Week 1, Day 0 , Afternoon.
The first day dragged on. We finally sparked our very first fire thanks to an old man who still had a lighter in his pocket. Honestly? If I'd had a lighter on me, I probably would've kept it hidden, and I hated how easily I could imagine doing exactly that.
Nobody had said much all day, not since the dragon. But this quiet felt different. Heavier. The kind that comes when everyone lands on the same thought at once. Whatever this planet actually was, it clearly had more waiting in it than we'd guessed on day one. If we wanted to survive the night, we needed real shelter, not the half-built thing currently passing for one.
That's when the jobs got handed out. Nikita, Carmen, and the elf took the shelter itself, working to make it actually hold up. Amina claimed night watch before anyone else could, her only job keeping that fire fed so it never went out again. We'd only get the one chance at starting it.
That left the Japanese kid and me on wood duty.
"Aleks, right? Let's go!" he said, flashing a grin and tossing an arm across my shoulders.
"Yeah, yeah, let's go," I grumbled, sliding his arm off.
"Wow, those two clicked fast," Amina murmured behind us at the fire.
We pushed deep into the woods. It was cool and dim in there, only thin shafts of light cutting through gaps in the canopy. I started ripping branches off trees, and the wood was way softer than anything back on Earth, thick limbs coming off with barely any effort at all. Startled, I glanced at him. He stared back, just as stunned.
"Bro, did you see that? This wood's insanely soft! We can haul a mountain of it in no time," he laughed, giving my shoulder a playful smack. "Enough fuel to last us a week, easy."
"Soft doesn't automatically mean good," I pointed out. "Because it's soft, it'll burn quicker than hardwood. So we'll actually need a lot more."
His smile faded. He dropped his hand and went back to snapping branches in silence.
Great. Way to kill the mood, five minutes in. I'm useless at this, the whole talking-to-people thing, and this actually needs to go well. At least one person here who doesn't already have an opinion about me, that's all I'm asking for. So say something. Anything. Except I don't even know his name anymore. It's gone. I had it an hour ago and now there's nothing there.
"So, uh," he suddenly asked, breaking the tension, "what do you think about the girls back at camp? Amina and Carmen?"
What? Why is he asking me this right now?
"Seriously, you can still think about girls after everything that went down today?" I laughed, half in disbelief.
He shrugged, grinning. "Your answer'll tell me what kind of guy you are. So, Amina or Carmen? Who do you think is hotter?"
"Uh, give me a sec to think," I said automatically, cheeks heating.
Is he serious right now? People literally died in front of us and this dude wants me to pick a crush?
He leaned closer. "You knew Carmen before all this, right? When you two walked back from the woods it looked like it."
"Yeah, that's right. She's a friend from my..."
He stopped ripping branches, cutting me off. "Friend? As in, are you two together?"
"No, no. Like I said, just childhood friends. You cut me off."
"Do you have feelings for her? Like, actual feelings?"
"No."
"Really? Because that took you a second."
"Really. No feelings. She's basically my sister at this point."
He let out a giant breath. "Thank God. I thought you'd be my rival and I'd have to duel you or something. She's totally my type. First time I saw her I thought, damn, she's beautiful. I can't stop thinking about her."
He would not shut up.
"Pretty sure we've got enough firewood. Let's head back," I said, cutting him off.
"Sure thing, bro."
We walked slowly toward camp. The guy, still no clue what his name was, kept talking about Carmen the whole way.
"You know her personally, Aleks. Spill some details, come on," he nagged.
He paused mid-stride, slid the bundle of wood onto his shoulder, and pointed. "What's that over there?"
I followed his finger. He was aiming at the archway Carmen and I had found earlier.
"That's the place Carmen and I told you about," I said.
"Then let's see what's inside." His eyes went wide with interest.
"I really don't think that's smart. Let's get back to the others first," I argued, but it didn't stick. He was already marching toward the doorway.
"Hey, wait!" I called, jogging after him.
"Do you think something lives in there?" he asked, still glued to the shadowed entrance.
Something? We'd already watched a real dragon fly overhead, and God knew what demonic nightmares we'd seen on Earth. Yes. Obviously yes.
"Come on, let's go in," he urged.
"What? Oh hell no!" I blurted.
"Scaredy-cat," he laughed.
Fine. Things can't get any crazier, right?
I shot the structure one last glance before stepping inside. A tall archway carved into a low hill, black stone etched with winding patterns. From the entrance all you could see past the first few feet was black. We dumped the firewood next to the doorway and slipped inside.
There was no light at all past the entrance, not the dim kind, not any kind. My boot found a step before my eyes ever would have, and that's how I realized we were already on a staircase, heading down. Each step took us lower. The air turned cooler, damper, and a smell drifted up that reminded me of an old church, dusty and stone-cold, the kind that gets into everything, walls, clothes, skin.
"Look," he whispered.
He didn't point, but I saw it too: up ahead, a glow. Light, this far underground? How was that even possible?
I drew a slow breath, swallowed hard, and kept moving. It was so quiet down here I could hear my own pulse. The only sound at all was our footsteps on the stairs, and the flat little echo they threw back at us with each step. My heartbeat picked up until it matched the rhythm of our steps. Every part of me wanted to turn back around and take the stairs two at a time going up instead.
"Careful," he whispered as the glow widened ahead.
"No shit," I muttered.
Why am I still going deeper? I should've turned back the second he said "let's go in" and let him find out the hard way.
At the bottom, the stairs opened into a hall that didn't match anything about the doorway outside. Smooth white stone covered every surface, cut into columns and friezes, all of it carved with a precision that didn't look hand-done. Torches burned in sconces along every pillar, already lit, and at the far end a massive door stood closed. The walls held carvings more detailed than any Egyptian hieroglyphs I'd ever seen in a textbook, four separate panels, two to a side.
