Neil's consciousness returned slowly, like surfacing from deep water. His head throbbed with a pain that seemed to echo from somewhere beyond his skull, and his mouth tasted of copper and ozone. For a moment, he lay still, eyes closed, trying to remember where he was.
The construction site. The strange light in the forest. The metal object that had—
His eyes snapped open.
Above him stretched an alien sky, darker than any night he'd ever seen. Not the comforting black of Earth's evening, but something deeper, more absolute. Yet it wasn't empty. Stars wheeled overhead in patterns that made no sense, constellations that belonged to no mythology he knew. And hanging in that impossible sky were three moons—one silver, one pale gold, and one that seemed to shift between blue and green as he watched.
Neil sat up slowly, his construction worker's instincts checking for injuries. Everything seemed to work, though his entire body felt strange, as if it belonged to someone else. The air was thin and sharp in his lungs, carrying scents he couldn't identify—something like pine but not quite, something metallic and clean.
He was sitting on a platform.
The realization hit him as he looked around. Not a natural rock formation or clearing, but a deliberately constructed square of dark stone that stretched about fifty feet in each direction. The surface was smooth as polished marble but warmer to the touch, and strange symbols were carved around its edges—flowing script that seemed to shift and change when he wasn't looking directly at it.
"What the hell?" Neil whispered, his voice sounding strange in the thin air.
That's when the sky exploded into light.
Twenty brilliant spheres materialized in the darkness above, each one pulsing with its own distinct color. They hung there for a moment like impossible stars, close enough that Neil could feel their radiance warming his face. Then, with a sound like distant thunder, they began to move.
Neil scrambled to his feet, transfixed. The spheres scattered in all directions, trailing streams of colored light across the alien sky. Most shot toward the distant horizon, disappearing beyond mountains and valleys he couldn't even begin to map. But two remained visible.
A green sphere, brilliant as an emerald, arced toward what looked like a body of water to his left. It descended slowly, deliberately, until it touched down near the shoreline. The sphere appeared deceptively close—Neil felt like he could almost reach out and touch it—but some part of his mind understood that the distances here were beyond anything he could comprehend.
Far to his right, barely visible as a tiny speck of deep blue light, another sphere fell toward the distant horizon. This one reminded him of Earth's oceans, but it was so far away that Neil had to squint to make sure he was really seeing it at all. It disappeared behind what might have been mountains or hills, leaving only the faintest glow to mark where it had landed.
As the spheres touched down, something extraordinary happened. They expanded, flowing outward like liquid light, transforming into massive dome shapes that rose from the ground like geometric mountains. The green dome settled over what Neil now realized was indeed a large lake, its glow reflecting off the dark water. Even from here, he could see that the dome was enormous—easily the size of a city, maybe larger. The blue dome was nothing more than a distant glimmer now, so far away that it looked like a star that had fallen to earth.
For several minutes, the domes pulsed with brilliant light, their radiance bright enough to make Neil squint and shield his eyes. Then, slowly, the intensity began to fade. The colors dimmed from blazing white-hot to warm, steady glows, like campfires seen from a great distance.
As Neil's eyes adjusted to the returning darkness, he finally saw his surroundings clearly.
He was in hell.
That was his first thought, looking out from the platform across a landscape that belonged in nightmares. Everything around him was dead. Not recently dead, but long dead, ancient dead. Twisted trees stood like skeletal hands reaching toward the alien sky, their bark black and silver in the strange light. The ground between them was rocky and broken, covered in what looked like ash and scattered with boulders that cast sharp shadows.
Mountains rose in multiple directions, their peaks jagged and unwelcoming. The water he'd seen toward the green dome was indeed a large lake or sea, but from here it looked dark and still as black glass. And nowhere—absolutely nowhere—could he see any sign of buildings, roads, or civilization.
Just him, standing alone on a stone platform in the middle of a dead world.
"This isn't real," Neil said aloud, his voice echoing strangely in the thin air. "This can't be real."
But even as he spoke the words, he knew better. The cold bite of the air in his lungs, the ache in his muscles from lying on stone, the alien constellations wheeling overhead—it was all too vivid, too consistent to be a dream or hallucination.
Somehow, impossibly, he was no longer on Earth.
That's when the second flash hit.
