If, down in darkness daylight dies,

To a fated serenade we'd not abide,

We are to be the few who dare survive.

Neither for either thanks, nor blame,

Will you ever learn...

01 - A Name

Through the city of shimmering cinders and across shattered streets of scattered crystal splinters, a deep silence swept them for an hour steady; Alreno ever keeping at the lizard's heels. He followed closely, keeping it in view, though doing all he could to eschew direct eye contact whenever it looked back.

What little blasé sang-froid in him that yet remained slowly fell apart with sights of copious corpses breaking through his psyche. The dead littered their way, the city tier being no more than a sundered field of fallen souls.

Were I more brave and less a knave, our fates'd be shared, Alreno mused, stepping over a soldier's remains.

To the lip of the platform and to the edge of the tier they walked, until the alien stopped.

In slow deliberation, its head bobbed.

Alreno, taking in their surroundings, made a guess of the motion's general purpose: A signal of curiosity, confusion and thought. Though as he, too, looked off of the tier, confusion was the last thing he began to feel. Like a maze made to torture the mind, the city spanned across and far beyond what he could see.

There was no ground nor sky. Their horizon was of crystal, stone and metal; with plumes of smoke standing substitute for clouds.

“To where's it now we go?” he asked.

The alien seemed to give Alreno's existence and words the same amount of attention: Nearly none.

Sharp pains seared all throughout the lizard's skull as tethered shadows curled and frayed its mind, throwing thoughts into a madness imposed as opposed to one possessed, sending sullen, unsung imaginings and undone deeds to burn within the flames of another braneworld. There were things that it knew, had known and could still know. Yet all-in-all, it knew enough to not know now.

Steeped in anguish, it ran towards the nearest building, clawing through long-burnt walls and disappearing from Alreno's sight.

With hopes for the end of walking war-torn streets, Alreno ran to keep pace. Just as he'd wished, the creature felt it was time to stop for the night; though with the dark spanning far beneath all the city's tiers, it could still have been daylight for all Alreno could tell.

Once he was inside, he noticed something strange. The alien's eyes were a deep red, but as it happened, they were not reflecting light from the fires in the city's streets as he had once thought.

In the total darkness, they remained radiant.

They reflected nothing.

Its eyes themselves were bright and fulgid bioluminous lanthorns, permanently left aglow with an oxidized luciferin scintillation all their own.

“Enable forward lights,” Alreno commanded, turning to the drone hovering behind him.

In a flash of yellow and white, three wide bulbs lit the dreary room they'd entered. Then, like a startled sea of microscopic insects, the field of black dust around the alien quickly shrank and vanished, as if signaled to retreat.

“Wha-” No, he stopped himself to rethink his words.

“Verbal recount. Past ten seconds...” he said to the drone.

“Observations of note: Activation of light source,” replied the drone before beeping softly to signify the end of recorded events.

Alreno began to wonder what he'd seen, but disregarded it just as fast. He was tired, leaving open the possibility of having imagined the sight. If it had been real, however, it didn't appear to bother the lizard.

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He set aside his thoughts, wasting no time on the shadows.

Trying to regain some bearing on normalcy, he looked around the room. There wasn't anything overly interesting.

All the walls were of a sabulous white, saturated with filth and bullet holes. Once a store, or perhaps a home for those fond of shelves and broken devices, but he couldn't be sure. For all his days within the city, Alreno had never seen an obvious alien abode. Every structure he had ever entered appeared to be suited more for business, manufacture, storage or entertainment.

The damage to the room in which they stood made it hard to tell, but looting of one kind or another had occurred. As well as being suggestive of panicking civilians, the floors and walls were charred by thermite, which left no openings for any kind of whodunit. Some small troop of soldiers from the Sol Conglomerate had undoubtedly arrived, shot the place up for whatever reason, and then moved on. There was very little of the first room intact, but strangely, there were no corpses.

Doubtful shots remotely akin to strays could these have been, he thought as he touched the bullet holes, wondering who the intended targets were.

Behind him, the creature croaked like a dying frog.

“Gŕr'ăt sůlgo'ãl,” it said, slowly lowering its head towards the ground.

Alreno spun around, his eyes widened, and his chest throbbed as if it had suddenly swelled with blood too thick for his heart to pump.

The alien hadn't spoken to him before, and from thereafter, never in his life would he forget the voice, nor its hauntingly ethereal echo.

