The Lonely Planet Claire - Chapter 1: The Night the Stars Went Silent

The wind on Claire always sounded wrong. It wasn’t like Earth wind—if Earth had ever truly existed. It had a whispering quality, as though it was trying to imitate human speech but never quite learned the language. The people of Claire used to say the planet was alive, and that its voice was the wind.

Brian never liked that saying.

He was ten years old the night the wind stopped whispering and started listening.

His parents had put him to bed early. The moons—three of them—hung like watchful eyes over their little homestead in the valley of Eslara. His father was an engineer who worked on the energy harvesters; his mother taught the younger children of the colony. They were gentle, quiet people. The kind who believed Claire could be tamed.

They were wrong.

Brian woke to silence so deep it pressed against his ears. No hum of the generators. No rustle of the wind through the quartz-glass trees. Only the sound of his own breathing, quick and shallow.

Then came the knocking.

Three knocks—slow, heavy, deliberate—against the outside of his window. He froze. No one knocked on windows in Eslara; everyone had radios. Besides, his room was on the second floor.

He didn’t move. Didn’t breathe.

The knocking came again—faster this time. When he finally found the courage to peek through the curtains, he didn’t see a face. He saw a reflection—his own—distorted, stretched into a smile he wasn’t making.

He screamed for his parents.

The next moments blurred into chaos: footsteps pounding the hall, his mother shouting his name, the lights flickering, and then—a noise like tearing metal. His father’s voice cut off mid-word. The air filled with that awful stillness again. When Brian ran to their room, the door was open, the walls slick with something dark that smelled like burned iron.

No bodies. No sound. Just the open window, the curtains fluttering even though the wind had not returned.

He ran outside, barefoot, into the cold blue light of the moons. And there, in the dust near the fence, he found two perfect handprints—pressed deep into the ground. The fingers were too long.

The wind began whispering again, only now it knew his name.

“Brian… Brian…”

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