Lit torches meant someone, or something, had been here not long ago.
"Check this out," he said, eyes glued to one mural.
I joined him. The carving showed a wide landscape, humanoid figures kneeling with their backs to us, too worn to tell if they were human, elf, or something else entirely. Every one of them faced a huge sphere that threw light out in beams, all of them kneeling toward it in the same direction. Along the border ran a script I'd never seen before in my life.
I squinted, trying to make sense of the letters, and jerked back. Somehow I could read it. Not letter by letter. The meaning just arrived, whole, the same trick my head had pulled with elves and dwarves earlier that day.
I shot him a look. "Can you read this too?"
He locked on to the script and started reading aloud, voice low and clear:
"We were the First. The First Children. Made in His Image. We were blessed, eternal, untouched by decay. The world was ours. We knew no war. We knew no hunger. We knew no loss. We were loved."
"How am I even able to read this? This place just keeps getting worse," he muttered, pushing his glasses up out of habit.
"Let's check the next mural," I suggested.
He nodded, and we stepped to the panel beside it. The layout was identical, but the glowing sphere was gone, and the same kneeling figures were still there, praying into empty air. While I studied the scene, he read the inscription aloud:
"Then the Sky fell silent. His voice, which had always guided us, was no more. We waited. We prayed. We searched the heavens. But no answer came."
Our eyes met. Yeah, that sounded bad.
We crossed to the third carving. This one was a mess: only a few figures remained on their knees. The rest looked terrified, some sprinting away, others turning on each other. In one corner, someone had scratched in a rough shape, hunched over, faceless, unmistakably one of the things that had come for us back on Earth.
He swallowed and read the next inscription:
"Not through war. Not through disaster. But through emptiness. Without Him, there was nothing. And so we became nothing."
We moved to where the fourth mural should have been. Instead there was a hole, ragged at the edges, the stone around it broken outward, exactly where a fourth panel should have sat.
"Damn," he muttered.
"Yeah. Let's get out of here," I said, already backing up.
"Hold up, what about the big door? Don't you wanna know what's behind it?" he asked.
I shook my head hard, no argument in me for it.
"If you're scared, you can head back alone. We'll meet at the shelter," he teased.
I glanced back up the stairs behind us. Only the first few steps still caught any light at all. Past that, it was solid black, no light reaching down that far.
Oh, hell no. Rule number one of horror movies: never split up.
He stepped forward and shoved his shoulder against the massive door. "This thing's heavy. Hey, bro, help me out, yeah?"
I moved closer, but before I could touch the wood a piercing scream cut through the crack. Something was actually behind that door, and we were not alone.
The scream came out impossibly loud, sharp enough that I flinched hard enough to bite my own tongue. Our faces drained of color. In the same heartbeat we bolted back up the stairs.
Seconds later we burst outside, and I'd never been so happy to gulp fresh air. My lungs burned and my legs wouldn't stop shaking.
"Dude, what the hell was that?" he panted, bent double with his hands on his knees.
"No idea, man. No idea," I wheezed, crouching to catch my breath.
"What just happened stays between us, okay?" he said, still catching his breath.
"Fine." I didn't have the air to argue anyway.
"Promise?"
"Yeah. Promise."
"Then let's get the hell out of here."
First smart thing he'd said all day.
We grabbed the sticks we'd left beside the doorway and headed back toward camp.
"Hey, Aleks," he asked as we walked.
"Yeah?"
"Who do you think they were talking about?"
"Who?"
"In those texts, the ones I read aloud. They kept mentioning someone who'd abandoned them. Who was that, Aleks?"
"God," I answered quietly.
"God, huh? Now that I think about it, kinda makes sense. Those murals showed them praying to something."
He went quiet, lost in thought, and slowed for a few steps, eyes fixed on the dirt path in front of him.
"Do you think God's abandoned us too?" he asked quietly.
"Huh?" I blinked.
"Never mind," he said, brushing it off.
Soon our shelter came into view. The sun had already dipped below the treeline. While we'd been out gathering wood the others had done serious upgrades. Our lean-to had come a long way since we'd left. It actually had walls now, something you could call a shelter instead of a half-finished frame. A skeleton of thick branches held up a wide triangle shape, the roof packed with smaller sticks and a thick layer of leaves. Nikita and Carmen were still up on it, tucking more foliage into the gaps. Off to the side, Amina knelt by the fire, feeding it more logs.
But my attention snapped to Cealith. He stood at the center of half a dozen of his own people, and you'd think being surrounded by his own kind would have settled him. Instead his face was pure panic. Shoulders pulled in tight, rigid. I knew that stance. It used to be mine, back whenever Brad wound up to take a swing at me.
Suddenly one of the elves shoved him. Another drove a fist into his ribs. Cealith gasped and dropped to the dirt.
"Hey, what the hell?" I whispered, dropping my bundle.
"Cealith looked totally chill before. Why are they beating him?" he said, his voice sharp with confusion.
"No clue, but we can't just watch," I said.
We threw the firewood aside and bolted. Nikita glanced up, confusion flashing across his face, but we were already sprinting past him. One of the elves drove a knee into Cealith's ribs. Another raised a clenched fist, ready to swing again.
"Stop!" he shouted.
I felt the same word tear out of my throat too, but out here in the open dark, it barely carried past the fire.
Cealith tried to crawl away, blood streaking his lip. The tallest elf grabbed a fistful of his silver hair and yanked him upright, just as we reached the edge of the firelight.
His attacker turned toward us, eyes burning, and lifted something that caught the light, orange and sharp in his hand.
I skidded to a halt, heart punching my ribs.
Please don't be a blade.