Let’s go over what I know right now. My home is gone.

When the sky starts to ripple like that, 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.

And here I am, on some shore at the farthest tip of the island chain, useless lungs waterlogged until I collect the wherewithal to attempt a sigh. It’s a small comfort that I don’t depend on oxygen like that. A living thing’s record would have ended not far from the sun’s point of impact.

I shouldn’t be this calm. I should be sobbing on my knees on the ashen beach. Crying hasn’t come so easily since I died, 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. The rest of my family travels further down the archipelago for their day-to-day, I hope the damage wasn’t widespread enough to have gotten them too.

...What if it was?

All the tears finally hit at once, and I grieve for a while; I'll spare you the details but I let it get 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. 

There shouldn’t be tides at all. The usually stagnant, lifeless, poison sea only stirs up like this during a storm, and the sun has long passed by. The clouds haven’t. They continue to roil, fallout from the rotting satellite still active and deadly. Lightning in sickly shades runs a jagged circuit through the perfectly circular bite out of the sky. It’s only going to get worse. I think of my mother and sister. Even if they found adequate shelter on the island they’d have been on at the time, they won’t be able to stay for long; the air will turn poisonous too.

Regardless of the advantages my altered body confers, I also need shelter, so I begin to pick myself up out of the water. I can think of a plan of action after I’ve secured survival in the short term. I turn and regard the island, a maze of bluffs and sheer drops. It’ll be hard to navigate.

There are some pieces missing, forgive me.

I am, and for now continue to be, Merion, a 27-year-old morph. My represented animal is a black-backed jackal. Jackals aren’t an uncommon sight on Paliputra. Neither are aberrated individuals, among whom I also count myself. Coming back from the dead is a pretty well-understood clinical process, nowadays.

I am, until officially counted among the casualties and the missing, a Maxim citizen. My specific situation didn’t come with a death certificate, you see, so they’ll be looking for me. At least, I hope they’ll be looking for me.

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

>>>>>>>>>

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. I dangle in her grip, meeting her unamused gaze and holding it long enough for the chilly breeze to bite through my saliva-damp fur. Finally, she speaks.

“This doesn’t feel like the beginning to me.”

“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.

>>>>>>>>>

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, if I actually climbed.

I’m a gapwalker, that is to say, I can tap into the great big sea of unreality that exists beneath the thin membrane we like to think of as a stable material world. It’s not as scary as it sounds, rather it presents some very convenient options, like remote storage, gravitational anomalies, even teleportation. Bouncing an entire person off the void gradient does expend quite a bit of radiance, comparatively, 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. Easy to miss on a map, especially when the tide rolls back in and takes the lower ground. Scarcity of plant life means that I don’t have a lot to work with for shelter.

But 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 concrete 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. It doesn’t seem waterproof, but it must be set just high enough that the sea doesn’t reach.

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, serving as a kitchenette, perhaps, but the apparent age of the appliances casts doubt that any of it is in working order.

There’s a door at the back of the room, bolted shut from this side. Undoing the bolts with some effort, decrepit as they are, I give into a curiosity that quickly moves aside for dread. I delicately shut the door, hastily resetting the bolts and stumbling back away from it. Given my attunement to 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. As I regard it, my vision travels even further, back to those storm clouds. They’re getting bigger, filling in the space the sun had carved. I look down as I feel water flowing around my toes. So soon. Something tells me that door’s going to be tested like never before. If I’m going to explore, I’ll take it to high ground.

I wander a while back up on the bluffs, before coming to what I firmly believe is the only green that exists on this rock. A small grove of trees, twisted and gnarled, overlooking the shore. 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 sit nearby, watching the storm clouds build. I cannot stress this enough, they’re an even greater source of distress every time I look at them. Nobody’s coming to find me.

I turn my attention to my new distraction. Lack of tools should make this difficult, but I have my ways around that. Some casters could build a boat to get out of here, or even travel through the water unharmed, but I can… whittle, I guess. I have to take tiny victories where I can get them. 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 make my way down again, 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. It wasn’t a necessary modification, but even in life before my eyes needed preserving, I had always wanted them like this. Aberration success rate is far too low to justify doing it purely for aesthetics, though. 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.

But I jolt suddenly awake again, after what I presume to have been a few hours have passed, 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.