The rain here did not taste like iron. It tasted of something older, something rotting and wet and overwhelmingly alive.
Kaelen huddled beneath the curvature of a massive, shattered stone slab—a piece of the floating island that had survived the descent only to embed itself like a tombstone in the foreign earth. The air was thick, heavy with moisture that clung to the inside of his lungs. It didn't smell of ozone or recycled air. It smelled of decay. Sweet, cloying, suffocating decay.
Kaelen pressed a hand against his left side. His breath hitched, a jagged rhythm against the dull, grinding ache of his ribs.
Ribs 4 and 5, his mind cataloged, the habit of the Audit kicking in to stave off the panic. Fractured. Displacement likely. Lung capacity reduced by 30%.
He looked at his hands. They were coated in a thick, dark substance. Not grease. Not oil. It was... soil. Wet earth. It felt alien against his skin, gritty and chaotic. There was no uniformity to it, no industrial standard. It was just a mess of ground-up matter.
He wiped his hands on his ruined trousers, repulsed, and reached for the Ledger.
The book was damp. The leather cover, tanned from the hide of a Sky-Ray, was sodden and limp. He opened it, the pages peeling apart with a sound like wet flesh. The charcoal stub was broken, but he found a fragment in the binding.
He needed to write. If he didn't write, the silence of this new world would consume him.
Day 16. Post-Impact. Location: The Below (Surface). Shelter: Debris Field. Supplies: 1 Knife (Steel). 0 Rations. Water Source: Unverified.
He stared at the page. The variables were all wrong. He didn't know the baseline for survival here. What was the toxicity of the air? What was the caloric density of the local flora? He was a mathematician trying to solve an equation using a language he didn't speak.
He hesitated, the charcoal hovering over the next line. Assets.
He wrote: Korgath. He stared at the name. The heavy anchor of the group. The wall. He crossed it out with a sharp, jagged line. Status: Missing.
He wrote: Vanya. The memory of her magic, the rot she carried, felt strangely akin to this damp, festering place. He crossed it out. Status: Missing.
He wrote: Elara. His hand trembled. The anomaly. The variable that refused to fit the curve. He crossed it out slowly. Status: Missing.
He closed the book. The soft thump was swallowed instantly by the relentless drumming of the rain on the stone above.
"Audit complete," he whispered. His voice was a wreck—a dry rasp that felt small in the vastness of the surface.
He needed to move. Staying in the crash zone was illogical. The smoke from the burning remnants of Sector 7 was rising into the grey sky, a beacon for whatever lived down here. And things did live here. He could feel it. The air watched him.
Kaelen gritted his teeth. He took off his belt. He pulled his knife. He cut strips from the hem of his heavy coat.
He stripped off his upper layers, shivering as the damp, humid air hit his skin. He wrapped the strips of cloth around his chest, pulling them tight.
One. White spots danced in his vision. Two. He locked the breath in his throat. Three. He exhaled, the pain settling into a dull, constant roar.
He redressed. He checked the lead-lined pouch at his waist. The Resonance Core was still there. A cold, heavy lump. A piece of the world Above brought down to the world Below.
He crawled out of the shelter.
The rain soaked him instantly. The ground—this "mud"—sucked at his boots, trying to pull him down. He stood up, swaying, using a fractured piece of masonry as a cane.
He scanned the perimeter.
It was a nightmare of organic chaos.
Kaelen had spent his life in corridors, on metal grates, in forests of pipes and glass. He understood geometry. He understood architecture.
He did not understand this.
Great pillars of brown, fibrous material rose from the ground, twisting and branching out into canopies of green webbing. They looked like explosions frozen in time. They were everywhere, blocking sightlines, creating a ceiling of leaves that dripped water endlessly.
Trees, his mind supplied the word from ancient texts, but the reality was far more terrifying than the definition. They were massive. They were silent. And they were crowding him.
Interspersed among these "trees" were the shattered remains of his home. A section of a tower lay crushed against a rock face. A bridge span had impaled the earth like a spear. The clean, hard lines of Sector 7 looked pathetic here, swallowed by the green and the brown.
Kaelen began to walk. He moved away from the smoke, pushing through waist-high growths of ferns that brushed against his legs with a wet, whispering sound.
He hated it. He hated the texture of the world. Everything was soft, damp, and yielding. There was no reassuring clang of boots on metal. Only the squelch of his own insignificance.
He moved for an hour. His pace was agonizing. He counted his steps. One hundred. Scan sector. Two hundred. Scan sector.
He found a stream. It wasn't contained in a pipe. It ran wild, cutting a jagged scar through the earth. The water was clear—suspiciously clear—running over smooth stones.
He stopped.
On the bank of the stream, pressed into the mud, was a mark.
Kaelen crouched, his ribs screaming in protest.
It was a print. A paw print. But it was enormous. Three times the size of any vermin rat from the sewers of the sky.
He hovered his hand over it. The mud was still slowly filling the depression with water.
Fresh, he analyzed. Estimated weight: 300 pounds. Morphology: Quadruped. Biological.
That was the terrifying part. It wasn't a machine. A machine had limits. A machine had a power source, a maintenance cycle, a logic loop.
Biology was messy. Biology was hungry.
Kaelen drew his knife. The steel blade, forged from recycled hull plating, looked fragile against the backdrop of the ancient woods.
Variable added: Apex Predator.
He turned away from the stream, seeking the cover of a dense thicket of thorny brush. He moved slower now. He tried to mimic the silence of the place, but he was a creature of the city; he didn't know how to walk without making noise. Every twig that snapped under his boot sounded like a gunshot.
The light began to fail. The grey sky darkened to a bruised violet.
