It was the twenty-third dawn since we killed the last beast—or so we pretended to count, because time here does not pass: it drags itself, drop by drop, like clotted blood in a wound that never closes.
The planet swallowed us without haste. Plains of black moss sucked away any remnant of light, turning it into viscous darkness. The ancient towers, once erected by hands that had already forgotten what hope was, now stood like rotting bones, leaning, ready to collapse upon anyone who dared remember that something other than fear once existed.
My name was Elias—a word I repeated in silence, like someone grinding their teeth against the inevitable, so as not to dissolve completely into the indistinct mass of prey.
I sat at the edge of the crater we called camp, knees against my chest, lungs struggling against the dense, humid air, impregnated with decay and fungi that stank of broken promises. The alien sun did not rise; it dragged itself across the horizon, swollen, festering, a yellow ulcer that never warmed, only illuminated enough to remind us of what we had lost.
Below, the others moved like specters condemned to feign life. Seven—or six, if we discounted Kael, the alien who had stuck to us like a shadow one cannot shake. His gray skin, covered in chitinous plates that creaked with every movement, glistened like spilled oil on rusted metal.
He had fought by our side in the previous slaughter, his curved blade plunged into the same black ichor that still stained my hands in dreams. Now he remained there, motionless, his vertical eyes fixed on the violet sky as if awaiting the sentence we all knew was coming. I hated him for existing; I hated him even more for reminding us that not even betrayal was certain—only the cycle.
Peace reigned. An oppressive, sticky peace that infiltrated the lungs and filled them with lead. There were no roars, no tremors, no metallic smell of blood—only the silence, that silence that screams louder than any shriek.
The children—the few who remained, thin, hollow-eyed—fiddled with luminescent stones with trembling fingers, without laughing, without speaking, as if sound were a crime they could no longer commit. The adults whispered dead plans: seeds that rotted before sprouting, weapons that rusted before firing, exits that never existed.
I knew.
I knew because the dream visited me every night, identical, crushing: the transport descending without noise, the doors opening like hungry mouths, new faces emerging from the mist—faces that had never seen us, but already carried the same dread etched into their bones. And among them, always, the larger silhouette, still formless, pulsing, growing.
The new beast. Not the same one. Never the same one. Always heavier, more patient, more inevitable.
In that dawn, while the air condensed into cold droplets on my skin, I heard it: a low, dragging sound, like leather tearing dry meat, coming from a place that was neither near nor far—just underneath everything. It wasn't a threat. It was a reminder. The cycle did not pause; it only pretended to sleep so that the terror of waking would hurt more.
I stood up slowly, muscles protesting like old chains. Kael raised his head in the same direction, pupils dilating into black slits. Our gazes met—there was no complicity, only the mutual recognition of those condemned twice over.
I turned to the others. My voice came out hoarse, almost inaudible, but heavy with the weight of all repetitions:
"They return."
"From time to time."
"And we... we never leave here."
The silence that followed wasn't empty. It was full—full of held breath, of hearts beating slower so as not to attract attention, of a certainty that crushed us like the ceiling of a tomb still pretending to be a home.
The cycle wasn't a clock. It was a breath—deep, slow, patient—that the planet exhaled through the cracks in the black moss. Every exhalation brought the smell of rusted iron and fresh meat; every inhalation sucked the air from our lungs, leaving us lighter, emptier, ready for the next flood of terror.
I counted the turns like one counts scars on their own body.
The first: when we woke up here, naked, without memory, only with the instinct to run. The beasts came then like elongated shadows, with claws that scratched the sky before scratching flesh. We killed some—or they let us kill them, so we would learn the taste of false victory.
Then came the peace: long months of silence where the festering sun barely moved, and we pretended to rebuild lives. We planted roots that never sprouted. We built shelters that the wind knocked down as if they were made of ash. And we dreamed of exits the planet would never allow.
From time to time, they returned.
The second turn was worse. The beasts were no longer the same; thorns grew where once there was smooth skin, eyes that shone with stolen intelligence—perhaps from us, perhaps from those who came before. The human group—what remained of it—fought by my side. We lost three.
