The ash did not fall so much as accumulate, drifting sideways in thin grey ribbons that caught the merchant lights and turned them the colour of old bone. Rohan kept low behind the drainage cut, one hand pressed flat against the compacted grit beneath the maintenance platform, and waited for the drone cycle to complete its pass.
Three. Two. One.
The whine of the drone’s rotors faded east, chasing a heat ghost thrown off by a vent stack Tavin had rigged two nights ago for exactly this purpose. It wouldn’t last. Merchant tech was better than anything Veyrhold could scrounge together, and sooner or later the drone would notice the decoy wasn’t breathing the way a person breathed.
Sooner or later wasn’t now.
Rohan pressed his palm harder into the ash and let Molten Assimilation stir beneath his skin. The sensation had stopped feeling strange months ago. It simply felt like reaching — an extension of will into dead matter, asking it to remember it had once been something else, something looser, something that could move. The compacted ash beneath the platform’s rear support shivered, then loosened, grain sliding against grain like sand deciding to become water.
He pulled himself through the gap on his elbows, spear strapped tight along his spine, breath held so long his ears began to ring.
[Skill Activated: Molten Assimilation]
[Origin Energy Expended: Low]
He ignored the notification. He’d learned to ignore most of them by now, the way a person learned to ignore their own heartbeat — present, necessary, and only interesting when it did something unexpected.
The staging zone above the drainage cut smelled of ozone and machine coolant, utterly unlike the ash-and-mineral tang of everywhere else on Cael Athis. Rohan lay flat in the shadow beneath a stacked row of transport crates and watched merchant handlers move between them with the bored efficiency of people who had done this a thousand times before and expected to do it a thousand times again.
The stabiliser casing sat exactly where Tavin’s sketch had promised it would — a squat cylinder of dull grey alloy, roughly the size of a large storage barrel, tagged along one seam with a strip of amber warning tape that read UNSTABLE — DO NOT OPEN — SEALED FOR TRANSPORT in three different scripts, one of which Rohan still couldn’t read.
He had exactly one chance to reach it before the next handler rotation.
Rohan counted the guards. Four visible, all facing outward, all watching the ash squall for the kind of desperate wasteland scavenger who might try to steal cargo rather than climb inside it. Nobody expected the second thing. Nobody had ever needed to.
That’s the whole plan, really. Nobody expects the person dumb enough to hide inside the thing they’re trying to steal from.
He moved when the nearest guard turned to speak to a clerk about manifest numbers. Six low strides, spear held flat against his side so it wouldn’t catch the light, and then he was behind the casing, working his fingers along the seam Tavin had marked with a small scratch only someone looking for it would notice.
The panel came away with a soft hiss of equalizing pressure. Inside, the casing was mostly hollow — a cage of support struts around a genuinely damaged stabiliser core, exactly enough space for a person to fold themselves into if that person didn’t mind never fully straightening their spine again.
Rohan minded. He climbed in anyway.
He drew the panel shut behind him, plunging himself into total darkness broken only by the faint status glow of his own eyes reflected back at him from six centimetres away.
[Quest Updated: Stowaway Beneath the Gilded Heron]
[Objective: Board Merchant Shuttle Three via damaged equipment transfer. — Complete]
[New Objective: Survive transfer to orbital vessel.]
[Warning: Charge scan imminent. Origin Energy signature may register as anomalous heat.]
Wonderful. Thank you, Great System. Very reassuring.
Rohan folded his knees against his chest, wrapped both arms around the spear laid diagonal across his body, and made himself as small and as still and as dead as four months of ash-world survival had taught him how to be.
The casing lurched. Voices outside, muffled by alloy and distance. A grinding whir that could only be a loading arm. Then motion — smooth, mechanical, nothing like the jarring haul of a hand cart — carrying him and his hiding place toward the shuttle ramp.
He heard the charge scan before he felt it. A low hum that climbed in pitch, sweeping across the casing’s exterior in a slow pass, searching for the particular signature of unstable equipment components and, presumably, nothing else.
Rohan held his breath and pulled every scrap of Molten Assimilation’s control toward one single purpose — not manipulating ash, because there was none here to manipulate, but pressing his own Origin Energy as flat and as quiet as he could make it, the way Tavin had described banking a fire down to embers so it wouldn’t smoke.
The hum passed over him.
Paused.
Please. Please, please, please —
The hum continued on, unbothered, sweeping toward the next crate in the row.
Rohan let his breath out so slowly it hurt.
[Charge Scan: Passed]
[Objective: Survive transfer to orbital vessel. — In Progress]
The loading arm set the casing down with a clang that rattled his teeth, and then, after a stretch of time he had no way to measure in the dark, the whole world tilted backward and a deep engine roar built beneath him until it swallowed every other sound.
Shuttle Three is lifting.
Cael Athis fell away beneath him — the ash wastes, the Ashen Marches, Veyrhold’s buried lights, all of it dropping into distance and darkness and finally into nothing at all.
Rohan closed his eyes inside a casing meant to look broken, and for the first time in seven months, felt something in his chest that was not quite hope but stood close enough to it to borrow its shape.
’Now that I think about it, this is my first time on a true, interstellar journey... I’ve spent so long on Cael Athis, living a frugal and life of nothing but survival that I’ve forgotten how society in this universe is much more advanced than the Federation back home. Not even we have the capabilities to make an interstellar journey without the aid of the Origin Realm’s gates.’
Deep down, he was actually rather excited.