Kalani was in the presence of the sun.

Her skin was bare, heat licking at the edges of her flesh in a gentle caress. A lullaby in space, the sound of her GoDDEss beckoning for her safe return.

Her arms were outstretched, a beacon of warmth in the endless void.

Kalani could not understand the words of the MAtrOn. The song eluded her comprehension whenever it fell under her scrutiny. Ribbons that slipped through her fingers despite her focus. She could use the emotions within the sonorous singing to interpret their thoughts, however.

The GODdesS was elated with their first conquest. Her children had succeeded in the task at hand. They were capable. They would thrive. They would RETURN.

And yet this elation was something that Kalani had been forced to parse out, a single thin rivulet in that massive stream of emotion. It was fixated on something else.

It was CURIOUS.

The sensation felt like beetles writhing within her stomach, an overloading of unpleasant crawling things just underneath her skin with no possible recourse. The curiosity needed to be scrutinized. There was nothing her gODDesS could do to immediately satisfy her curiosity.

OBSERVE. REPORT. SURVIVE.

---

Kalani woke up.

The unnatural warmth that had swaddled her in her dreams had receded into the ether, leaving an uncomfortable pang of loneliness in its wake.

She took a deep breath and surveyed the area. Her other crewmates were sleeping in their respective bunks. Elena slept taut in her bed, a hair trigger away from barreling out of comfort and into combat with her blade by her bedside. Phineas slept sprawled out on the top bunk, his leg hanging over one end with a third of his blanket over the other. Cantwell slept below his friend in a similar display of easy peace.

Kalani lingered on Aurelio’s bed. She watched his chest rise and fall, the cool cerulean spark in his chest a dim glow from underneath the covers. Their crew had been formed by happenstance, so it wasn’t unexpected to have a stranger like him join their ranks, but he was an odd man out even in their ragtag group.

It didn’t help that she was suspicious of him even now.

She shook her head. Less suspicion and more…

She was interested in his origins and the relationship between him and the monolith. Why had the being inside the stone chosen him over the others? Did it lay claim over him in a certain way? Were they-

“Agh.” Kalani grinded her teeth as she winced in pain. Her head was throbbing uncomfortably, and it made it hard for her to process her thoughts. There was a lot of uncertainty to their predicament, and she needed to step up as captain if she was going to lead them through it all.

Eventually the pain receded, and her mind was cleared enough to continue with its idle planning.

Learning about the world through the archives was a nonstarter, at least until Aurelio got around to creating a rough alphabet for her to use. If she could not learn through the archives, then the history that still existed in their new home would do for now.

She decided to take in the outpost of her own accord. The quiet and restless night proved the perfect opportunity to simply take in the sights of the alien world.

Not wanting to disturb the crew, she grabbed one of the scrap spikes in their armory and silently walked out of the barracks out unto the starry lit sky. The Black Sun as the mental intrusion had referred to it was visible in the stark absence it created. A corona of consumed stars and reflected light shining outwardly from the circular anomaly.

It was massive. It stained the sky like an obtrusive ink blot.

Kalani sneered at the celestial body before pulling her attention away from the sky and towards the perimeter of the outpost. The walls were worn yet sturdy, carrying the history of their previous denizens through crude etchings and dents.

How many people had lived here, she wondered? And from what era of the cosmos had they settled their roots on this strange planet and called it home?

She was raring to read through their tomes and imbibe on their history. Elena had once told her she was a scavenger of a different sort; a hoarder of discarded memories and forgotten tales left to collect dust with the passage of time.

And here they were living in the remnants of a previous civilization with an entity that far exceeded their comprehension and she had to depend on someone else to sate her curiosities.

Kalani stepped outside of the outpost gates and onto the cleared flatlands surrounding the area. The pinewoods were distant and swayed lightly with the breeze.

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

Inspecting the skyline, she even caught the slow formation of a thunderstorm. The lightning that writhed within the cloud illuminated peculiar shadows that fell outside of her understanding.

Another mystery among many.

She brandished her weapon and idly walked the perimeter. The walls had been battered and cracked in sections, but they’d not given in to whatever had made its assault there.

Weapons clung on the lower ramparts, inert turrets that promised to turn the outpost into a veritable fortress should they commit to the effort. The fact that they were built into the outpost meant that their crew would need to prepare for an eventual siege.

The planet was far too dangerous for Kalani to assume that the enemies of the former denizens were also relics of a bygone era. And if she was wrong and no siege was coming to tear down their new home, then so be it.

