Let’s go over what I know right now. The sky started to ripple; it doesn’t matter what planet you’re on, you can almost always take that as a bad sign.

The decaying aether from our stand-in for a sun fell from the sky and blasted my island off the map. That’s pretty bad too.

I’ve got no idea if my folks are alright. And right now I’ve got no means of finding out. That’s the item I get to when I offhandedly discover that the pit of my stomach is much lower than I’ve previously known it to be.

I shouldn’t be this calm. I should be sobbing on my knees on the ashen beach. Crying hasn’t come so easily since my first death, and that should scare me. I wish it scared me. I try to tell myself that now is not the time for a personal crisis, but quickly correct myself; it is the perfect time for a personal crisis. My dad and my friends are potentially dead, and I’m an indeterminate distance away, so I can’t even know. I just hope the damage wasn’t so widespread that it got the rest of my family on the other side of the archipelago.

...What if it was?

All the tears finally hit at once, and I grieve for a while; I'll spare you the details but it was ugly. I manage to eventually tear myself out of it and make an effort to get my bearings. Though I lift my head, I still wallow in the aftermath of my quiet despair for several minutes, the gentle gray tide’s chill permeating me in my entirety. The storm must have truly been massive to keep the sea in motion this long; it’s usually stagnant and lifeless. A depressing scene, to be sure, but given recent occurrences, I would prefer it to this. I tire of it before too long, and begin to pick myself up out of the water.

I need to focus on survival. I won’t starve very quickly unless injured, but I do need fluids. The ocean won’t be a good source of that; undead or not, the arsenic concentration will do me no favors. For the first time since I woke up, I turn and regard the island, a maze of bluffs and sheer drops. It’ll be hard to navigate.

>>>>>>>>>

My recollection is interrupted as fingers dive in and my captor lifts me by my midriff out of her canine jaws. The steam in her breath is quickly lost in the air outside.

“This doesn’t feel like the beginning to me,” she says, dangling me a little too high for my liking. “And has anyone ever mentioned to you that your pacing could use work? I asked what happened, not how you felt about what happened.”

“I get really into it,” I defend, my ears folding. “I thought I’d omit the whole ‘life at home’ thing for now; that’s a little boring.” In honesty, that’s not true. There’s just a lot that she doesn’t need to know.

“Fair enough, you can always tell me about it once we’re better acquainted,” she chuckles. “Anyway, can you get to the part where you stop being on the beach?”

“I was getting there.”

“Perfect.” With that, she stuffs me back into her mouth, face down on her flat tongue. As odd as it is to say, I’m getting used to this texture. I might even enjoy it if not for the implications of it. After all, it’s not a new experience, you know, but so far neither flirtation with it has lived up to depiction.

I try to get situated without slipping into her throat again, and find my spot in my tale again.

>>>>>>>>>

There are some pieces missing, forgive me. Not of me I mean, of my recollection.

I am, and for now continue to be, Merion. Morph, black-backed jackal type, there are a lot of jackals on Paliputra.

I am, until officially counted among the casualties and the missing, a Maxim citizen.

I was, until just this morning, a full-time ghostworks technician but the likelihood of any part of that campus continuing to exist in recognizable form is, shall we say, suboptimal.

Let’s skip ahead a little bit. After a couple of hours of wandering, I finally got the idea that it’d be easier to tell where I’m going if I climbed up top. It would have been difficult, I’m sure, but I opted to cheat. As a gapwalker, it’s nice to have the options I have. Teleportation does expend quite a bit of radiance in comparison to other sorts of spells but upon feeling the wind in my fur for the first time since entering the claustrophobic confines of the maze, I am assured that it was well spent. Leaping the gaps proves easy enough, and I quickly cover more ground than I could have before.
It’s not long before I reach the opposite coast. It’s a small place, evidently. Scarcity of plant life means that I don’t have a lot to work with for shelter.

It turns out I don’t even need to worry about that. After a few more minutes, fate and chance take pity on me. Embedded in one of the bluffs facing out to sea is a small… we'll call it a bunker, since that generosity costs nothing. It’s a patchwork of crude bricks and sheet metal but it seems solid, protruding arm's length from the natural rock. It doesn’t look like anybody has been here for some time.
Well, the polite thing to do is knock, just in case, but I get no answer. I’ll just let myself in, then. I pull the oxidized handle and the door responds with a loud creak, but at least it wasn’t locked. There are two bolts on the inside that I initially think I can use to keep it shut when I need it to be, but looking closer, I find they’re too short, the ends cut roughly. They’re just as weathered as every other surface though, this wasn’t done recently. I’ll find something else to stick through there to keep it shut.

The interior is dusty and drab, with a single table and chair, and a foldout shelf affixed to the wall for a bed. It’s not quite as similar to a home as it is to a bunker. One corner of the room has a small counter, the majority of its surface dominated by a microwave oven, the tiny alcove in it large enough perhaps for a single small bowl. This thing is older than me. Fighting for room next to it is a small tank of gas, supporting a rack to heat food more conventionally. Not that I’ve got anything to cook, but I wouldn’t trust either device to work at this point, at least not safely.

There’s a door at the back of the room, bolted shut from this side. I assume it’s a closet or pantry, possibly containing canned food. I’m not above eating it cold assuming it’s still good.

I don’t look inside for long before fear starts to well up in my chest. I delicately shut the door, hastily resetting the bolts and stumbling back away from it. Given my magical affinity for it, you would think I would have shaken my fear of the dark long ago. I thought I did too. But I have just peered into the darkest darkness I’ve ever seen. I don’t think I want to open that door again. Part of me wants to go out and find a different place to make my base, but finding another location as complete as this one, as well as unoccupied, is unlikely. But maybe there’s a reason it’s unoccupied.