Kael, the alien, drove his blade into the throat of the matriarch, and black ichor gushed like hot oil over us. We celebrated the victory with hoarse whispers, as if the noise could wake the cycle again. But it woke up anyway.
From time to time, the silence lied.
Now, on the twenty-third dawn, I felt the cycle contract like a muscle in spasm. The ground trembled slightly—not enough to topple the rotting towers, but enough to make the luminescent stones roll from the children's hands.
They didn't cry; they just looked at me, eyes deep as dry wells. They knew. Everyone knew.
I sat on the edge of the crater, my back against the cold rock that pulsed like living flesh. Kael approached soundlessly, his chitinous plates creaking like old doors. He stopped a few paces away, looking at the violet horizon.
He didn't speak our language—or perhaps he did, but the words came out as grunts carried by the wind. I spoke anyway.
"Have you seen this before?" I asked, voice low, as if the planet could hear. "In other worlds. Other cycles."
He turned his head slowly. His vertical eyes narrowed, reflecting the sickly sun. For an instant, I thought I saw something there—not pity, not fear, but recognition. The recognition of one who has been both prey and predator, and knows the lines blurred a long time ago.
"You are the bait," he murmured, the words coming out in a rasping whisper, as if scraping his throat. "We are the tool. The beasts... the beasts are the cycle."
I laughed—a dry sound, devoid of humor.
"And you? What are you?"
Kael didn't answer. He just pointed to the sky. There, in the distance, a dark spot moved against the violet: not a cloud, not a bird. A transport. Silent. Inevitable.
The new batch was descending.
They emerged from the mist like newly awakened ghosts: broad-shouldered men who didn't yet know how to fight, wide-eyed women who still believed in salvation, children who could still laugh without fear. About fifty, maybe more.
They carried the same smell we carried in the beginning—fresh sweat, confusion, uncorrupted life. They looked at us as if we were saviors. We looked at them as if they were the cycle's next meal.
As they descended the ramp, the ground shook again—stronger. From the horizon came the sound: leather tearing dry meat, but now closer, hungrier.
The new beast was not like the previous ones. I felt it growing in the depths of the plains, feeding on the memory of past slaughters. Taller. More cunning. With eyes that already knew our names.
Kael raised the curved blade but did not attack. He stood still, as if waiting for permission.
The newcomers shouted questions no one answered. The old survivors shrank back, some crying silently, others just staring at the ground as if they could dig an exit.
I stood up. My body ached—not from old wounds, but from something new: a stiffness in the bones, a tingling in the skin, as if chitinous plates wanted to break through from underneath.
I looked at my hands. The nails were longer. Darker.
From time to time, the beasts returned.
From time to time, we changed.
And the cycle—patient, eternal—breathed deeper.
The transport was still hissing as it touched the black moss when the ground opened up.
It wasn't an explosion; it was a yawn. A wide, slow fissure, like the mouth of one waking hungry after sleeping too long. From it rose cold steam, heavy with the smell of iron and bile.
And then it emerged: the new beast.
Larger than the previous ones, but not just in size—in weight, in presence. Its body was an irregular mass of chitinous plates that seemed to have been stitched hastily over pulsing muscles. Arms—or tentacles—extended in wrong directions, ending in claws that scratched the air as if testing gravity.
The head had no visible eyes; instead, a crown of pulsating orifices that opened and closed, inhaling the dread of the newcomers as if it were oxygen.
The new ones screamed. A sharp, human sound that cut the silence like glass.
The old survivors—us—did not scream. We already knew that noise attracted attention.
Kael moved first. His curved blade cut the air in a precise arc, hitting one of the beast's extremities. Black ichor gushed, thick as molasses, but the creature didn't even falter.
It merely turned the crown of orifices toward him, inhaling deeply. Kael staggered back, as if the air had been stolen from his lungs.
"Stay back!" I growled at the newcomers, but my voice came out weak, muffled by the rising steam.
They didn't obey. They ran in panic, tripping over each other, falling into the moss that sucked at them slowly.
I grabbed the nearest weapon—an improvised rifle of twisted metal and stolen circuitry—and fired. The projectile hit a plate on the beast's shoulder; it ricocheted with the sound of a cracked bell.
The creature turned to me. I felt the weight of that invisible gaze: not anger, not immediate hunger—curiosity. As if it recognized me from previous turns.