How she would convince Aurelio to invest into their refurbishment was a problem to chew on. It was another matter of how much time they had to get these defenses online and their watchtowers in order before the assault.

She stopped her idle walking.

“Hm?” Kalani focused on a lump in the flatland. There were small obsidian stakes sticking up from the ground. Five in all forming a semicircle around the loamy end of the lump.

She walked towards the raised earth and found something unexpected.

Thick obsidian doors barred entry into the bowels of the planet, their violet hues glimmering underneath the starlight. Cast onto the doors was a peculiar figure.

It was a feminine figure, Kalani believed, with twelve arms held in a praying formation. Three arms connected onto either shoulder like branches to a tree trunk. Her gaze traveled down to the elbows, the arms splitting apart to have two hands on one arm trunk.

Four hands held a set of stones aloft at the center of the door.

The obsidian used to cast the figure was as intricate as it was immaculate.

Despite herself, she gingerly placed her hand on the door and gave it a gentle push.

The fire within her body roared to life, orange flames bubbling out to overflow on her black skin. Her chest erupted with a mote of orange fire. The ember leapt out of her and onto the stones that the figure held in between its hands.

The stone at the top began to glow white hot, its heat far surpassing anything her skin was experiencing from within. The stone below dimmed in light until it was as dark as the ink blot in the sky, frost forming around the hands that ‘held’ it in place.

It was scalding and freezing in equal measure, and she felt those sensations wash above and below her fingers, but their effects did not harm her.

The ground shook beneath her feet as the massive doors slowly parted. Barred behind the strange gates was a tunnel. The tunnel appeared to be man-made with crystalline sconces gradually filling to the brim with a white liquid light.

“What in the world…” Kalani whispered.

She squinted into the open maw of the world and saw it descended into the dark unknown.

Her curiosity compelled her to continue, taking hesitant steps into the tunnel towards the other side.

The heavy footfalls of her boots echoed down the lengthy hallway. She placed her right hand on the wall and found the rock to be smooth to the touch, with irregular cuts and grooves forming the further away she was from her entrance.

“Crrrrrr…” Kalani strained to hear the dissonant noise in between her steps at first. The sound came first and vibrations on her fingertips followed immediately after. It sounded like stone grinding on stone from her perspective but what sort of activity could cause such a sound to form and lead to the minor tremors in the walls was beyond her comprehension.

She just hoped it wasn’t something that she’d need to deal with in her current condition.

The transition from the outpost into the strange new location was a gradual one. First, the air grew drier, hotter, and thinner. Small gusts of wind that weaved around her body towards the surface were rejuvenating to her skin. She could even see faint trails of steam escape her body.

Her body was hardier than before but the discomfort in her lungs with breathing hot, thin air meant they’d be better off inside the suits than out of them.

This did not give her pause. She pressed forward.

The second indicator that she was getting close to the other side were the discordant sounds that turned minor quakes into moderate tremors. Their patterns were as jarring and indecipherable as the noise that’d pierce her ears.

Her third indicator was also the one to help her surmise the source of the noise. The smooth walls on either side of her grew geometrically strange. She wasn’t sure how to describe it other than sections of stone were smoothly cut and laid on top of other jutting rectangles and squares. One quake saw the jutting stones on one end of the wall behind her shift accordingly, sections sinking into the earth as slowly as others split from the unified wall of the other side towards the receding block.

The very earth moved beneath their feet, and it did so in a way wholly unfamiliar to her understanding of tectonics.

“Hm.” She stopped her descent. What made Kalani pause was the realization that the jarring sounds of scraping stone in the hallway, despite being closer to her, did not maintain the same level of guttural depth as the stone shifting ahead.

Her destination was close.

Kalani felt her heart race as her pace picked up. The exit was blinding.

She reached the tunnel's end and found herself paralyzed by the sights before her. A pavilion of an ancient civilization dwarfed her little tunnel outcropping. In the distance were massive carved statues holding the roof of the pavilion.

The creatures holding up the world were also humanoid in appearance. Their heads were shaped like old pen tips, the small split at the top leaking a stream of lava down their bodies to pour into man made canals in the floor.

“Crrrrrr…” the world bellowed. Kalani turned to look down the left end of the pavilion and saw the shadowed reflection of a creature in the distance. She did not stick around to find out what it was.

Kalani ran back up the tunnel until her lungs were raw and her legs quaked. There was more to this world than met the eye and her experience below the earth made that prospect all the more compelling.

She returned to her barracks, eager to report her discoveries to the crew and tap into her only source of knowledge for information as to the origins of that abandoned kingdom.