For a long moment, Elias lay still on the damp, spongy ground, letting his senses stretch out into the alien environment. His heart hammered against his ribs, a frantic drumbeat in the oppressive quiet. Panic was a luxury, a fire that consumed precious energy and clouded judgment. He forced it down, compartmentalizing the shock of his arrival, and began a systematic assessment, a calming ritual learned through years of triage in chaotic battlefields.
One: Body. He flexed his fingers and toes, rolled his neck, and tested his limbs. A deep ache resonated through his ribs from the impact, but nothing felt broken. A few scrapes, a stinging cut on his forearm where a sharp stone must have been hidden in the moss. He was alive and whole. That was a victory.
Two: Surroundings. He pushed himself to a sitting position. The ground beneath him was a carpet of thick, springy moss that glowed with a faint, internal luminescence. The air, heavy and humid, tasted of mushrooms and wet stone. Above, the colossal fungi formed a dense canopy, their soft, pulsing light creating a disorienting, perpetual twilight that swallowed shadows whole. The constant dripping he'd first noticed was water, or something like it, weeping from the fungal caps and mossy ceiling far above, each drop landing with an unnaturally loud plink.
Three: Threats. This was the most critical. The sweet scent of decay was pervasive. In his experience, where there was decay, there were things that fed on it. And things that fed on the feeders. It was the simple, brutal arithmetic of any ecosystem. His gaze swept the immediate area. The ground was littered with pale, skeletal-looking debris that might have once been wood. Strange, fist-sized pods hung from the stems of smaller fungi, some of them split open and empty.
He turned his attention to the cut on his forearm. It was shallow, but it was bleeding sluggishly. Blood was a beacon. He needed to clean and dress it. He opened his satchel, his movements economical and precise. Everything was still there, thankfully. He pulled out a small flask of clean water and a precious linen cloth.
As he began to meticulously clean the wound, he felt it—a subtle shift in the air, a new vibration against the low hum of the Verse. His head snapped up.
Scuttling out from the base of a nearby mushroom stalk was a creature no bigger than his hand. It looked like a beetle, but its carapace was the colour of old bone, and it moved on too many legs. Then another appeared, and another. A swarm. They weren't moving randomly; they were moving towards him. Towards the scent of his blood.
Elias's first instinct was to rise, to back away. But a quick glance showed more of them emerging from other directions, their multifaceted eyes glowing with a hungry, predatory light. He was being encircled.
His healing Resonance wouldn't help him here. It was a tool for mending, not for destruction. His mind raced, cataloging his limited resources. He had no weapon, only his satchel and its contents: bandages, a few herbal poultices, a flint and steel, and half a loaf of hard bread wrapped in wax paper—his payment for treating the child.
The bread.
As the first of the bone-white insects reached the edge of his mossy patch, its mandibles clicking audibly, Elias acted. He broke off a significant chunk of the bread, stood up, and hurled it as far as he could into a dense patch of glowing puffballs twenty yards away.
The insects paused. Their antennae twitched, tasting the air. For a tense second, they remained focused on him, the larger, warmer meal. Then, as one, the swarm turned and skittered away, a living tide of clicking chitin flowing towards the more potent, accessible scent of the food.
Elias didn't wait to watch. He moved quickly and quietly in the opposite direction, his feet sinking into the damp moss. He didn't run, knowing that panicked flight would only draw more attention. He moved with a woodsman's stride, deliberate and aware, his eyes scanning constantly, his ears straining to catch any sound beyond the maddening drip, drip, drip from the canopy above.
He needed shelter. A defensible position to rest and think. After what felt like an hour of navigating the alien forest, he found it: a shallow alcove in a wall of dark, wet rock, partially concealed by the drooping caps of several large fungi. It was barely a cave, but it offered solid rock at his back and a limited field of approach.
Sliding into the relative darkness, he leaned his head back against the cold stone, the adrenaline finally beginning to ebb, leaving a profound exhaustion in its wake. He had survived his first test. He was a healer, a mender, but he had proven to himself that the survival instincts honed in war were not yet dull.
He closed his eyes, just for a moment, letting the sheer weight of his situation settle upon him. He was trapped in a hostile, alien world, a place of myth and cautionary tales. His act of compassion, his adherence to a principle he held more sacred than his own life, had led him here. He felt a bitter irony rise in his throat, but pushed it down. Regret was as useless as panic.
A sound cut through the gloom, sharp and distinct, alien to the rhythmic dripping.
A snapped twig.
It was close.
Elias's eyes shot open. His body went rigid, every muscle tensed. His breath caught in his chest. The sound hadn't come from a creature. It was too deliberate, too heavy. It was the sound of a footstep.
He was not alone.