Falling Star
Part 10
Darkness met darkness, as if he'd never awoken at all, as Fox's eyes creaked open. For a moment, the memory of his whereabouts escaped him, something he had reveled in during his slumber but could no longer escape beyond that fleeting reorientation. Feeling his way up and along the wall he had propped himself against as he rose with a yawning grunt, the texture of the inscriptions on the walls following his fingertips, he eventually found the lever which would call the elevator back down to his level. The gurgling sound of its machinery now almost pleasant to him, he cricked his back of the misaligned disks resulting from his over night posture until it eventually reached him. As the platform made itself flush with the floor he stood on, a shaft of light cascading down from the tunnel leading back out onto the mountainside gave him one last visual recollection of the room he'd taken refuge in as he stepped onto it. Peering into the mired void beyond what little the light from outside was able to show him, an intense curiosity to explore further beyond it came over him, particularly at the prospect of finding more food, and possibly even people. To that, he unholstered his blaster, the high beam flashlight adorning the end of its barrel tempting him with all manner of unknowns. The less than ideal charge percentage staring back at him as he pondered, however, persuaded him otherwise as the platform began rising back upwards to eventually cut off any further investigation. Turning his head downwards to properly reholster it, ominous signs something which he had not seen traversing down into that place caught the attention of his weary eyes. Foot prints, several organisms worth.
Kneeling down to examine the prints in the increasing field of light, it became apparent to him too that they were not of benign intention. Rather, the disconcertingly clear grooves etched into the stone platform implied heavily that they had been thrashed into it. His focus transfixed on them in that moment, he almost didn't notice once the platform had reached the surface layer, whereupon he noticed the tracks leading both in to and out of the tunnel. Drawing his blaster once again, this time in reaction to a more dreadful curiosity, he took aim squarely at the exit and began inching towards it. His heart pounded in his chest as all of the survival instincts he had suffered through the previous day came flowing back into him ten fold. He could feel his legs shivering from the rush of adrenaline which almost compelled him to charge at whatever lay on the other end of the gate of light before him, and even the gentle gusts of wind caught by the tunnel's vacuum seemed a call of the void to his oxygen eviscerating body.
After what he'd have sworn was an eternity, the view to the outside finally came to his bloodshot eyes. Lowering the barrel, though not his trigger finger, he dashed the last few feet to the entrance and propped himself up against the right side wall. Not a sound besides the rustling of the leaves permeated from the outside, yet his head was awash with the static of combat readiness as he slowly peaked out. All at once, his momentum halted. Nothing. Even the tracks leading out seemed to fade into the solitude under the canopy. Lowering his blaster yet again, his head dipped to veil an infuriated sigh into his jacket collar as the compounded aftershock of the moment and those that led up to it crawled up his spine. Fight, survive, run – die – it all coagulated into an intense isolation to which he could only respond by kicking a piece of stone that had fallen out of the tunnel's ceiling into the mud outside before carrying on.
The icy wind whipped at his back, further unfurling his already mangled hair. Its mind numbing whistle as it traversed this and nearby peaks drowned out only by the sound of his jacket brushing against him in response to its push as he pulled himself onto the summit. Finally free of the blindness the valley he'd landed in had forced upon him, he was now able to survey a far truer scale of his marooning. Across the curvature of the horizon, his eyes befell a seemingly endless array of mountainscape interrupted only by the mild temperate forests and blankets of cloud and mist occupying the dips between their bluffs. This came as no particular surprise, though the persistent absence of any birds in the sky or their songs echoing through it struck him yet again. The rarity of seeing anything bigger than the occasional bird of prey or grazing mammal even in the Cornerian countryside was no strange notion to him, and yet the absolute void of fauna, or at least their refusal to make themselves known to him, as if none had ever lived here at all, pervaded into a finality he had been reluctant to accept until that moment. Even the memory and implications of his overnight stay rallying in his mind was not sufficient to stay the sagging of his body downward with a melancholic sigh. Upon inhaling to redouble his resolve in the face of such overwhelming stimuli, however, the scent of burning metal and wire caught his nose. His ears perking upwards, he stepped lightly over the summit's apex and perched himself such that he could get a view of the valley it declined into. There, beneath a light haze of smoke billowing from its carcass at the crescendo of a substantial clearing it's trajectory of descent had ripped into the valley marsh, lay what remained of the Troades.