They found me crawling through the slag fields, skin slick with ash, lungs raw from breathing the broken air. Each breath felt like swallowing broken glass, each gasp a thin thread pulled taut, threatening to snap. The sky above was bruised black, the clouds torn and heavy, pressing down as if the weight of the heavens had chosen this moment, this place, to collapse.
I didn't remember falling, but my palms were shredded, streaked with black that wasn't all dirt. My knees bled through the torn fabric of my pants, leaving smears against the steel bones of the earth. Blood mixed with the dust and grime, turning slick and oily, clinging to me like a second skin. The ground beneath my fingers wasn't earth—it was slag, the remnants of something melted down to its bones, cold and sharp as old grief.
Somewhere overhead, machinery groaned—a sound like the grinding of teeth in a dying jaw. Massive cranes, long-dead, hung limp from the skyline, cables swaying as if caught in some phantom wind. Smoke rose in lazy, twisting columns, blurring the horizon into a smear of rust and shadow. It wasn't just smoke. It was the breath of the world itself, exhaling poison and memory into the dark.
The stars had been gone for as long as anyone could recall. But I remembered them. Not light, exactly. More like the memory of light. Something buried so deep in the marrow it refused to die, even when the sky collapsed and bled out into the dark. I could feel it under my skin, like a splinter I couldn't dig out, a flicker of something I shouldn't have touched.
The figures stood watching, silent as the ruins around them. They weren't men, not really. Their faces were smoothed over like unfinished statues, mouths sewn shut with wire, eyes hollowed into pits of reflective black. They stood just beyond the reach of the machines, where the ground grew soft with rot and the air hummed with a low, constant vibration. Their bodies shimmered faintly, like heat haze above cracked stone.
The sound was in my bones, gnawing from the inside out. It whispered to me, a thin thread of thought that wasn't mine but felt too familiar.
One of them stepped forward. His arms were too long, jointed wrong, bending like wet reeds. His voice was a whisper, sharp as broken glass in my ear, but it didn't move the air. It carved through the silence like a scalpel.
"You're awake."
I opened my mouth to speak, but the words crawled back down my throat. My tongue was dry and cracked, the taste of iron thick on it. My voice was buried under ash and memory, and I could feel it clawing at the edges, begging to be let out, but I couldn't. I couldn't.
The figure crouched, bringing his face close to mine. His skin was the colour of old wax, his breath a thin line of frost that curled against my cheek. His mouth moved like it was struggling against unseen stitches, words forced out through gaps too small to speak clearly.
"Do you remember what you are?" he hissed.
I shook my head, though something deep in me shifted, the slow grind of gears trying to catch. A memory—shattered, blurred—pressed against the inside of my skull, but I couldn't grasp it.
"You're nothing," he said. "You're mundane. You're the dirt beneath our heels. But we smelled it on you. The rot. The crack in your bones."
He reached out, and though I flinched, I couldn't move away fast enough. His hand pressed against my chest, just over my heart. Cold seeped through me, and I felt it—a pulse, faint and twisted, beating against his palm. It wasn't my pulse. It was something else, something wrong, something stolen.
"Do you feel that?" he whispered. "That's not yours. That's something you stole."
I gasped, but it was too late. The figures closed in, a circle tightening like a noose. Their breath made the air thick, syrupy, choking. I could feel it settling on my skin like a second death. The ground trembled beneath me, and I realised it wasn't trembling. It was breathing.
A low hum rose from the earth, rising through my limbs until my teeth ached with it. My vision doubled, then split entirely—lines of shadow peeling back from the edges of the world. I could see the seams. The cracks where light used to leak through. And beyond them—nothing but teeth and void.
"You don't belong here," the figure said, his mouth splitting wider than any human mouth should. "You're not one of us, but you're not nothing either. You're broken. And broken things…"
He pressed harder, and something inside me snapped. A rush of heat tore through my chest, blooming like frostbite set alight, like the scream of something trapped and starved too long.
"…break everything they touch."
I screamed, but no sound came out. My throat locked, my body convulsed, but there was no release. No air. No escape. My vision fractured, split into jagged pieces of light and dark, shivering like broken mirrors.
Then—
Silence.
The figures were gone. The smoke hung heavier, thicker, suffocating. My hands trembled as I pushed myself upright, the skin on my chest scorched where his hand had been. My heartbeat—if it was mine—fluttered wildly against cracked ribs.
I was alone again.
Or I thought I was.
A faint glimmer caught my eye. Not light. Something sharper, more dangerous. I turned, slowly, and saw it—an ember, no larger than a fingernail, hovering in the air just beyond the edge of the broken ground. It pulsed once, a tiny heartbeat in the darkness.
And for a moment—just a moment—I thought I saw a star