The Temple is my home now. No—it's always been my home. Its bright sandstone walls encompass the world. Its chambers are endless. And it brings me new friends every day. My friends call me Rahn.
This morning I woke up beside something new: a thin splinter of doubt. And itching questions that swelled into blisters as the sun came up. For instance, there used to be others, ones like me. A woman—her name?
A Voice like grinding stone scrapes out from the walls, grit across my skull. One belonging to the Temple, but also to something else.
Forget about them, Rahn. I forget about them.
I sit dangling my feet off a ledge over the tops of trees. The sun prickles my skin as I watch the shaded jungle below. It exhales smells of damp soil and sweet flowers. There's life in those smells, and love. The Temple's way of telling me: “We will provide.”
Every other day, that smell has warmed my blood. But today I think: provide what?
A dull gray rock catches my eye ... except it's not a rock. Too smooth. I spring to my feet and scramble down the slanted stone wall toward it.
A spike of fear like seeing a viper strike. The gray thing sits lightly on a rush. Red-orange flakes of rust line its carapace and at its center it glows dimly. I pick it up and read—something I've never done before.
[…started when the drills did. Something in [-?-] crust, or maybe the mantle. Not sure.]
[...receive this: **DO NOT COME**]
[The Temple [-?-] never find my way out now.]
- First Corporal Anvitz
The message is fragmented. The transmission light is dark; that means it hasn't been sent. I don't know how I know that. I don't know who First Corporal Anvitz is, nor why they didn't send the message.
Destroy the console, Rahn, Ragtag says. I destroy the console.
Ragtag always speaks as a stern, but loving father. He knows best, so I listen.
I'm hungry. I know the way to food, so I go. But something has changed and today ...
I start to wonder.
I lock the question away in the hidden, tangled place that is mine alone. Something to think on—secretively, out of sight of the others. But first, breakfast.
The others don't speak so much as... imbue.
Where flowers flow, comes the lilting Voice of Arasatchio, and violet blooms erupt around me like stars coming alive. The Temple glows indigo in this early hour, and I walk through a loving world of wonder. Twisting mandrake roots grip the sandstone foundations with their stony fingers, forming bridges over water-logged grasses below. There is no such thing as quiet in the Temple—thousands of insects and frogs sing a constant aria of life. Echoes on the eternal walls. I know them all by their sounds.
I climb over the mandrake roots and leave the chamber through a lower door, shaded beneath towering ferns. Because that's what Arasatchio tells me to do. Her Voice is oldest, and there's comfort in that. She is my mother.
The Temple shows me many things. Usually I watch. The lower door takes me into a gloomy chamber and I see faces in the shadows when I'm not looking. Do I know them?
You don't know them, Rahn. I don't know them—(do I? They look familiar.)
I come to a forked passage, but my mind walls over the left-hand tunnel like it isn't there. The apprehension barely registers. I go right.
A shady copse holding shimmering pools of tadpoles. A steep sandy ramp back up to sunlight. A narrow passage through the crumbling rock between chambers.
My feet carry me into a windswept glade, seeming out of place in the Temple—an intermission of sorts. I know (because Arasatchio says so) there are fat grubs and beetles hiding under the flat muddy rocks. I gather a pile worthy of breakfast and make for a spot on a round-top hill under the shroud of a willow.
The beetles are best of all—crunchy, salty, with sweet juice that runs between my teeth and down my neck. Arasatchio coos. Then a tiny sparkle in the dirt breaks my food-trance.
I pause—swallow, crawl, dig.
My fingernails cut through the soft soil and uncover a ... device. A word I know, without knowing how. Beneath its shell of dirt: cracked metal and a black empty screen. The squishy rubber texture of the buttons is familiar—and welcome? A feeling of relief. Why should that be?
Bury it, Rahn! Ragtag sounds angry. I bury it—wait.
I don't bury it. Ragtag rages.
I... remember.
“Oh, rack off already.”
There was something about that teasing Iandanian accent I found infatuating. It warmed my blood against the icy hell. I laughed, feigning a thin skin, and let her be. We both had plenty of work to do, anyway. The dropships were flying the drill heads down the well and I was supposed to be there to—
FLEE, RAHN! A disharmonious chorus of Voices—Ragtag bellowing the loudest, but they are all there. All furious. The whispering hallucination (a dream of another life?) evaporates, ghosting up into the willow leaves. An explosion of adrenaline in my legs, flooding my chest until my heart will burst. The device springs from my fingers and rolls down the hill to rest among the reeds of a stream.
I flee. There is no resisting this command. I feel it in my bones—they become soft, dissolving clumps of fear and I flee.
One look at the reeds shows a dented metal corner poking up through the muck. Something sparks in my brain, a bright blue flame of memory. The chorus fades and another flash of something breathes in and comes alive.