Light exploded around him, not from above this time but from everywhere at once, as if the air itself had become luminous. Neil cried out and staggered, raising his hands to shield his eyes, but the brilliance seemed to come from inside his skull as much as outside it.
Then came the pain.
A headache slammed into him like a physical blow, so intense that his vision blurred and his knees nearly buckled. But that was just the beginning. The air around him began to move, not like wind but like something alive and hostile. It pressed against his skin with razor edges, making him feel as if invisible knives were trying to slice him apart.
His lungs seized. Each breath became a struggle, as if the atmosphere itself was fighting against him. The thin air that had seemed merely strange now felt toxic, burning his throat and chest with each desperate inhalation.
And underneath it all was pressure—crushing, overwhelming pressure that made him feel as if he were sinking to the bottom of the deepest ocean. His ears popped repeatedly, and dark spots danced at the edges of his vision.
Neil stumbled across the platform, gasping and disoriented. Whatever was happening to him, it was getting worse by the second. The wind-that-wasn't-wind grew sharper, and he could swear he felt his skin beginning to split under its invisible assault.
*I'm going to die,* he realized with crystal clarity. *I survived whatever brought me here just to die on this platform.*
Panic gave him strength. Fighting against the crushing pressure, Neil forced himself to look around desperately for shelter, for anything that might protect him from whatever force was trying to tear him apart.
The platform was empty except for the carved symbols around its edges. The dead landscape offered no refuge that he could reach in time. The distant domes were impossibly far away, and even if they represented safety, he'd never make it across the broken terrain in his current condition.
But as his vision began to tunnel from lack of oxygen, Neil caught sight of something directly below the platform.
At ground level, almost hidden by the platform's edge, was what looked like a door.
Not a natural cave opening or gap between rocks, but something artificial. A rectangular shape cut into the stone foundation of the platform itself, framed by the same strange symbols that decorated the upper surface. Even through his pain and panic, Neil could see that it was too regular, too purposeful to be anything but man-made.
The jump down to ground level wasn't far—maybe eight feet at most. Under normal circumstances, it would be nothing for someone with his construction background. But with his body fighting against invisible forces and his lungs barely functioning, it felt like leaping into an abyss.
He had no choice.
Neil threw himself over the edge of the platform, landing hard on the rocky ground below. His knees buckled and he rolled, scraping his hands and face on the rough stone, but the impact seemed to jar something loose in his chest. For a moment, he could breathe almost normally.
The door was right in front of him.
Up close, he could see that it wasn't quite a door in any conventional sense. It was more like an opening that had been sealed with a material that looked like black glass or polished obsidian. The surface was smooth and reflective, but as Neil reached toward it with a shaking hand, his fingers passed right through.
It was an illusion, or a barrier that responded to touch.
Above him, the invisible storm was getting worse. The platform itself seemed to be groaning under some tremendous strain, and Neil could hear what sounded like the air itself tearing.
Without hesitation, he plunged through the false door and into darkness.
The relief was immediate and overwhelming. The crushing pressure vanished, the razor wind stopped, and his lungs suddenly worked normally again. Neil collapsed on what felt like a smooth stone floor, gasping and shaking as his body recovered from the assault.
He was in some kind of chamber beneath the platform. The air here was still and cool, carrying a faint scent of something ancient and metallic. Gradually, his eyes adjusted to reveal walls covered in the same flowing script he'd seen above, but here the symbols seemed to pulse with their own faint light.
Neil lay on the floor for long minutes, just breathing and trying to process what had happened to him. He was no longer on Earth—that much was certain. The spheres, the domes, the alien sky, all of it pointed to something beyond his understanding. But the immediate crisis was over, and he was alive.
For now.
As his heartbeat slowly returned to normal, Neil began to make out more details of his refuge. The chamber was larger than he'd first thought, stretching back into shadows his eyes couldn't penetrate. The walls were covered not just with symbols but with what looked like diagrams and maps, all glowing with that same soft light.
And somewhere in the darkness ahead, he could hear the sound of water dripping.
Neil Hayes, construction worker from Earth, sat up slowly in an alien chamber beneath a stone platform on a dead world, surrounded by mysteries he couldn't begin to understand.
But he was alive, and he was no longer alone with the hostile forces above.
Whatever this place was, it had saved him.
Now he just had to figure out what came next.