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Sunday, June 29, 2025

The Storms of Venus - Chapter 4: The Shifting Grounds

The surface of Venus was not what Jaxon expected. His training back on Earth had painted a picture of a static, molten wasteland, but the reality was much stranger. The ground beneath his feet seemed alive, shifting and buckling with unseen forces. On the third morning after his crash, Jaxon awoke to find the landscape around him utterly transformed. Towering stone spires had risen where flat plains once stretched, and shallow craters yawned where hills used to be.

His first instinct was panic. Had he wandered far from his makeshift camp in his sleep? But as he scanned the horizon, he recognised the distinctive silhouette of his wrecked ship not far off. The planet itself was moving.

The seismic activity on Venus was relentless. Tremors rolled beneath his boots almost constantly, like the planet’s own heartbeat. But Jaxon began to realize it wasn’t random. The quakes had a rhythm. A pattern. He marked the movements with scratched lines in a strip of metal salvaged from the shuttle. After several hours of tracking, he could predict when the next shift would come.

Using this knowledge, Jaxon started to move between the cracks and crevices, navigating the living landscape with surprising ease. He used the shifting stone to his advantage, finding shortcuts and uncovering new paths that had been hidden moments before.

In one particularly deep crevasse, he discovered something unexpected: a series of strange, geometric markings etched into the stone, glowing faintly through the sulphuric mist. They weren’t natural. Someone—or something—had been here before.

A surge of hope mingled with caution. Perhaps he wasn’t alone on this planet. Perhaps there was a way out.

--To be continued--

Source: Some or all of the content was generated using an AI language model

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