"What do you want me to say, Oscar?" Malik Rosen muttered as he flipped through the strange book he'd recovered from the swamp. "I'm not Sarah. I don't do weird foreign languages.” Malik’s words broke off into a fit of deep, rattling coughs. The sea monster lounging on the beach magnanimously waited for Mal to finish saying his piece. “I'm not sure that she could do much better,” the human continued with a slight wheeze. “ Unless you happen to have an alien Rosetta stone that you haven’t shared."

The prehistoric alligator blinked its amber eyes in annoyance. Oscar was an amphibian of action. It had no time for Malik's paltry excuses.

Unfortunately, Mal had very few answers to offer his friend.

*****

On the previous day, he'd arrived at the lifepod only minutes before sunset. After stripping down, he dove into the ocean to scrub the day's grime from his skin. The saltwater felt like molten lava against his wounded back, but he forced himself to endure. Physically weary and mentally drained, he'd stumbled his way back to the pod like a drunk man abandoning a bar after last call.

He should have addressed the wounded carbuncle that had shadowed him throughout his journey home. He should have dressed his wounds with and cleaned them with more than a few splashes of ocean water. In the end, he ignored those responsibilities and all the rest in favor of tumbling into the bed he’d cobbled together from crash couch cushions. In seconds the gauzy arms of sleep embraced him like an eager lover, drawing him into a deep, dreamless slumber that lasted well into the next day.

*****

Now, sitting comfortably in the shade cast by his escape pod, he was being berated for his ignorance by the resident sea monster.

Malik lifted his clear blue eyes from the book in his lap to give his companion a scandalized look. "You take that back. You did not get stuck with the most incompetent human. Imagine what would have happened if it'd been Jackson instead of me. You'd have eaten that wise ass in ten minutes."

Malik pointed his finger like a matron scolding an unruly child. "And he would have given you a stomach ache. Guaranteed."

Oscar's amber eyes slipped shut as a mighty huff sent white sand billowing into the air.

Grumbling under his breath about getting no respect, Malik ignored the leviathan’s good-natured ribbing. Instead, he focused his attention on the tome he’d recovered after the Battle of the Bog. The cover was a dark blue metal that looked and felt exactly like the spear leaning against the hull of his lifepod. The pages inside the cover were a pale yellow and slick to the touch, like candle wax or cooking oil.

If I remember my history right, parchment was made from treated animal skin. Never seen any of the stuff, but if I had to imagine what it looked and felt like, this would be it. Kind of makes me a little queasy flipping through the pages, but it does help explain why the pages hadn’t disintegrated long before I killed the swamp king.

Malik’s misgivings about the nature of the book didn’t keep him from researching it as best he could. The sixty-odd pages were filled with a compact, angular scrawl that reminded him of the Norse mythology he’d read as a kid. Strangely, some of the letterings were raised, immediately making Mal think of braille.

So it was intended to be touched and read? Does it change the word’s meaning or is it some form of punctuation? Damn, I wish Sarah were here.

The book’s real prize, so far as Malik was concerned, was the picture drawn across the middle two pages. The drawing appeared to depict a cavern, with rock formations like broken teeth rising from the ground and hanging from the ceiling. In the center of the foreboding image, rising from a pool of still water, was a terraced pyramid. A flight of steps broke the water’s surface, leading to an intricately drawn archway and a flat section of stone. A second set of stairs lay beyond it, leading to an arch of a different design. Five staircases led to five arches, all at steadily ascending levels of the pyramid. The sixth set of stairs led to the pyramid’s apex where the artist had scrawled something that looked like a jagged crack hovering in mid-air.

Malik had studied the drawing four times since he’d first opened the book’s cover. All four times his examination had stopped when he began to truly inspect that jagged crack. He wanted to believe that the uneasiness he felt was a product of his overactive imagination, but there was no disputing the sense of relief he felt when he snapped the metal cover shut.

What the hell is going on with this place?

Mal stifled a groan as he rose to his feet. He could sit around all day pouring over the book and it wouldn’t matter. He needed to keep moving, keep marching ahead or he’d never find his crew. That was the goal. All these other little mysteries just felt like distractions. Potentially deadly distractions, at that.

It's even worse when the distractions follow you home.

The thought crossed Malik’s mind as he looked at the bloody remains of a creature that had stained the sand a rusty brown color. Short, coarse fur covered the animal whose defining feature was a long, hairless tail. Mal’s best guess was that this was Ryujin’s idea of a labrador-sized rat. Or maybe it was an opossum. It was difficult to tell when the head and most of the upper body was gone. He’d found the offering beside the hatch of his lifepod, helpfully placed like a thoughtful parent dropping a sack lunch into their kid’s backpack.

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

Finding a dead woodland critter on his doorstep had startled him, but that paled in comparison to how he felt beneath the wounded carbuncle’s unblinking gaze. The way it watched his reaction to the gift made Malik’s hair stand on end. Despite that, there was a small part of him that found the killer cat’s gesture endearing. Clumsy as its invitation had been, it had tried to introduce Mal to the local cuisine. He’d started friendships from more dubious encounters.

“Alright, Fred, you win.” Malik called out. Oscar opened one faceted eye to see what the noisy human was shouting about. The crocogator rapidly lost interest when it realized Mal was speaking to the newest member of their tribe. “I was trying to wait until you got bored and left,” Malik continued, “but it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen. So let’s make a deal. You don’t try to eat me and I won’t try to shoot you. That sound reasonable?”