“Vrat'Uŕa'loį...” It continued. “Sīįiğű. Vëìïãie ō'ķśje'jao... Nňiaèlkă gŕas'kāls ijija'ga'jías.”

It seemed as if two creatures spoke in unison; one of a low and shrill sonority, the other infused with barking bloodlust.

Run... he told himself. His instincts implored the same, yet his legs did no more than shake within his armor.

The pain.

The lights.

The noises.

The overwhelming senselessness of it all burrowed in the alien's head and twisted its mind. Alreno's graceless stomping caused it nothing but an obscene amount of aural grief, and the drone's bright distortions of the light were disorienting; annoying to a point it hoped to never know again.

Without any consideration for – or sense of – its temperament, Alreno suppressed his fears and decided to pursue the small chance of opening an effective discourse, aware at last that verbal communication with it was more than a fool's dream.

To disturb it was not his goal, but risks had to be taken. Something – anything – had to be done to reach whatever friendly terms were possible between it and himself. If nothing else, a single step towards civility had to be made.

Alreno's whole train of thought derailed in a single moment as he caught a glimpse of himself in his drone's hull. Reflecting back at him in the silvery mirror-like polish was the distorted shape of a walking robot; a humanoid tank carrying belts of ammo and a large military pack - albeit mostly empty. Between the three animate beings in the room, only the alien seemed to be alive. Not one patch of Alreno's skin was visible through the mechanized metal and glass engulfing him.

He was – to it – a blueish bipedal machine. The alien stood as would a mere adolescent, but he, like all Sol soldiers in such armor, amounted to a miniature mech.

Seeking to remedy a cold and steely appearance, he resolved to show his face. Others in the past had noted how his looks were far from calming, but regardless, it would be a gesture to seem more friendly in his mind.

A scant chance, he admitted.

With two flicks of his thumbs, Alreno opened the dome shielding around his head and undid the clamps connecting his helmet to the rest of his armor, pulling it off and slowly turning from the drone's reflective surface to face the alien eye-to-eye.

He knew that the air was safe, for the most part, so he took a deep breath and steadied his expression.

“Fuck!” he yelled and coughed, gagging violently at the smell of the city.

All the alien did was watch him, unperturbed by sudden motions, though bothered with the noises. Alreno quickly unhooked his emergency oxygen filter from his side and secured it over his face, trying to recover.

That foul, unfiltered inhalation he had taken tasted like death and toxic fumes, burning with blood and carrion detritus.

Then, for the first time, Alreno noticed a clear change within his savior's countenance. It looked at him in a way he didn't like, not one that brought him fear, but anger and incumbrance.

The beast's red, soulless eyes locked onto him with a kind of wonder-without-awe; a blank stare over-laced with confusion ensnared by studious musings over what he – the 'alien' – could be.

What he could not read, however, was that had the trait of laughter evolved within its species, the deathly quiet room would sound very different.

Alreno sported a pair of soft-orange eyes, a head adorned with silver hair tied into dreadlocks and skin shaded a pale albino as white as snow. And he was male; a fact unobvious to it.

They shared nary a word nor phrase nor gesture, and Alreno was far from sure that it could even hear in the way that he did. To its strange and massive ears a basic 'hello' could be perceived as a distorted gargling for all he – quite rightly – knew.

Scrambling from one part of the room to another, he could only mumble to himself for a time as he searched and dug through the staserian garbage for anything he could find. One by one, he touched and meticulously tinkered with everything littering the floor, hopelessly scrying into alien wonders for any shred of usefulness.

There was nothing except for rubble, bits of paper-like curiosities, pieces of the walls and ceiling, an odd array of unserviceable alien technologies, and enough ash to fill a morgue furnace.

Oh...

Alreno did not think much of his first idea, but it was appropriately simple.

He grabbed the drone and swung it around, pointing its lights to the cleanest wall before reaching down and smearing his gauntlet across a pile of thick, black ash. The only living member in his audience kept to the darkest corner of the room, a healthy distance away from him, but watched attentively as he scribbled six symbols on the least damaged surface of the wall.

After promptly finishing, Alreno apprehensively exhaled and stood directly under what he had messily written. Uncertainty crept onto his face, and as simply as he could, he pointed at the wall, then his head, uttering three simple syllables.

“Alreno.”