Day 22
By the twenty-second day, the expedition moved like machines—eat, march, collapse, repeat. Routine lacquered over exhaustion until both felt the same. Every kilometer deeper into the forsaken lands carved away at their spirits, a slow abrasion that sanded hope into a smooth, thin thing.
Temporary shelters dotted their path—fabric domes braced by smart-ribs, thin walls, weaker than the darkness pressing against them. The material held, electronics humming softly as the orb's distant pulse tickled their sensors, but the sound did not comfort. The shelters offered no warmth, no relief—only a reminder: you are still alive… for now.
Fuel bled faster than projections. Every day consumed more than they could afford, calculations tightening like a noose around Kai's brow. Food held at stretched margins, recipes altered to eke out calories from blandness. And after more than 110 kilometers of barren ruin—still nothing. No cities. No villages. Not even bones. It was as if the world had swallowed its dead to keep secrets.
Only silence. Only emptiness. Only the abyss.
Inside one shelter, the silence cracked.
Tom Wilton's breath hitched.
It was small at first—a stutter that might have been a cough held back to avoid waking someone. Then the stutter grew claws. His trembling fingers clawed at the seal of his helmet. Too tight… can't breathe… His eyes flashed white around the pupils, panic glassing them over. The air inside the shelter tasted metallic, but safe, safe, safe—except his body didn't believe it.
The hiss of released air filled the room.
"Tom!" Elena's voice cut through the comms, sharp and terrified. She was on him before the sound finished, hands precise, not frantic. "Breathe with me. In—hold—out—now look at me." Her visor tipped to catch his gaze.
Nausea surged through him. His vision swam. The barrier should have kept them safe—but the oppressive miasma seeped in at the edges of reason, clawing at his sanity, whispering madness that smelled like old rain and rot. It was not content with walls. It wanted a mind to nest in.
His hands shook as he fumbled the helmet back on, panic burning through him like fever. Elena guided the ring into place, her fingers steadying his arm, voice calm but firm in his ear. "Seal. Lock. Good. You're okay. Stay with me."
Tian stormed over, the air around him tightening as if bracing for impact. His tone was edged with urgency, not anger—urgency always wore his voice like a blade. "How long without the helmet?"
Tom's lips quivered. They were too pale. "...F-four minutes."
A stunned silence fell. Four minutes was a universe measured in breath. The shelter's hum seemed to dip, then correct itself. Someone cursed too softly for the comms to catch the word.
Suit scans flickered across Tian's visor—heart rate high, fever rising, but stable. Stable… for now. Numbers told a story; he wanted a different ending than the one he had heard before.
"Continuous monitoring," Tian said, iron closing around fear. "No risks. Once back, we run full examinations."
No arguments. No hesitation. Elena's nod was already half a promise. Tom's hands finally stopped shaking, but his eyes did not unclench. The team resumed their march, but unease hung heavy. Each step felt like they carried Tom's burden on their backs, a weight that redistributed from man to many with grim grace.
The abyss listened. It had always listened. Now, perhaps, it began to remember them.
Back at the complex, Tom was rushed to the labs. The change from suffocating dark to clinical light made every edge feel too sharp. Exhaustive scans, endless tests. Numbers scrolled. Images stitched. Results: stable vitals, only a stubborn fever… and fatigue that clung like chains. Elena refused to leave his side except to wash her hands; she cataloged his breaths the way archivists cataloged relics—afraid to lose even one.
Yet by nightfall, he had not stirred.
Day 23 came. Tom still slept.
Everyone knew what that meant. The drivers. The coma. The curse of breathing the poisoned air. A pattern had been traced in grief, and it matched too closely.
One more life stolen. One fewer soul to march into the dark.
Day 23
The expedition set out again—reduced, but unbroken. They moved like a repaired blade—thinner, sharper, harder. Each face was harder now, steel hiding the grief of yesterday. Some wore Tom's name in their silence. Some carried it in the way they checked a seal twice, three times.
Amara led as always, her glowing spirit a fragile candle in the infinite black. The orb's presence within Tian's containment harness pulsed in steady intervals that had become familiar: the cocoon's heartbeat, their movable sanctuary. Around it the void pressed, not clawing, not yet, but alive in its stillness.