I shake my head; I’m worrying too much. I mean, basically the worst thing has already happened. If I can survive a sunstorm, I can sleep a few feet away from a scary steel door. It’s as thick as my forearm is long, so it’s not like anything is getting through it anyway. But now that I’ve opened it at all, the anxiety on the other side has come to join me. There’s always going to be that nagging worry in the back of my head now.

I’ll come back here later. It’s next to a somewhat prominent stone spire, so it should be easy for me to find again. I have nothing else to do, so I should explore, and maybe see about replacing my old protection. Everyone is carrying something, after all, and I can’t count on the first face I meet to be friendly. Even the friendly ones have more likely than not killed someone. My hands aren’t clean either.

>>>>>>>>>

“Bulllllshit.”

I yelp, spilling out onto my predator’s palm. I shake off some of the clinging saliva, like I’m not about to get a fresh coating of it reapplied in a few moments, and try to steady myself enough to kneel.

“Why bullshit?” I ask, glancing back over my shoulder indignantly.

“I don’t think you could.”

“You thought I was gonna kill you!” I protest, turning to face her properly and flicking her own remnant drool at her face. “Isn’t that why you ate me?”

“I thought you’d try,” she clarifies, giving me a little tap on the nose. I think it’s meant to be little, anyway, but it knocks me on my back. I roll to cover myself.

“May I continue?…”

“Yeah sure.” I can hear that lack of punctuation, her growing apathy. As she tosses me back into her maw yet again, I find myself increasingly dreading that she’ll just get bored enough to swallow.

>>>>>>>>>

I spend a while walking along the gray beach, before coming to what I firmly believe is the only green that exists on this rock. A small grove of trees, just inland from the gravelly shore, twisted and gnarled. Dead, mostly. But a handful of them have managed to survive, and even flourish, as well as anything on this planet can flourish. 

Browsing through the branches, I pick up one every now and again and strike the ground with it. I am sure I look like a damn fool, banging sticks on the ground, but who's around to see? It proves worthwhile, anyway; I barely break a splinter from some of the branches. Sturdier than I expected. I can work with this. I eventually decide on one that comes up to about waist height, and after peeling as much bark off as I can, I begin to take it back to the bunker. 

Once I’m back, I sit down and begin working on it. Lack of tools should make this difficult, but I have my ways around that. I focus my energy to the fingertips of my right hand, opening a miniscule void rift. A lot sharper than any knife, at the cost of tapping my aura again. It won't leave me with much in the way of spells to fall back on until next sunrise but this is hopefully a long term investment.

After spending some time on it, I manage to get a crude, ovular cylinder shape out of the upper half and I have the foundations of a handle at the bottom half. I had to cut off quite a bit of it, so the final length will probably be about half my height, if even that. Not as much heft as some things, perhaps, but the shape of it should allow for rupturing skin if the situation calls for it.

The sun has almost set; once it does, the five suns of the Ravel will be visible in the night sky, although far and dim in appearance from all the way out here. Most people say that our sky is the most beautiful, but the sight of that vibrant color so far away from the Fray fills me with longing to be anywhere but here. I think they’re just trying to stop themselves from feeling that same longing by repeating hopeful things to themselves. After all, nobody is going to waste time coming all the way out here to tell them they’re wrong. The fastest ships in all five systems will still take nearly a month to get here.

>>>>>>>>>

“You’re… reading again,” I diverge, having turned myself around to see pages past her teeth.

“You’re getting all wistful again,” she says around me, flipping a page. “Get to the important bits, you interrupted me at a really good part so that’s your competition.”

I groan, settling in on my folded arms and flicking her soft palate with my bundle of tails.

>>>>>>>>>

I really don’t need to see the sunset, its angrily roiling surface only keeps the memory of the morning fresh. I head inside and lock up, but I underestimated how dark it would be. Closing my eyes and rolling them straight back, I switch modes, finding my way in infrared.  My irises emit a soft amber glow that overpowers my natural green like this, it’s an unintentional indicator of their activation, but it’s caused me no problems so far. Even now, there’s still not a lot to see in here, but vaguely colored outlines allow me not to stumble aimlessly.  About halfway to the bed shelf, I remember the door that bothered me earlier so much. When I set my makeshift weapon down, I do so well within arm’s reach of the shelf.

With that done, I remove my scarf and fold it up where I’m going to lay my head. There can be some comfort in resting on a flat piece of wood after all, even if it’s still somewhat damp. I position myself as cozily as I can, but ensure that my tail doesn’t hang off the side. After deactivating my infrared sight, I keep my eyes shut and try my hardest to sleep. I start to drift off, after maybe an hour of lamentations I didn’t get around to having earlier. I don't have the energy to be quite as pitiful, this time.

What I presume to have been a few hours passes, when I jolt awake suddenly, and find myself in something I can’t quite tell is real or a nightmare. I sit upright, sensing something amiss right away. I turn my infrared back on, immediately focusing on the thing I dreaded, but the door is still shut tight.

Then why do I feel so afraid? There has been a quiet unease in here since I got back, but that’s normal when sleeping in strange places, isn’t it? I try to find rationale for what I'm feeling, hoping it will bring me some calm, but when the reason finally does become known to me, my last nerve snaps. I’m not alone after all.

When I opened the door earlier, more than just a sense of anxiety followed me out, and I realize this when my guest- or am I its guest? –who is perched beside me, unseen, and as heatless as death itself, breathes five words onto my vulnerable neck.