A brother? A lover? Gone.
None of it stayed. None of it mattered.
The sky tore open around her. She fell screaming through it, through air that felt too real after the void, limbs flailing uselessly in freefall. Below—mountains. Trees. A forest swallowing the horizon in green teeth.
Branches caught her first, slamming against armor, scraping bare skin where the joints left her exposed. Something cracked in her side. Another branch spun her sideways. A gauntlet tore free with a metallic shriek, spiraling off into the canopy.
Then—ground.
The impact crushed the air from her lungs in a soundless huff. Pain lanced up her spine, white-hot and immediate.
Then—stillness.
Her chest convulsed, heaving air in jagged, broken gasps. The taste of dirt sat thick on her tongue. Blood wept sluggishly from a cut at her hairline, blurring one eye.
Move. Get up.
Her body didn’t want to listen. Trembling hands scrabbled at the forest floor—wet moss, old leaves, something sharp slicing her palm open. Metal. Plating. Not hers. Not anymore.
One elbow locked. Then the other. She forced herself upright onto shaking knees.
“Fuuuh…what the fuck.” The words slurred in her throat. They didn’t sound right.
What was hers? Who was—
Her head tipped forward. Sweat dripped from her chin onto the soil. One foot found purchase. Then the other. She staggered, catching herself against the trunk of a tree slick with sap.
A name. She needed a name.
Her name.
Think. Think.
Pain spiked through her skull. Fragments of memory flared and burned out. Faces without names. Words without meaning. A blur of missions and orders. Of fire, and blood, and betrayal spinning away from her like the debris of a dying star.
Her mouth shaped the syllables before her brain caught up.
“Rynna.” A whisper. Barely there. “I’m…Rynna.”
It steadied her. A little. Enough to try standing on her own.
Her breastplate hung askew, pieces twisted, cracked open like an exoskeleton molting mid-battle. Sparks guttered in the seams, blue-white and fading. No backup. No command feed. No tactical net. She was alone.
Again.
“What now?” Each ragged exhale bled into the cold, leaving quick ghosts of vapor behind.
The answer didn’t come. It never did.
Another world. Another slow unraveling waiting on the horizon.
She pressed a hand to her temple. Tried to piece together the threads of where she’d been—who she’d been fighting for, what she’d been running from. Flashes only. Faces already slipping away. The Mission? Forgotten. The war? Over. Or lost.
Rynna squared her shoulders beneath the remnants of her battered coverings, exhaled, and took her first step forward into whatever hell awaited her on this world.
It didn’t matter. Not anymore.
She staggered forward through the undergrowth, boots sinking into supple loam. Her heartbeat still pounded in her ears, louder than the wind threading through the trees.
