The sensation was glorious, exhilarating—wings spread wide, catching currents of air that shouldn’t exist on this thin-atmosphered world. Below him, the Martian landscape unfolded in shades of rust and ochre, ancient riverbeds and impact craters scarring a surface that remembered violence on a planetary scale.
But this wasn’t the Mars he knew from his waking life. The colors were different here—whites and blues dominating where reds and oranges should have been. Ice. Vast sheets of ice stretching to the horizon, glaciers grinding their slow paths across terrain that might once have known warmth.
The poles, some part of him realized. The frozen caps where even the terraforming has barely begun to touch.
He banked, adjusting his flight path, drawn by something he couldn’t name. A pull. A presence. Something that resonated with frequencies he had forgotten he could perceive.
The glacier below was ancient—so ancient that even his memories of old Mars held nothing to compare. Layer upon layer of frozen water, compressed under its own weight,trapping within its depths secrets that predated human arrival by millions of years.
And beneath those layers…
Something.
He could feel it now, a muted awareness deep below the ice. Not consciousness, not exactly—more like the echo of consciousness, the potential for it, slumbering in crystalline darkness. It was vast, whatever it was. Vast and patient and old, older perhaps than he had been before his long sleep.
Hello? The thought formed without his volition, reaching down through kilometers of frozen water. Can you hear me?
For a moment—just a moment—something answered.
Not words. Not images. Just a sense of… recognition. Of kinship. Of shared origin and shared purpose, connecting across distances that should have been impossible to bridge.
Then it was gone, retreating back into the depths, and he was alone in the frozen sky.
Rhyx’s eyes snapped open.
The shelter was dark around him, the heating units humming their quiet lullaby. Alina slept peacefully in his arms, her face relaxed, her breathing steady. Nothing had changed.
And yet everything had changed.
He lay motionless, staring at the ceiling, his heart pounding with the aftershocks of… what? A dream? A vision? Some combination of both?
Was it real?
The question circled his mind like a predator stalking prey. He could still feel the echo of that presence, that vast awareness slumbering beneath the ice. It had felt real. More real than most dreams, more coherent than the fragmented memories that sometimes surfaced during sleep.
Could there be another like me?
The possibility was staggering. For all his time with Alina, for all the comfort and joy she brought him, there remained a fundamental loneliness in his existence. He was unique—the last of his kind, a remnant of a dead civilization, reborn through processes he didn’t fully understand. There was no one who shared his nature, no one who could truly comprehend what he was.
But if there were others… if the terraforming had awakened more than just plants and predators… if somewhere beneath the polar ice, another consciousness dreamed of wings and warm skies…
It would be nice, he thought. Not to be alone.
Then he looked down at the woman in his arms.
She had curled closer in her sleep, one hand resting on his chest, her face turned towards him as if seeking his presence even in unconsciousness. Her golden hair was spread across his shoulder, catching what little light filtered through the shelter’s walls.
I am not alone,he realized.I have her.
The thought brought a smile to his lips, warm and genuine. Whatever mysteries the dream had revealed—whateverpossibilities lurked beneath the Martian ice—they could wait. The future would unfold in its own time, bringing challenges and discoveries he couldn’t yet imagine.
But right now, in this moment, he had everything he needed.
He had Alina.
He had love.
He had a home.
