The light grew brighter, more intense, forcing its way into spaces that had known only darkness for—how long? He couldn’t measure it. The concept of time had fractured in the endless compression of his stasis.
Something gave way.
The world tilted, and he was expelled from the chamber like a stone from a sling as the entire structure came apart around him. He felt the ice around him, felt it parting like flesh before a blade, pushed aside by forces he couldn’t identify.
The Awakening Protocols.The words that flashed into his mind meant something, but it was gone before he could grasp it as he broke through to the surface, flung high into the air.
The cold hit him first. Martian polar cold, familiar and fierce, biting into scales that hadn’t felt wind in longer than he could calculate. His wings snapped outward by pure reflex, catching air, fighting to stabilize his tumbling ascent. One of them shrieked with pain—damaged somehow, the membrane torn or the tendons wrenched from the violence of his emergence.
He fell.
Not far. A distance that would have been trivial under normal circumstances but felt like a killing drop to his awakening-weakened body. He hit the ice hard, his shoulder taking the brunt of the impact, and the world became a chaos of white and pain and confusion.
Get up. Assess. Orient.
The command came from the part of his mind trained for survival, an instinct carved by epochs of evolution. He forced himself to his knees first, then his feet—and tried to take in his surroundings.
An ice field stretched in every direction, but it was wrong. The colors were wrong, the texture was wrong, the very quality of the starlight filtering through the thin atmosphere was wrong. What had happened? Something akin to panic threatened to overwhelm him but he forced it aside. First, survival.
He forced his attention back to his immediate surroundings. The ice surrounding him was shattered, broken into great angular fragments that jutted skyward like frozen teeth. The crater he’d created on emergence was still steaming, heat sublimating the ice into a mist that coiled around his legs. His own body felt wrong, stiff and weak. His wings ached. His joints protestedevery movement. And there was something else, a deeper wrongness that he couldn’t identify.
I’m injured.
He looked down at himself. Silver-white scales, torn along his left side and bleeding sluggishly into the cold air. A powerful chest and arms, but something about them seemed wrong as well, oddly misshapen. His tail flicked behind him, the flexible spines along its ridge chipped in places.
He didn’t remember how the injury had occurred, but it didn’t matter. What mattered was that he was weakened and vulnerable, alone in a world that he didn’t recognize.
He caught a flash of movement at the edge of his vision, and his head snapped towards it, every survival instinct he possessed screamed alarm.
Something was there. Something large. Something that didn’t belong
He struggled to focus through the mist and the shock of emergence. The shape resolved slowly into something angular and artificial, squatting on the ice like some kind of huge predator.
Threat. Eliminate the threat.
His instincts overrode any type of rational thought and he drew breath, preparing to strike. The cold air burned as it filled his lungs, summoning the ice in his blood. The knowledge emerged with the cold.
I am a frost-breather, born to the polar regions, born to defend these frozen wastes.
The predator sat motionless on the ice. Damaged, perhaps, but damaged didn’t mean harmless. Damaged could mean cornered and dangerous.
He released his breath.
The cold that emerged from his jaws was beyond temperature, and it struck the predator dead center, coating it in frost that spread across its surface like a living thing. It shuddered, and something inside it cracked—a sharp sound, metallic and wrong.
Not enough.
He drew breath again, deeper this time despite the protest of his damaged body. The rational part of his mind had stopped trying to intervene. This was survival. This was instinct. This was the only response he knew to an unidentified threat in hostile territory.
He released the second breath at the same moment that something inside the machine gave way.
The explosion was catastrophic, a pressure wave that picked him up and hurled him backwards across the ice. For an instant, the cold of his breath and the heat of the detonation met in the space between, creating a reaction that went beyond anything he’d intended.
Fragments of metal and crystal and things he couldn’t identify came spinning through the air faster than thought. He twisted instinctively, but his body was too slow and weak, already damaged.
Something hit his side, the same side that was already wounded. The fragment punched through his scales and sliced into the muscle beneath, and he felt the wet heat of blood against hisskin. He hit the ice again, harder this time. The impact drove the fragment deeper and tore a sound from his throat that might have been a scream if he’d had the breath for it.
The world went grey at the edges.