He heard it then.
A sound.
It wasn't a mechanical whir. It wasn't a hiss of steam.
It was a breath.
A deep, wet intake of air, followed by a low, vibrating chuff.
Kaelen froze. He pressed his back against the rough bark of a massive tree. He held his breath, his heart hammering against his bruised ribs like a trapped bird.
Thirty yards away, the ferns parted.
It stepped into the clearing.
It was wolf-like, but wrong. It was too tall, its shoulders hunched with slabs of shifting muscle. Its fur was matted with moss and mud, acting as natural camouflage. Its eyes were not glowing optics; they were pale, yellow orbs with slit pupils that seemed to drink the remaining light.
It opened its mouth, tasting the air.
Kaelen stared in horror. He expected rows of serrated steel. He saw pink gums, white bone, and strings of thick saliva. The heat radiating from the beast was palpable even from this distance.
It was hunting. And it wasn't scanning for a thermal signature or a movement pattern. It was smelling him.
It smells the blood, Kaelen realized, a cold sweat breaking out on his forehead. The internal bleeding. I am leaking data into the air.
The beast turned its head. The yellow eyes swept over the tree where Kaelen hid.
It didn't see him. Not yet. But it knew.
Kaelen gripped a heavy stone from the base of the tree. His hand was shaking. He needed a distraction. In the sky, he would have thrown a bolt into a fan blade, created a mechanical dissonance.
Here, there were no fans.
He looked to his left. A pool of stagnant water sat beneath the roots of a fallen tree.
Trajectory calculated.
He threw the stone.
It arced through the gloom and splashed into the pool. Plod.
The sound was dull, organic.
The beast whipped its head around. Its ears—swiveling cones of flesh—twitched. It let out a snarl that started in its chest and ended in a snap of its jaws. It lunged toward the water, moving with a terrifying, fluid grace that no servo-motor could replicate.
Kaelen moved.
He didn't run. He slid. He kept the tree between him and the monster, moving downwind, praying that the scent of the stagnant water would mask his own metallic tang.
He retreated fifty yards, moving on hands and knees through the mud, ignoring the agony in his side. He didn't stop until he reached a rocky outcrop that rose above the tree line.
He scrambled up the wet stone, his fingernails tearing on the granite. He wedged himself into a crevice high up, behind a curtain of hanging moss.
He listened.
Below, the beast prowled the water's edge. He heard it sniffing. Then, a low whine of frustration.
It moved on, vanishing into the green dark.
Kaelen slumped against the cold rock. He was shaking violently now. The adrenaline crash was hitting him.
"Biologicals," he hissed, the word tasting like bile. "Unpredictable. Chaotic."
He checked his pulse. Too fast. He forced himself to breathe. In. Out.
He was alive. But the margin of error was gone. On the island, he was a scavenger. Here, he was prey.
Night settled fully over Aethelgard. It was a darkness deeper than the Void. In the sky, there was always the glow of the city lights, the stars, the nebula. Here, under the canopy, the darkness was absolute.
Kaelen sat in his crevice, shivering. The temperature had dropped.
He looked out over the landscape from his vantage point.
The crash site was a distant, glowing smudge to the north. But looking south, he saw the true face of the world they had fallen into.
It was vast. Endless rolling hills of black shapes that he assumed were more of these "forests." Mountains in the distance that looked like jagged teeth. It was a world of immense, terrifying scale.
And it was dead silent.
No hum of generators. No distant clang of industry. Just the wind sighing through the leaves.
Then, he saw it.
To the south. Miles away.
A spark.
It wasn't fire. Fire flickered and danced. This was steady. A pulse.
Flash.
Pause.
Flash.
Kaelen sat up, wincing. He fumbled for his spyglass. The lens was cracked, spiderwebbing the view, but he focused it.
He swept the horizon.
There.
Rising from the sea of trees was a spire. It wasn't made of rusted iron or riveted plates. It was white stone, smooth and pale like bone. It looked untouched by the decay around it.
And at the top, a light pulsed. A clean, golden light.
Kaelen lowered the glass.
He didn't know what it was. The maps in his Ledger ended at the cloud layer. The surface was supposed to be a tomb.
But a light meant intent. A light meant someone—or something—was keeping watch.
If the others had survived... they would see it.
Elara would go to it. She was drawn to things she didn't understand. Vanya would sense the power of it. And Korgath... Korgath would look for a rallying point.
Kaelen took out his charcoal. It was a nub now, barely usable.
He turned the page to a fresh sheet.
Objective Updated. Current Goal: The White Spire. Distance: Unknown. Variables: Biological threats. Unstable terrain. Critical injury.
He looked at the blank space under "Probability of Success."
He thought about the beast in the woods. He thought about the mud. He thought about the sheer, crushing alien nature of this planet.
The math said zero. The math said he should lie down in this crevice and let the moss take him.
But he thought of the Ledger. He was the Auditor. He had to balance the books. He couldn't leave the entries as "Missing." He had to verify.
He wrote a single number.
1%.
It was a lie. But it was a necessary variable.
"Acceptable," he whispered to the wet stone.
He curled up in the crevice, pulling his knees to his chest to preserve warmth. He gripped the knife in one hand and the damp Ledger in the other.
He watched the distant light blink in the crushing dark.
Flash... Flash...
It was the only thing in this world that made sense. Geometry. Rhythm. A binary state of on and off.
"I am coming," he breathed.
He closed his eyes. For the first time, he wasn't dreaming of the sky. He was dreaming of a path through the woods.
The audit was paused.
Tomorrow, he would calculate the cost of a mile. Tonight, he simply had to endure the silence of the earth.