My room was ten-by-ten. Unbelievable. I'd never even had my own private quarters before. Least, not since joining the corps. Magdeline was there, lounging in my desk chair, both of us pretending the bed didn't exist and didn't call to us. A strand of her orange hair hung in front of one eye, looking like a curl of fire frozen in time. A pause in our conversation, and our eyes met. Her expression said—
In Valleys of ruin! comes the thundering chorus again, and now loudest is Ephinomy's Voice crackling through the air with electricity, deafening me, with the others layered beneath like strata reaching to a primordial depth. Ephinomy's Voice always lifted my spirit in love for adventure. Now it sparks with peril. Storm clouds over my heart.
The valley beneath my feet cracks and tears, an invisible shears sundering it. I leap over and my feet dangle above an empty black abyss below that feels more like a dwelling than a pit.
Ahead: a stone arch at the top of a dozen uneven steps. I rush up, ducking under the weathered arch and into the dusty tunnel behind. Like a window sliding shut, the chaos behind me dies. The silence of the tunnel broken only by my hoarse gasps for air.
Ahead, the tunnel stretches for dozens of feet. And narrow—why don't I remember this tunnel being so tight? I—
Magdeline and I had been arguing. That was new for us.
The drills pounded away outside our cozy double room where she'd lit a scented candle—vanilla or maybe almond. She'd obviously had a plan for our afternoon, but it evaporated when I started the argument. I didn't have an actual job here besides “keep an eye on shit,” and maybe that was part of the problem.
She wanted to stay, I wanted to leave. Simple as that.
We were a few months into the op, and two guys had gone psych. One too many to be coincidence, but she was having the time of her life. This wild frontier was everything she wanted and I didn't want to take that away from her. Still, the thought of spending any more time here made my skin crawl. So I argued.
In the end I'd regret backing down. But she had me in a corner: I wasn't going to leave her side.
I'm clutching my arms around myself, waiting for reality to return. The fading image of the fire-haired girl's face hangs on the sandy wall. The Temple has always given me answers, but this time it's silent. What is happening to me?
A golden triangle of light marches across the wall, the sun sinking toward the rim of the adjacent chamber, setting the tunnel into twilight. A hint of vanilla hangs on the air—was that there before?
I huddle deep into the tunnel, but the device calls to me, scratching at my brain, begging me to return. My betrayal of the others stings, that of affectionate Arasatchio most of all.
But Arasatchio is silent. All I can hear is...
An echo of laughter—melody. A sleepy afternoon in a bed by a space heater.
Realization like a slow-turning wheel. Clarity like a splash of water on my face. The flashes I saw—those were my memories.
A deluge of heretical questions flood my mind, burning down my loving effigy of the Temple. I have not always been here. The Temple does not comprise the world. There's some other place outside the walls.
The Voice of Ephinomy comes to me now, the same static crackle: Entomb by Consequence, and with a bellowing lurch the tunnel walls shudder and begin to squeeze inward.
I race down the passage. The tunnel slides tighter, forcing me sideways. The rough stone presses, constricts, scrapes. My head swings both ways—there's no right choice, both directions stretch too far. I choose anyway: forward.
I plunge from the collapsing tunnel. Its walls settle in one final expulsion of dust behind me while I stand doubled, holding my knees. My mouth tastes of salt and blood. My stomach twists into a hard fist and I almost vomit when I remember the beetles. The stone between my knees is dyed pink from the moons above, and the night-song of insects washes over me.
I look around at the chamber I've entered.
The deeply set creek with banks covered in blue flowers. A single kapok tree at the center of the chamber, taller than the surrounding trees. The visible stone wall bleached white at the southern edge.
I'm miles from the hilly chamber. How did I come here? I think back on my escape, and immediately another memory from my past life unfurls. Petals of a blossoming flower.
The drills clattered against the ground, fighting to break the ice at the new FOB. I kept my eye on the readout, watching heat levels—so far no issues. Outside the cozy control room, several techs stood huddled in the cold, talking their tech-talk.
Magdeline sat next to me. Dark circles under her eyes like coffee ring stains. She hadn't been getting a lot of sleep lately, and it was making her jump at things that weren't there.
Her scent enveloped me, and I loved it. Somehow this badass marine smelled like flowers or something girly I couldn't place, and it didn't detract from her badassedness. The look she gave me then, the one she knew spiked my adrenaline ...
I was hating the mission by then, but damn if I wasn't glad to be there anyway.
With her.
When the Temple returns to me I find myself in tears. How could I have forgotten? That feeling rivaled my love for the Temple, my home.
The Temple? How could I love this place... this prison?
Rahn... You are our Child. We are your Home.
It's Arasatchio. Singing in the voice she uses to rock me to sleep at night. Soft. Fresh loam and a bed of palm leaves.
A warm rush of endorphins.
The tears flow faster now, streaming like the high falls in the western chambers, but they are not for the girl (girl?) but for Arasatchio and my betrayal. Wind comes, rustles the grasses. I close my eyes and smile. The breeze carries scents of sweet flowers and sweeter water. It sweeps my hair back—
Orange hair like fire frozen in time.
