I haven't written this story. The author is my boyfriend, who thinks he has no writing skills. So please, comment, make constructive critics, or just leave a little fav so I can show him how much he is wrong.
Sorry for any eventual mistakes, we are not English natives speakers.
Thank you and enjoy.
Pour les francophones, vous pouvez retrouver cette nouvelles en français sous les rumeurs stellaires: Seul dans la neige.
Panting, his breath turning into white clouds of steam, Gul'reyn stopped. He had had enough. Since his Dart crash-landed on this sorry planet after being damaged in the space battle that took place in its orbit, he had been struggling with the worst enemy a wraith could encounter: the silence of the Mind.
When he woke up from the crash, healed but hungry as all hell, he knew something was off even before he could regain full consciousness of his surroundings. It hit him when he opened the cockpit and witnessed a world made of pure white: silence. Everything around him, the scenery, the spaceship, everything was so quiet. Even his own breath, heavy and short from the cold that also freezed his fingers, his ears and nose, seemed muffled.
There was snow everywhere. A stainless white cloak, covering the plain Gul'reyn landed on, going on and on as far as the keen eyes of the alien could see. And, hovering right over him, a cloudy sky nearly the same exact hue as the snowy plain, making all of his attempts to locate himself pointless.
He tried to jury-rig his ship. The cold bit his fingers, and paralyzed the bio-mechanics of the Dart for good, shutting it down definitely. Seeing that he was not going anywhere with the wreck, he tried to telepathically contact his hive-ship for assistance. And then, again, it hit him.
Silence.
Gul'reyn tried again and again, not believing what he perceived; he was the only wraith in this solar system. He tried to fight back what began to look like distress inside of him. He tried to convince himself that his kin fled the space-fight against their ancestral foe, the Ancients, and went to repair the hive-ship on one of those deserted planets they knew of; but then, he remembered the drone weapons, bright dots of light which destroyed the mothership's hyperdrive, just before he too got hit and taken down.
He was alone. His queen died, alongside with everything he could have called "home". The Mind was silence. After seven millenniums of reassuring and empowering omnipresence, the hive-mind of Hive Alastrika was no more. Not even the shadow of a thought that was not his, for light-years and light-years. Nothing. Silence.
At first, Gul'reyn went mad with wrath, roaring, tearing bits apart from his ship, crushing them, throwing them around; then he felt weak, hungrier than ever, and cooled himself down a little. He had to find someone to eat. So he set off, with nothing more than his pilot goggles and his long black coat.
He had no idea where to go, so he walked, for what he believed to be days. Never did the sun set, nor did it seem to rise. An eternal semi-day, white and blinding, on a plain so vast and so flat that at times, Gul'reyn thought that skies and earth switched places. What do humans find so beautiful in snow?, he asked himself several times. It's cold, boring, bothersome… and quiet. So quiet it hurts.
Finally, he stopped. His vital energy was at the lowest, his sight was getting blurry and his muscles were nothing but pain. His short breath forming white clouds of steam, Gul'reyn dropped to his knees in the foot-deep white cloak. With his eyes turned towards the sky –but was it?-, the wraith let out a heartrending wail.
He was last. And he was going to die.
Alone.