The sky embraced him. Thin and cold and achingly clear, the Martian atmosphere offered less resistance than his body expected—another change, another reminder of time’s passage—but his wings adjusted instinctively, finding new patterns in the different air.
He banked hard, reveling in the sensation, and the landscape wheeled beneath him.
So much had changed.
From this height, he could see patterns invisible from the ground. The ancient seabed that had once been his territory stretched towards the horizon, its contours softened by ice but still recognizable if he squinted through the veil of millennia. To the north, he could make out the ridge where?—
The memory slammed into him without warning.
—voices in the dark, arguing about necessity.
“We cannot save them all.”
“We can try.”
“It’s already too late. The atmosphere?—”
His wings folded against his sides as he descended into the darkness. Others leaving to find their places, their eyes reflecting his own grief.
“Remember,” someone said. “That is our purpose now. Remember everything, so that if anyone survives?—”
He faltered mid-flight. His wings locked, and for a terrifying moment he hung suspended between sky and ice, caught in the grip of a past he couldn’t quite see. Fragmented images cascaded through his mind—faces he should know but couldn’t name, voices speaking words he almost understood, and a sense of duty so profound it had driven him into centuries of frozen sleep.
Remember,the voice echoed.Remember everything.
But he couldn’t. He could feel the memories, as massive and heavy as glaciers, but they remained locked behind walls of ice in his own mind.
A tremor suddenly ran through him, not from the cold, but from something else. Something he sensed rather than felt, a shift in the world around him that screamed a warning.
His head snapped towards the horizon. The sky had changed. What had been clear rust-orange was darkening rapidly to the north, a wall of churning dust and ice crystals building with terrifying speed. Even from this distance, he could feel the pressure drop, taste the electricity on the air.
The storm was returning.
For one heartbeat, he was paralyzed by the beauty of it—the way the light fractured through the ice particles and the massive scale of the atmospheric violence approaching like a living thing. He had seen such storms before, long ago. He had weathered them in caves and vaults and watched them reshape the face of his world.
Then thought caught up with instinct, and ice flooded his veins.
Jaz.
She was down there. Outside. Vulnerable. The storm was moving faster than any he remembered—some consequence of the changed atmosphere, perhaps, or simply the accumulated weight of his distraction. Either way, she had minutes at most before it hit.
He folded his wings and dove.
The world became a blur of white and rust, wind screaming past his ears as he plummeted towards the ground. His body remembered the controlled fall and the last-second wing flare to bleed off speed even as his mind repeated a single desperate thought:
Please. Please let me be in time.
He spotted her from a hundred meters up, a small figure in dark thermal gear moving between pieces of wreckage. She was examining what looked like the remains of her destroyed rig, completely oblivious to the death bearing down from the north.
The ground rushed up to meet him. He flared his wings at the last possible moment, absorbing the impact through bent knees and a stumbling run that ate up the distance between them in seconds.
“Adjar? What?—”
He didn’t stop to explain. There was no time.
His arms closed around her, one beneath her knees and one around her back, and then he was moving, half-running, half-flying in desperate bounds towards the habitat. She cried out, struggling against his grip.
“Put me down! What the hell do you think you’re?—”
