No one ever mistook the Barrens for a place meant to be lived in.
It was a wound in space—an immense bubble where the stars warped and bent inward, their light dulled as if passing through bruised flesh. Ships pierced its boundary every cycle, engines screaming as reality resisted their entry. Some never made it through intact. Others arrived already burning.
That was how most humans came.
The strong, the altered, the reckless—those who could survive vacuum and radiation—sometimes flew in alone, bodies wrapped in barely visible shields of mutated blood. They crossed the boundary like falling meteors, vanishing into the haze below. There was no honor in it. Only necessity.
Leaving was another matter entirely.
At the center of the human outpost stood the teleporter—a towering ring of scarred metal and fractured light. Its surface rippled constantly, like liquid trying to remember how to be solid. The machine hummed with restrained power, ancient and temperamental, tuned to something deeper than flesh.
It did not answer everyone.
Silver passed it every morning.
He kept his eyes down as he walked, shoulders hunched beneath armor that had once belonged to someone else. The metal plates were too large for him, the straps tightened as far as they would go. Dust clung to his boots and refused to come off, no matter how often he scraped them clean.
Around the teleporter, warriors waited in silence.
Their blood had already begun its transformation. Veins glowed faintly beneath scarred skin, carrying strength earned through survival in the Barrens. When the machine recognized one of them, its light flared sharply, and the chosen vanished in a burst of distorted space—sent upward to the Ashlands, where stronger bodies and crueler trials waited.
Silver had never been chosen.
He was awakened, they said. That was supposed to mean something. The first sign that the blood had stirred, that mutation had begun its slow ascent. For most, it brought strength, speed, resilience.
For Silver, it brought pain.
His head ached constantly, as if something inside him were pressing against the limits of his skull. He slept poorly, haunted by dreams that left him shaking and empty. Sometimes his chest burned with a heat that never turned into power—only exhaustion.
The teleporter ignored him completely.
No resonance. No signal. Not even rejection.
Just silence.
Sirens wailed across the outpost as patrols assembled along the perimeter. Another incursion was expected. The Barrens never rested; its creatures tested the walls endlessly, probing for weakness, learning from every failed assault.
Silver joined a scavenger unit and followed them beyond the shielding field, out into the open dust. No one assigned him a partner. No one complained.
The sky above churned slowly, layered with ash and distant flashes of orbital combat. Somewhere far beyond sight, human fleets clashed with things that should not have existed—beings born of the Barrens' twisted depths, pouring endlessly from fractures in space.
This was where humanity began now.
Not on worlds of blue and green, but here—in the dust, beneath a broken sky, fighting monsters while waiting for their blood to decide if they deserved to leave.
Silver tightened his grip on his blade and stepped forward with the others, his heart pounding for reasons he could not name.
He did not know that the Barrens remembered him.
He only knew that he was still at the beginning.