A very timely collapse occurred. Or rather than timely, it was something that was bound to happen sooner or later.
When something as massive as an Aberration—over eight meters in height and width—moved from deep beneath a vast expanse of sand, all the sand that had been covering it fell downward.
Here was the most important detail: many other things had also been covering the Aberration. Because of that, the floor of the fissure sank even further. The Aberration and Nova fell toward the depths with no chance of saving themselves.
He felt the sand crushing him, filling his clothes. Warm wind brushed against his face, his amber eyes locking onto the monster as it desperately tried to cling to the walls with its tentacles.
They were falling down some kind of vast, descending cavern. The octopus struggled frantically, trying not to reach the bottom. It looked at Nova and, with one of its many tentacles, grabbed him by the torso and pulled him toward its mouth.
'I can't believe you care more about eating me than saving your own life!'
It was a stupid beast, after all. But that was enough for Nova. Being so close to the octopus's mouth, he threw the seeds inside.
'Now you're really going to eat something!'
Fwoom!
In an instant, plants exploded inside the Aberration. Once again, cold branches and blue leaves burst outward. The carapace shattered, the tentacles writhed in desperation. Black blood, reeking of death, splattered everywhere, and the viscera vanished into the fall.
It was a quick death for an impatient beast.
Nova sighed in relief, but this was no time to relax. In free fall, danger still lurked in the shadows.
He used the growing tree to grab onto one of its branches. The branches spread against the walls, slowing the fall a little. Unfortunately, it wasn't enough.
'Shit!'
Crash! Crack!
The tree got wedged between a pair of black rocks forming the interior of the narrow, dark cavern, stopping abruptly and snapping the branch Nova was holding onto—sending him straight into what remained of the void.
The wind roared past his ears. Darkness stretched downward like a hellish abyss. Distant crunches echoed nearby. In the end, only a heavy impact was heard as the sand hit the ground.
For Nova, everything went dark the instant he fell, as if it had all been nothing more than a lucid dream.
The following hours passed in profound silence.
***
It seemed that all of this had already become some kind of routine. Say something, fall from a great height toward death and despair, where all kinds of hungry, dangerous monsters surely awaited.
These were the kinds of horrors that lay beyond the portals. Nova had only experienced a small part of one of the worlds on the other side, but there was probably much more out there.
He fell. He lost consciousness. Maybe he died. Everything had become confusing in this world. Octopuses that lived beneath the sand. Strange dogs that could see despite having no eyes. Two suns in the sky and a long, forty-two-hour night.
It was curious how things so different from what they already knew could exist.
Like the blood of other species… or the blood spilling across the sand right now… What color was that blood? Black? Blue? Red?
At the bottom of the abyss, after many long hours of deep silence, Nova woke up. He was confused, dizzy, and suffering from a terrible headache.
From a place of calm, he thought:
'It hurts…'
The pain grew steadily. It started as a faint itch on the right side of his face. Then it felt like a heavy blow from a metal bar. Finally, it was as if someone had fired a shotgun into his face—as if the pellets had spread through his right eye and embedded themselves deep into his flesh.
It burned, hurt, and throbbed, as if his veins were trying to pump blood through a place where there was no longer a passage.
'My eye…' he whispered in a faint, flat, emotionless tone.
The problem was that a small part of his body was no longer there.
He was buried in the sand from the neck down. His entire body was still dazed from the fall, but there were no serious injuries except for one place—his face, which barely protruded above the sand. It was a face missing an eye.
When he regained mobility, he slowly lifted his legs, pushing them downward to work his way upward through the sand. He repeated the process for several minutes until his torso emerged.
He braced himself on the surface with both hands. He pulled his feet free and remained kneeling, staring at the ground.
He couldn't see anything, but he could feel small, dry drops of blood sliding from his nonexistent eye to the edge of his chin.
"Did I lose my eye?"
The heavy impact from earlier—Nova remembered it. Before falling, his face had slammed directly into a stone near the wall. His eye had burst the moment he lost consciousness.
"So that's why it hurts so much, huh."
Anyone else would have been horrified by such sudden and devastating news. Nova, however, showed no emotion. It was as if his heart blocked out all forms of suffering.
He searched his pockets. His communicator was still there. Using its light, he found his backpack, shield, and staff. With that, he could eat some fruit and stop the bleeding with regeneration.
For a moment, he illuminated the ground, where small red drops of blood fell in sequence. He stared at the blood in silence.
'Oh, man… this isn't good,' he thought, almost as if it were something normal.
Maybe he didn't react much because losing an eye due to a single small mistake didn't feel real yet.
Unconsciously, he raised his hand to his face, covering the wound to stop losing more blood. Then he slowly lifted the light—but frowned when he noticed something strange resting in the sand.
It was a peculiar sandstone pillar, carved with incomprehensible scribbles. The pillar was old, broken, and lying on the sand—ancient debris, a fragment of the past.
Enduring the pain as blood fell like a tear, he raised the light further and saw something that caught his interest.
'What is this? Where did I fall?'
In front of him lay the grotesque remains of the octopus, scattered across rocks and walls—but also across the ruins of an ancient yellow-sandstone temple, waiting for eternity for a civilization that would never return…