Three hours into the march, Amara's eyes widened. It was not a physical motion so much as a rending—the light behind her irises flared and refocused with a sudden intensity. Her voice shook over the comms like a thought spoken too quickly to be massaged smooth. "...Life."
The word froze the team in place.
Life had been a prayer, a hypothesis, a memory. Hearing it made knees feel hollow, made breath feel too loud. Tian's hand rose, an instinct older than command, signaling hold. Engines settled to a tense simmer. Inside helmets, hearts stumbled and corrected.
Then she saw them.
Six twisted monsters—hulking, horned nightmares. Their spiral antlers jutted like thorns grown from the idea of a crown, polished black in Amara's sight, slick with the abyss's dew. Their bodies were a grotesque mix of predator and fever-dream, griffin grace warped into monstrous frames clad in matted black fur. Their shoulders rolled like boulders under skin. Their talons hooked like metal torn and reshaped into hunger.
They fed.
Their prey were beasts no less terrifying—hippo-like juggernauts, massive and squat, armor hides split by teeth and frenzy. Fanged maws tore open, blood painting the broken earth in patterns Amara could not unsee. The ground drank the red and offered nothing back.
Predator against predator. Nightmare devouring nightmare.
The scene seared itself into Amara's ethereal vision. She saw the wet sheen of breath in a monster's nostrils. She saw the shiver that passed through the herd as the sixth horned thing turned its head—not toward the prey, but toward the cocoon, as if sensing pressure gradient rather than light. She felt the orb's pulse dip, then harden, a father's hand tightening on a child's shoulder.
Her voice broke across the comms, urgent, trembling. "We need to move. Now."
Her spirit flickered—then fell.
The light behind her eyes guttered as if wind had found a crack. Unconscious. Her body sagged forward, knees kissing the ground through layers of suit. Elena was already there, a prophecy fulfilled, catching her at the hinge of collapse and breath. "She's out!" Elena's voice was steady. "I've got her."
Tian wasted no breath. He did not ask for descriptions. He did not ask for detail. He did not let curiosity sharpen itself into risk.
"Retreat! Full speed—now!"
Engines roared, boots pounded, beacons blinked like startled birds along their path. The convoy pulled back, every eye burning with dread and a peculiar fury—the kind born when hope is offered and then yanked away with claws. The abyss did not pursue. The predators feasted. If they noticed the cocoon slide backward through the dark, they did not break the feast for the chase.
They reached the sanctuary without incident, but the silence was suffocating. The inside of the doors seemed to hold the echo of the order long after it faded. Decontamination cycles hummed. The air regained its human size. No one spoke until speaking would not shatter them.
Amara awoke trembling, eyes haunted. She gripped Elena's wrist long enough to anchor, then found Tian with a gaze that asked for nothing except being seen. Her words chilled the room.
"There is life out there… but it's not what we hoped."
The sentence had weight enough to bend spines. Hope had been rehearsing a reunion with the familiar: survivors in habs, an enclave waiting, a village with fires banked. Instead, life wore spirals and matted fur and ate its own nightmares for breakfast.
That night, no public gathering was called.
Only the expedition team met in the conference chamber. The walls felt tighter than ever, structure compressing around breath and worry. The air was heavy with unspoken fear, thick with the residues of almost. Kai stared at resource tables without seeing them. Elena's hands were clean and would not stop being clean. Tian stood too straight, an angle drawn with a ruler instead of a spine.
Amara stood at the center, the weight of revelation pressing against her trembling shoulders. Around her, faces arranged themselves into orbits—some close, some careful. The orb in its cradle thrummed a steady, indifferent rhythm, as if to remind them: the abyss has rules. So must we.
She inhaled and held the breath, as if trapping her vision where words could reach it. When she spoke, her voice was softer than the dark.
"They hunt," she said. "They do not wander. They do not search the way we do. They feed because they can. They felt us. I don't think they saw. But they felt."
The room did not stir. A chair creaked in pain. Someone's knuckles whitened around a pen as if breaking the plastic could erase what had been said. Tian looked at his hands and could not remember any longer if they had always been this steady, or if steadiness had been a choice he would keep making until it cost everything.
"We plan," he said, the single plank of a bridge laid over a chasm. "We adapt."
But even in the resolve, everyone there understood what had shifted.
The abyss was not empty.
And tomorrow, it might finally reach for them.