Zhellday. 22.10.26 AFE

He stirs, cold, under a thin layer of cloth. When he rolls over, his leg knocks into something. He sits up, squinting, and looks around. His leg knocked into a barrel.

There's a massive yellow and black sign on the barrel, shaped like a triangle. He tries to remember what that means. He can't. When he sits up and examines it, the barrel is empty anyway.

He shivers, glancing back to where he apparently fell asleep, exhausted, and slept for… who knows how long. This hut seems to keep out a fair bit of cold, and there's a fire burning in the hearth that he was sleeping against—that's probably why his throat feels like death—but it's still chilly.

The fabric he was sleeping under is a coat. Dappled grey, like military fatigues. He picks it up; it looks warm. Warm and dry. In the lining at the neck is scrawled, in writing faint from too many washes, Luke Skywalker.

He puts it on and snuggles into it. Whoever Luke Skywalker is, he has very warm coats. He must be someone who gets cold easily, like he is.

Memory eludes him, but somehow he expected that. It feels like memory has been eluding him for a while. There's a flask on the floor near to him as well, but when he tries to drink from it, he finds it empty.

The house around him—a boathouse, he realises, when he trudges outside—is empty and still. No one is here. No one has been here for a long time. The wood in the hearth is soaked through, yet it still burns merrily, which is odd, but he can't complain. The wasteland outside, colourful and hideous, is silent.

He searches through the boathouse to see if there's any food but has no luck. His bag has food instead—a couple of measly ration bars. He should keep an eye on them. He considers some of the boats left behind in the boathouse, but the river is frozen over, crusted with white like fruit consumed by mould, and the boat will take him nowhere.

There are footprints leading from the river to the boathouse. He frowns at them, matches them to his own boots. They are his. He must have got here from across the frozen river.

Why did he come here? There is nothing in this boathouse, nothing on the horizon. There is something on the other horizon—a billow of black and yellow smoke, sharp against the pale sky—but nothing in the direction he was going. Perhaps he was going nowhere. Perhaps he was leaving somewhere.

He must have left for a reason. Either he should keep going, keep putting distance between himself and whatever is belching smoke like bellows, because he definitely left for good reason… or he should find answers.

He retraces his steps. Places his feet on the frozen river. It held him yesterday, clearly; it should hold him today.

Twenty unsteady steps later, something flickers under the ice. He stares.

Something below him… something that feels like death, a stronger death than that which envelops this whole planet, a more personal, recent, precise death…

Before his eyes, shadows shift under the ice. Something white—a white limb against the dark water. A white face. Not face. Helmet. Black eyepieces stare up at him.

He does not know that armour, the head to toe white and black design of it, but terror spears his chest. The feeling of being hunted. There are more of them—more corpses, he can see them now, drifting farther below his feet, unmoving in the sluggish, frigid water.

That same terror attacks the ice at his feet. The more his legs shake, the more he can feel the ice groaning. Hear it. He makes to step forwards, to outrun this. He makes it ten paces.

The ice shatters into fragments. Water fills his mouth. He swallows some and plummets, his coat flapping away from him as the dark blue depths embrace him.