wings that folded over like cloaks of tar. Beady eyes glinted with cruel intelligence. He watched one tug at the soft flesh of a soldier's cheek through a cracked helmet, another digging into the open ribcage of a fallen pilot still strapped to his seat. Their movements were jerky, almost mechanical—adapted, evolved for this very carnage.
His stomach twisted.
He didn't know how long it had been since he last ate. A day? A week? How long since the war ended?
Had it ended?
Something deeper stirred. Not just the hunger. A low voice in the back of his skull, like a crack through which something waited.
Hunt.
He crept closer, feet silent in the ash. The ravines snapped at one another, territorial and vicious, but none noticed him. Not yet. He tried to pounce.
Too slow.
The ravine shrieked and took flight, scattering the rest in a whirl of dark wings.
He fell, coughing dust, clutching his side in pain.
Failure.
Weakness.
He coiled up in a place, only for him to feel extremely hungry.
Then something snapped in his mind—like a cage door blown off its hinges. For a fraction of a second, something was trying to take control.
A voice, rough and cold, sneered inside his skull.
"You're pathetic. Let me out. I'll gut one of them clean."
"Who are you" the boy asked out of fear. Then, like a flicker, the presence vanished, and he was himself again.
Probably because of the fear he was experiencing at the moment, he had supressed the voice without him noticing —gasping, dizzy, crawling back into the shade of a hollow mech's ribcage.
His hands curled into fists against his will,the hunger was getting unbearable.
"I must do something" he said to himself.
He lay there for hours, or minutes—he couldn't tell. The twin suns never moved. Or if they did, he couldn't tell through the smog and clouds.
But he waited.
Waited until the ravines circled again.
This time, he didn't move. Didn't breathe.
Played dead.
His lips cracked, his skin coated in ash and dried blood. One ravine landed near him, its claws clicking as it dragged a chunk of meat from a nearby corpse.
It hopped closer.
Closer.
His hand moved like lightning.
The shard of metal plunged deep into its throat. A horrible, liquid screech. The creature thrashed—but his grip didn't falter. Blood, black and steaming, gushed from the wound. He tore the blade free. The beast dropped.
He stared at it.
Still twitching.
Still warm.
Then he fell on it like a starving wolf.
The meat was tough, sinewy, and wrong—but it went down. Gagging. Swallowing. Vomiting once. Then eating again.
When he was done, he didn't feel stronger. He felt hollow.
But he would live.
---
That night, the cold crept in. The twin suns bled away behind jagged clouds, and the air turned sharp as knives. He found shelter beneath the mangled remains of a mech's cockpit, where heat still lingered in the broken engine core.
He pressed his back against the hull, staring out into the dark.
The animals came at night.
Not like the ravines. These were bigger. Stranger.
One of them moved like liquid fire, its body coiled with translucent muscles and a thousand red eyes blinking across its flank. Another had legs like stilts and a mouth that split sideways across its face, spilling luminous threads that sizzled when they touched the ground.
He curled into the shadows, still, silent, barely daring to breathe.
His heart pounded like a drum.
Then another flicker.
> "Analyze the behavior. Light-sensitive. Rely on heat signatures. Move low. Don't reflect."
The voice was sharp. Calculating. Calm.
It wasn't his.
Not the cold, angry one from before—but something else. Distant. Analytical.
He was not alone in his own mind.
When the beasts passed, he waited another hour before emerging.
He walked.
Aimless.
Stumbling.
The planet's surface was endless in its desolation. Rivers of rust flowed between valleys carved by missile barrages. Trees made of metal cables jutted from the ground like broken fingers. Insects the size of cats skittered underfoot, mandibles clacking. Once, he saw a beetle dragging a human skull back into its nest of wire.
This place—Virelia-7—was death incarnate,a wasteland, a battlefield planet.
And yet, he lived.
He didn't know how. Or why.
He didn't even know who "he" was.
But sometimes, when he stared into the still pools left behind by broken coolant tanks, he almost saw someone else looking back.
Three shadows in one face.
---
By the third day, his lips were cracked to bleeding. The meat of the ravines barely lasted. He drank from condensation trapped in the cooling vents of dead mechs. His body burned with fever, but still he moved.
He reached what looked like the crater of a final battle. Here, both clans had unleashed their last might.
The Lion Clade.
The Winged Legion.
Flags, tattered and blood-stained, were half-buried in the dirt. He felt something stir again. A memory trying to break free.
> "I fought here…"
He didn't remember saying it.
But his lips moved. The words left.
> "I fought here."
Another flicker. A roar in his skull.
> "We crushed them. We should've died in glory."
He dropped to his knees, clutching his head.
A war inside him.
One wanted blood.
One wanted control.
And one—just wanted to survive.
He curled into a ball and screamed, but the sound was swallowed by the endless wind.
---
When he woke again, it was under stars.
But they were not stars like Earth's.
These stars pulsed.
Watched.
As if something beyond this ruined sky knew he had survived.
Something waiting.
Somehow, without knowing, he whispered aloud to the stars:
"I don't know who I am."
The wind answered with silence.
But somewhere inside, one of the voices stirred and whispered back:
"I pray we find out."
😋