The mid-morning light spills across the black sand, casting long, wavering shadows across the miles-wide black sand tide zones. Overhead, the sky is a deep, fractured blue, heavy with streaks of white cloud that swirl in the high winds. Nivig looms above, a crescent of dim, purple light on the left side, its massive shape dominating the horizon even in daylight. The star shines brightly to Nivig's side, but its brightness does little to draw the eye away from the awe-inspiring gas giant.

Beyond the beach, the land rises into jagged white cliffs, their pale stone stark against the darkness of the shore. This contrast—black sand, white stone—defines Kralin’s rugged geography, a land shaped by time and forces beyond human reckoning. Inland, past the cliffs, the first signs of civilization can be seen: faint outlines of tents clinging to the rock face, banners snapping in the wind, and the distant murmur of a city waking beneath the watchful gaze of the Kralic tribes.

But here, on the shoreline, all is still—a graveyard of wreckage and bodies, scattered like offerings to an indifferent, alien sky.



The first thing Gwen felt was the weight.

It pressed down on her from all sides, a slow, suffocating pull, like she was still submerged beneath some vast, unknowable sea.

Then—air.

Her body lurched, choking on salt and breath, rolling onto her side as water poured from her lungs. She coughed until she was empty, until her ribs ached, until she could taste only iron and brine.

The distant sound of crashing waves and the bubbling sea echoed in her head. But she was on land now. She was alive.

She lay still, fingers digging into the wet black sand, waiting for the world to settle.

Then, slowly, she turned her head—

And saw that thing, again.

It filled the sky.

Memory stirred.

A floating sphere so vast, so impossible, it swallowed the horizon, a churning colossus of storm and color. The clouds roiled in shades of ochre and violet, of bruised crimson and gold, a sky within a sky, folding and unfolding in endless, ceaseless motion.

She was breathless. It was like nothing she'd ever seen.

Except...

She had seen it before. Hadn’t she?

The knowledge felt slippery, like trying to grasp the memory of a dream upon waking.

She squinted, vision swimming, and saw something else.

Something moved within the planet’s clouds.

A shadow, large enough to be seen from here, deeper than the storms that churned around it. It shifted, too fluid to be a mountain, too solid to be mist, something vast and slow, something that should not be alive.

Her breath hitched. She did not know why she was afraid, only that she was.

She forced herself to look away, and the world reasserted itself in broken fragments.

The tide. The wreckage of a dozen ancient ships, marking 1,000 years of civilization. The bodies.

She was not alone.

Figures lay strewn across the shore, caught in the grasp of driftwood and seaweed. Some stirred, rising with sluggish, disbelieving movements. Others did not.

Something pounded in her throat, but it did not feel like her heart. In fact, it was beginning to dawn on her that her pulse was...weak. Had to be, she couldn't feel it at all.

A man slumped face-down in the sand, arms bent at an unnatural angle. A woman gasped for breath beside him, her fingers twitching, as if she had only just remembered how to move. Further down, someone sobbed, clutching a lifeless body against their chest.

The ocean had cast them here. But from what?

Gwen shifted, trying to sit up, and the wrongness of her body hit her like a second wave.

Her leg was broken.

She could see it, could feel it—yet there was no pain.

Her breath caught as she pressed a trembling hand to the bone beneath her skin. She should be screaming, weeping, but all she felt was a hollow absence.

No pain. No heat.

She had survived something.

Something no one should have.

She swallowed, forcing down the swell of some unholy cousin of nausea. Answers could wait. The world was here. She was here.

And somewhere beyond the beach, past the rising cliffs and curling smoke, civilization waited.

For now, she had to move. She had to find a way.

"Felix!"

His mother was angry with him again. He didn't know why she was so angry, but it didn't matter. Eyes like a spider's fell upon him, pinning him in place like an insect to a board. Cold fury washed over him as her eyes almost seemed to burn his skin. She towered over him, as he was only a child. Felix had done something horrible. He had failed her, failed to bring her something she needed. The child's toy fell out of his hand, a memento of the task she had given him. The bells that were sewn into it jingled as it hit the floor. His mother shrieked at him, madness and fury burning in her eyes.

"Why didn't you do as I asked? Why did you fail me?"

Felix didn't know what to say. Nothing would appease her in this state, and the true answer would surely worsen things. He had been tasked with taking something from a nearby house, a child sleeping in its crib. He stared at the peaceful child, envy blooming in his chest. He wanted to take its place, to not have to worry about his mother or anything she might do to him. Felix had been so caught up in his envy that he hadn't noticed the child's parents approaching the room. Candlelight fell upon him, and he heard a startled cry behind him. He fled before anything else could happen, but he wished he had. Maybe they would have understood.

When he didn't respond to her question, Felix's mother grabbed the underside of his chin, forcing him to look her in her many eyes. Tears sprung to his eyes, and he tried to look away, but he couldn't. He felt a presence in his mind, whispering things he couldn't understand. The presence grew, forcing any thoughts and memories from his mind except for the child from earlier. The memory grew, filling his entire mind. The presence pulled at it, threatening to tear him apart in the process. Suddenly, something

(shattered)

broke in his mind, and a scream fled from his lips. Felix thought he could see something from the corner of his eye, watching him. It called out to him, drawing his attention from his mother...

"Felix! Wake up! We need to get out of here!"

Felix opened his eyes. His entire body felt... nothing. He felt an enormous weight all over his body, as if an elephant or two were sitting on top of him. He almost forgot where he was. He remembered seeing something, although the memory slipped out of his grasp like a stubborn eel. Something happened to the ship he was on. He remembered the wood giving way under his feet, then a blinding flash of white as something collided with his head.

Now... he was here.

Felix looked at the wreckage around him, the black sand making every piece stand out. A figure stood above him, snapping its fingers in his face. It looked similar to himself, but it had another set of eyes on its cheekbones and it had a shadowy cast to it.

"Felix! Come on!"

He tried to sit up, but he found that he couldn't. He felt his shattered ribs scrping together, but there was no pain, only that looming pressure that was slowly starting to become familiar. A thought rushed into his mind, causing panic to bloom in his chest.

I shouldn't be alive.

His heart should have been pounding, but he didn't feel it beating in his chest. The familiar feeling of adrenaline coarsed through him, but his heart wasn't thudding against his ribs like when he normally did. His lack of pain was surely from the adrenaline. Not... anything else. He was alive, wasn't he?

Felix's flesh roiled underneath his skin, shifting, trying to become something else. His ability could change how he looked, but it couldn't heal major injuries. Still, he willed himself to try to stand, forcing his body to change to support his weight. His bones were broken, but he could shape other parts to serve their purpose for a short time.

He tried to cry out for help, but only a weak moan escaped his lips. He sounded pathetic.

Felix waited for the pain to come, to hit him like a tidal wave. Only it didn't. None of his injuries hurt. The overwhelming feeling of wrongness swept over him again. Something wasn't right. Any one thing by itself could be ignored, but it was tied together somehow. He didn't have time to figure out what was happening, though. He tried to sit up once more and looked around, noticing a woman who also looked to be alive.

"H-hello?" he called out weakly. Felix wasn't confident she heard him, but he tried to get her attention anyway. The figure looked at him with a mixture of panic and impatience.

"We don't have time for a meet-and-greet! Get out of here!"

As Gwen lifted her leg with her arms, attempting to keep the broken bone aligned, she felt the profound wrongness intensify suddenly. Parts of her body began to feel as though they were connected incorrectly. Her lower jaw pulsed with strange pressure, as did the skin over her shoulder blades. When she breathed, the air felt dirty, like a room filled with old cigarette smoke. For the first time in a long time, she felt no hunger.

No hunger.

Famine, she thought to herself, feeling the fleeting passing of a memory. Hunger. She couldn't forget that.

She had been fleeing hunger. Where she was from, there was no food.

Where did the hunger go?

She twisted her torso around and saw a pile of drift within reach. She grabbed the longest piece of wood she could and some weed, hoping to fashion a splint for her broken bone. As she did, she heard a weak voice nearby.

H-hello?

Gwen's eyes snapped to the source of the voice instantaneously. One of the nearby bodies was calling to her. He looked half dead, a fair-colored man whose pallid look mirrored hers. Another living corpse on this black beach.

Something activated in her. A sense of duty. She was starting to remember.

"Hey!" she called back to the pale man, as he seemed to attempt to stand. He spoke Skenian - which was helpful. "Are you hurt?"

Tell him to run, she reasoned. She would only slow him down. She looked around at the other shapes moving around on the beach, their dazed, shambling gaits reminiscent of the walking dead. She looked once more to the giant purplish sliver in the sky, and the shade of the gigantic floating sphere it was attached to, and then her eyes fell to the cliffsides below, and the row of bodies hung up on stakes prominently displayed atop them.

Shit.

There was civilization here, all right. Nothing said civilization like organized displays of capital punishment.

And notably - the bodies looked huge. Abnormally tall, with limbs too long. They made for effective displays, arms splayed outward, nailed to posts.

She turned back to the weak voiced man nearby. Without thinking, she put weight on her broken leg - and that pernicious sense of wrongness came over her once again.

The bone held strong.

She shifted more of her weight onto the leg to confirm it - her leg was no longer broken.

You're dead. This is Death.

She couldn't feel pain, or hunger, and now her body was healing horrific fractures.

No other explanation made sense.

Then what about him?

She cautiously stood, the black sand squelching with wetness beneath her boots. Her boots, her uniform. She remembered.

Admiral.

"Do you need help?" she asked as she approached the other man. As she did, she saw a familiar sight in the distance, further along the beach - a morning tide market.

Tide markets appeared every day at the low tides, during the several hours just after the water recedes. Vod traders from the depths would ride the tide deep into land-dweller territory and await the recession of the water in order to set up impromptu markets, hoping to separate those land-dwellers from valuables. In particular, the vod liked non-corrosive metals; and for the price, there were few limits on what you could find at a tide market.

Exotic fish from lands no one has ever heard of, or even the deepest dark of the sea. Lost treasures from sunken ships. Weapons. Slaves. Drugs. Sex.

And in the tide market, the laws of the sea applied. This was universal - vod only obeyed their own laws.

Gwen didn't like tide markets. She found the vod merchants to be aggressive. But, to their credit, she had never seen a vod crucify someone and then display their body on a cliffside.

"There's a tide market over there," Gwen told the stranger as she reached his side. "Can you walk?"

Felix waved the woman off, struggling to stand on his already mending legs. The flesh around the fracture looked knotted and strange.

“I’ll be fine,” he said, his voice hoarse as if he had been screaming for hours before this, “Just get the hell out of here.”

His body was mending itself. Maybe this is some quirk his body only had in dire circumstances. He didn’t want to consider the other possibility, that this had to do with the accident he had been in.

Felix could see the figure standing behind the strange woman, who looked to be doing fine despite the horrific accident. It wasn’t smiling like it normally was. It looked serious. Worried, even.

“Don’t bother yourself with her. If anything, use her help against her. She’s probably just looking to take advantage of you.”

Felix reached into the shredded remains of his once very fancy leather jacket and pulled out a small knife. It looked to be very sharp. It was a wonder that he didn’t find the blade buried in his side when he woke up. Felix brandished the blade at Gwen, his hand shaking as he did so.

“What did you do to me? Why can’t I FEEL anything?”

He knew she wasn’t responsible for what happened to him, but he needed something to blame this on. Things like this didn’t happen to people like him. Well, that may have been a better argument for someone who was a bit more… normal than him. Considering his past, it seemed perfectly reasonable that something like this could happen to Felix.

He could feel his ribs mending under the thin skin of his torso. It may have been strange to someone who hasn’t experienced changing like this, but it was strange because Felix wasn’t willing this to happen. It just was.

Felix glanced over at where Gwen indicated. A market on the beach. He hadn’t seen one of these in a while, but he knew what they were.

“What do we need to go shopping for?”

Gwen was surprised when the man drew a blade against her, and she stepped back before rooting herself, taking the stance of a trained fighter. But it didn't take much for her to understand, and relax her posture - if this man was as confused as she was, it made complete sense to pull a knife.

“What did you do to me? Why can’t I FEEL anything?”

So, it wasn't just her. She noted the strange way the man hobbled, like a baby purliquan standing for the first time. He felt it, too. He had been broken. He had survived, like she had. And he should not have - like she had.

She lowered her fists, then pointed to the ominous, displayed corpses on the hill. Her many years of service started to click inside her brain.

"We're in unknown territory," she explained to the pale man. "We don't know what awaits us among the white rocks. At a tide market, we know the rules. We speak the language. We should be safe. More or less. We can find supplies. Medicine. These people need our help,"

((OOC note: because the tide markets are pretty universal, so is the vod language - AKA the trade language, or the Language of Buying and Selling. Most everyone on the planet understands and speaks the trade language conversationally.))

She looked up at the silent, perfectly spherical invader in the sky. She felt something churn in a part of her stomach she had never felt before.

Was it some sort of moon?

Or another world?

Her eyes scanned for that shadow she'd seen. That weird, dark shape snaking across the purple crescent.

Had she imagined it?

Gwen kept her eyes on the man’s knife as he shifted his weight, still unsteady on his feet. His face was pale, his eyes darting from her to the bodies on the shore, to the endless black tide creeping toward them. He looked like a man trying to wake up from a nightmare but finding no way out.

She understood that feeling all too well.

"What's your name?" she asked, not expecting an answer but needing to establish some kind of command. "Who were you traveling with?"

Gwen exhaled sharply, scanning the others who were beginning to stir. Survivors. Some sat up groggily, blinking at the morning light. Others remained still, either unconscious or beyond saving. A few were trying to stand, shaking off the shock of whatever had brought them here.

She counted twelve awake.

That wasn’t enough.

Her thoughts began assembling in practiced order, the instinct of an officer taking over even as uncertainty clawed at the edges of her mind. What would command expect in a situation like this?

First, assess. She took stock of the supplies—none. Weapons—this man had a knife, but nothing else was immediately visible. Medical assistance—unlikely, unless they found someone among the survivors with the skills they needed. And their injuries… or lack of them.

Her stomach tightened again.

"I don’t know what happened to us," she admitted, forcing her voice to remain level, professional. "But it doesn’t matter. We're alive. And that means we act accordingly."