I shake my head violently, grit my teeth. If I had a hammer I'd beat my head and scatter Arasatchio's seductive purrs. I stride down the muddy ridge into the heart of the chamber. A quarter-mile ahead the kapok tree rises like a beacon, silhouetted against the pink-tinted moons. Its sparse, snaking branches reminding me of pictures of neurons I saw in school.
The flashes of memory come fast now, thin slices of images like sweeping binoculars across a city, lighting on strangers in motion for brief instants. Little fleeting tales of a forgotten—or misremembered—life. Bursts of color and sound tear through my mind and I feel like I'm back on Ulan IV storming across the fields, ducking shells.
Arasatchio's Voice floats to me on streamers of light.
Bathe under Stars.
“No!” I sprint down the slope to the blue flowered-stream and leap with all my strength.
While I am midair, Arasatchio speaks again—Wherein Time washes away!—but now Her voice is talons and putrid growth and decay and the other Voices are all there screaming, and the stream becomes a violent river. A great swell of white water gushes around the bend and slams into me, sending me headfirst into the muddy bed.
The Voices are dulled thunder booming above the surface. Raging.
But my world is terror and dirt-filled water choking me. Fingernails digging into mud.
Magdeline's hand grasped my forearm, heaving me the final three feet up the icy ledge. I tried not to look down.
Blind luck—a vine ropes around my wrist as I tumble downstream. It holds. I drag myself up the bank, my lungs on fire.
The Temple is transformed. A living tempest, grotesque and hateful. The pale pink moons bathe the jungle in sapient, baleful light. The kapok tree stands on the hill above, a long scraggly climb through soaked bushes—I make it up in no time and stand on the rain-slicked hill beneath the tree.
Death upon Thrones!
I close my eyes as the world rips in half, and force myself to think about—
Magdeline. She didn't try to hide her smirk as she watched me scramble down the last few feet of the tower. That damn tower. This was the fifth time I'd had to climb it.
She looked away, pretending to hide her laughter but actually making sure I saw it. Behind her, the drills rumbled beneath the ice.
“Well, you sure can get down quick.”
“Ha. Ha.” Shouldn't have ever let her know I was afraid of heights.
“How'd you get through basic anyway? I seem to remember a few climbs, not to mention a low-orbit drop or two.”
“Guess I just wanted it bad enough.”
I looked up at the monster I had just conquered, installing the new relay junction. The slender core of the tower rose fifty feet before it branched out into thin snaking arms like a neuron. It—
The kapok tree. The tower.
I back away from the tree—except it's no longer a tree but a metal tower. Thin antennae end in blinking red lights, set into the black sky beyond.
Forget, Rahn!
But Ragtag's booming Voice has no power now and I don't forget, I remember. I close my eyes and call up Magdeline's face and tell myself “remember, remember!” and soon the storm recedes, the howling wind quietens. The night-song of the jungle fades back in as if the world doesn't lay in tatters. Echoes of Arasatchio and the death-choir ring in my ears, but they too are gone.
I'm battered, bloody, utterly exhausted—but I heave myself down the hill away from the tower (which has already become a tree again). Beginning the long hike back to the hilly chamber, where a deluded, dreaming version of myself ate worms and smiled. The pink moons are setting.
The night is full-dark by the time I reach the hilly chamber. All signs of the battle from this morning are gone. The valley is whole, serene. I spot the willow tree and its hill, and then the reeds at its base. In the dark I can't make out the exact spot I threw the device.
Like a timid deer afraid of ambush, I creep down into the reeds and dig through the muck. My hand lands on something smooth, and I grasp it—
Magdeline had run ahead, her hair let down and fluttering behind her. We'd spent several afternoons exploring the ruins—some complex the original colony must have built. All big walls and spooky tunnels. It honestly gave me the creeps, but she was all wide eyes and 'oohs', so I humored her when she got bored.
She had been having nightmares—I woke up to her mumbling in her sleep every night that week. Real dark stuff like hidden demons and temples. It started to bleed into her speech during the day. Thinking it was just the creepy ruins doing it to her, I shrugged it off. Big mistake.
Six hours later I still hadn't found her. The whole base was out searching.
My fault. I should have carried her screaming to psych when the hallucinations started. I would regret it for the rest of my life.
—It's the transmitter. It breaks free from the tangle of reeds with a yank.
I boot it up and key in my commands. Then flick the transmission switch. The amber light flares to life and I let out a sigh for the ages, falling back onto the cushion of grass.
Rahn, we love You. Arasatchio. Her Voice warm raindrops across my scalp. Come Home.
“No,” I breathe. Feels like ripping a bandage off.
The Temple will never be my home, but it has me. The final threads are starting to fray. At least now, it won't claim anyone else.
Far off I hear a storm brewing. But here, for now, it's peaceful.
I fall asleep to the faint beep ... beep ... of the transmitter, steady as a heartbeat. Carrying my words into the dark.
[Something toxic in the planetary crust. Started with hallucinations. Then delusions.]
[Everyone else's gone. Don't think I'll last.]
[If you receive this: **DO NOT COME**]
[Magdeline, I'm sorry.]
- First Corporal Anvitz
01/05/2026
04:01:18 PM