The light-child’s voice trembled like a memory, fragile and cold. Brian pressed himself against the stone wall, his breath sharp and ragged. The figure drifted closer, leaving faint trails of blue light in the air like smoke.“Who are you?” he whispered.
The child tilted its head again, its form flickering as though it were struggling to stay solid. “We were the first. The ones who went missing before the grown-ups stopped looking.”
Brian’s skin prickled. He remembered the stories—children who had wandered away from the colony’s edge, swallowed by Claire’s endless plains. His parents had always said they’d been taken by storms, but there were never any storms on Claire.
Only the wind.
The child knelt, its hand hovering above the ground. “They live through us now. They don’t have bodies anymore, just hunger. They come when the moons line up.”
Brian shuddered. “You mean the thing outside? It took my parents?”
The light flickered again, dimming. “It wears them now.”
Before he could ask what that meant, a tremor rippled through the ground. The faint light from the cracks above blinked out for a heartbeat, then returned—red this time.
“They’ve found us,” the child hissed. “Hide.”
Brian scrambled deeper into the tunnel, the glowing figure following silently. The air grew colder with every step until frost formed on the walls, shining in the red light.
Ahead, the passage widened into a chamber filled with strange machines—old mining equipment abandoned by the first settlers. Their metal frames were warped, melted in places, as though something had burned through them from within.
The light-child hovered near one of the twisted machines. “They came from under the surface. The planet was never empty. We woke them when we started digging.”
A whisper echoed through the chamber—soft at first, then louder, layered with many voices speaking as one.
Brian.
You should have stayed asleep too.
The machinery began to hum, vibrating as if alive. The ground pulsed under his feet like a heartbeat.
Then he saw them—hands, dozens of them, pushing through the cracks in the floor. Their skin shimmered like glass, and their fingers reached for him, stretching, grasping.
The light-child screamed, its glow flaring blindingly bright. “Run!”
Brian ran. He didn’t look back as the whispers grew into a single, deafening wail that shook the tunnel.
When he finally stumbled out into the open night again, gasping under the triple moons, his home was gone. Only a crater remained—smooth, perfect, as if erased from existence.
And in the centre of the crater, something was moving.
Source: Some or all of the content was generated using an AI language model
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