From time to time, they learned.
The human group scattered. Two of the old ones—Marta and João, who had survived the second turn—tried to flank. Marta held a spear of sharpened bone; João carried a homemade grenade we had never tested.
The beast saw them coming.
A tentacle whipped out, too fast to be seen, too slow to be avoided. It hit Marta in the chest. She flew backward, slamming against a rotting tower that collapsed in a cascade of black dust. She did not get up.
João threw the grenade. It exploded near the creature's base, tearing off a plate and exposing pink flesh that pulsed like an exposed heart.
The beast roared—a sound that wasn't sound, but pressure on the eardrums, as if the entire planet were screaming through it.
Kael attacked again, leaping onto the beast's back, driving the blade between two plates. Ichor splattered, burning his gray skin. He grunted—the first sound of pain I had heard from him.
The beast thrashed, throwing him to the ground. He rolled, stood up, but was limping now. His blade trembled.
I ran closer. My body protested: bones creaked, skin itched as if something wanted to get out. I looked at my hands—my nails were black, curved.
The transformation was accelerating. The cycle waited no longer.
One of the newcomers—a young man, sparse beard, eyes still holding hope—picked up a stone and threw it. It hit an orifice in the crown.
The beast stopped. For a second, it seemed confused. Then it turned to him with slow, almost ceremonial deliberation.
The tentacle wrapped around him, lifted him into the air. The young man screamed once, then silence. The tentacle squeezed. I heard bones break like dry twigs.
The others fled toward the crater. We followed them, firing backward, retreating step by step.
The beast did not pursue us in a hurry. It walked. Every step made the black moss open into dark veins that spread like infection.
At the bottom of the crater, we stopped. Heavy breathing. Blood in our eyes.
Kael approached me, limping, the blade still dripping ichor.
"It is not just her," he murmured, voice hoarse. "It is what comes after."
I looked at the horizon. Another fissure was opening, smaller, but growing. Something was moving inside—still formless, still being born.
From time to time, the beasts returned.
But this time, one of them stared back at me from inside my own distorted reflection in the pool of ichor.
The initial battle had ended. We hadn't won. We had only bought time—the time the cycle grants us before making us part of it.
The crater was no longer a refuge; it was an open sepulcher, whose edges curved inward at angles the mind refused to calculate. The black moss pulsed like exposed veins, and the steam rising from the cracks carried not just cold, but a whisper—not words, but the absence of words, the void where language dissolves before being born.
The new beast—or what remained of it after the initial attack—rose in the center of the plain, but it was no longer a single form. Its body fragmented and recombined in patterns that defied permanence: tentacles becoming chitinous plates, plates opening into pulsating orifices, orifices expelling black mist where smaller forms writhed like larvae of something greater.
It wasn't evolution; it was an echo. An echo of eras preceding the stars, of cycles that had consumed entire worlds before Earth had even condensed into rock.
Kael was by my side, or what was left of him. His gray skin had cracked in irregular lines, revealing internal layers that glowed with a sickly green, like luminescent fungi under decomposition. The curved blade hung inert in his hand; he lifted it no more.
His vertical eyes fixed on me, not in hostility, but in something worse: recognition. Recognition of one who has seen the same awakening in countless others—or perhaps in me, in turns I did not recall.
"You feel it," he murmured, voice now a wet wheeze, like wind through hollow bones. "The veil tears. What comes after... is not death. It is something else."
I wanted to ask what. But the question died in my throat, transformed into a gurgle that echoed in multiple layers, as if coming from several mouths at once.
My arms felt heavy; fingers elongated, nails curving into claws that were not claws, but extensions of something stretching beyond flesh. The skin of my forearm cracked slowly, revealing not muscle, but a gelatinous mass moving independently, as if testing the air.
Every breath brought pain, but the pain was distant, as if it belonged to another body—a body I had once used, before understanding that "once" might never have existed.
The newcomers—the few who remained—had gathered at the edge of the crater. Their faces were masks of primal terror, wide eyes fixed on me just as much as on the beast.
A woman with black hair plastered to her face by cold sweat reached out a hand, as if she could pull me back. I looked at that hand. I felt nothing. