CHAPTER 4: ASH

Elias woke to the taste of blood.

He lay twisted in his harness, the straps digging into his ribs. The world was sideways. Smoke curled through the cracked cockpit, thick and acrid, clinging to his throat. Sparks spat from a dead console. His breath came ragged, shallow. His body ached, but he was alive.

He unclipped the harness. Pain flared through his chest as he dropped to the warped metal floor. He braced himself against the bulkhead, trying to focus. The viewport was shattered. Through it, he saw only gray. No sky. No horizon. Just ash.

The hatch was warped. He pressed his shoulder against it, gritting his teeth as metal groaned in protest. It took three hard shoves before the seal gave. The air hissed as pressure equalized, hot and dry against his face. He coughed, blinking against the thick gray dust swirling into the cabin. It clung to his skin, coated his tongue. He pulled himself through the opening, boots hitting unsteady ground.

The wind shifted. The ash began to clear.

And for the first time, he saw where he had landed.

The planet was massive. Bigger than Earth, but with gravity that felt familiar, close enough that walking wouldn’t be a struggle. Its atmosphere was thick, dense enough that sound carried in a way it shouldn’t have. The wind didn’t whisper—it pushed. The air wasn’t still—it wrapped around him, heavy and full of things unseen.

He inhaled carefully. Breathable. It wasn’t poisoned, wasn’t the choking death some planets offered. But it tasted different—dry, cool, something his body didn’t quite recognize. He let it settle in his lungs.

Most of the surface was desert, just like this—vast, endless plains of fine dust and shifting dunes. But there were other places. Places the orbital surveys had mapped, places where the cloud cover broke just enough to show deep canyons, dense pockets of green, large bodies of water that had been marked but never explored. No human had ever set foot here. Only machines. Hardened drones, sent down in controlled drops to collect data, to test soil, to scan the depths.

And yet, here he was.

The sky overhead was nothing like Earth’s. Too thick. Too heavy. There was no clear blue, no sun breaking through—just endless shifting layers of cloud and dust, a sky that churned and hid what lay beyond.

Elias stood in the wreckage of his ship, boots sinking slightly into the alien dust. He exhaled, slow and steady, staring out at the vastness before him.

He had survived the fall.

Now he had to survive the rest of it.