Halfway through Mal’s speech, the carbuncle’s floppy ears shot up, suddenly as stiff and rigid as a pair of newly graduated cadets. The fuzzy predator’s attention was a fleeting thing, lapsing before Malik could even make his offer. The human was forced to assume that the carbuncle’s lazy stretch as it sprawled out across the ground was a sign of acceptance.

“At least Oscar pretends to pay attention to the important parts,” Malik grumbled as he started gathering up the gear he’d need for his trip. The utility belt was strapped around his waist and the rifle’s strap was carefully looped over his shoulder. He tried not to disturb the bandages wrapped around his torso, but he couldn’t afford to sit around and wait for the wounds on his back to heal. He had no choice except to endure the discomfort and hope that the rapidly dwindling medical supplies would be enough to ward away infection.

The medical supplies weren’t the only equipment that was vanishing at an alarming rate. He was down to a handful of rifle rounds and even less for his pistol. For the first time since he landed on Ryujin, he could load all of his ammunition into the utility belt with room to spare. It was a sobering exercise. The bad news didn’t stop there. He was down to two days of ration bars. If he didn’t start hunting for his food soon, he’d be forced to accept Fred’s very unsanitary charity.

“You could use a little social awareness, Fred,” Malik’s words trailed off into a rattling cough. For several moments he had one hand planted against the side of the pod to keep him upright while he hacked up yellow phlegm deep within his lungs. “Ugh, that is disgusting.” The Chief wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. Almost as an afterthought, he snatched up the alien harpoon before he staggered away from the pod. “Anyway, you gotta break the ice with a coffee or something first. You can’t just jump right into a meal like that. Red meat just screams commitment and I might not be ready to take our relationship to that level, you know?”

The carbuncle watched Mal trudge his way up the slope toward the treeline. It didn’t follow him, at least not yet, but it did rise to its feet with a shuddering stretch that had its back arched and all six legs straining with exertion.

Mal tried not to think about his new friend. Either the carbuncle would attack him, or it wouldn’t. That simple. He couldn’t afford to wait until it lost interest and neither was he willing to kill the fuzzy murder machine just because it was inconvenient. The two of them had survived the Battle of the Bog together as brothers in arms. That meant something to Malik no matter how accidental their alliance had been.

Once he reached the stone road, thoughts of the carbuncle faded to the back of his mind. Earlier this morning he’d sent the drone out to search the surrounding ocean for another landmass. That meant that it was Malik’s job to finish exploring the island.

The next milestone in that exploration lay at the end of the stone road.

Prepared as best he could be with his meager supplies, Malik began to work his way into the jungle once more. Mal passed through the trail he’d blazed days before with a quick, sure step despite the ominous Gloam trees rising around him like the black bars of a living cage. When he reached the end of his earlier trail he briefly considered striking off into the jungle to check the rock where he’d first encountered a carbuncle. Perhaps he could lead the wayward racoon/cat/fox back to its kinfolk. Or perhaps not. As he drew his recharged vibroblade, Malik decided that Fred probably didn’t need his help to find his people.

Malik would have called the work that followed monotonous if every moment in the jungle wasn’t as unique as the snowflakes of a winter storm. Trudging his way steadily forward, his blue eyes were treated to splashes of vibrant color cast across the black and green jungle canvas. Winged insects swooped busily through the air while brightly colored beetles marched across the vines dangling from the Gloam trees. The thick fronds he waded through would occasionally move, drawing his attention until he met the eyes of some inquisitive animal that promptly vanished into the underbrush. Weaving its way through all the varying sights of the lush jungle was the warbling cry of birds as they fluttered about in the dark branches crowing the Gloam trees. Mal rarely got a good look at the energetic fliers aside from the burst of color their fabulous feathers made against the black backdrop of the Gloam tree’s bark.

Minutes turned to hours as he worked his way up the sloped stone path. Eventually, a tired Malik began to notice the undergrowth thinning out and the trees growing more sparse. Feeling the end grow nearer by the step, he began to cleave his way through the fronds and vines at a frenzied pace.

His work was soon rewarded as he pushed through the last of the thick vegetation to find what awaited him at the end of the road.

A small clearing, roughly the size of the village he’d found. A single metal building, its luster long since faded, listed heavily to the side like a guard dozing off in the middle of their shift. Directly behind the dilapidated structure was a wide cave entrance barred by a closed portcullis. On the opposite side of the portcullis, Malik could see metallic rails on the cavern floor and a toppled wooden basket with wheels that could only be a minecart.

Intrigued, Malik stepped further into the clearing. He immediately noticed the signs of another road that led toward the island’s interior where he’d found the village yesterday. But it was the dark cavern that drew his attention. Like a moth to flame, Mal slowly crossed the clearing, each step making him more and more appreciative of the size of the large tunnel. Now he was close enough to see thick black beams, doubtlessly fashioned of Gloam wood, supporting the roof of the mine shaft.

He was so distracted by the closed-off tunnel that he tripped over a rail hidden by the carpet of plant life that covered the small clearing. With the expression of a man that had just found half a worm in the apple he’d bitten into, Malik pulled his eyes away from the tunnel to follow the path the rails cut across the clearing.

Malik soon found himself at the far end of the clearing. It opened up into a gorgeous vista that overlooked the shallow bay he’d seen from the volcano’s rim before he descended into the swamp. The difference was, this time, he was much, much closer.

Close enough to see the gleaming hull of a gravskiff and what looked like three people camping out on the beach.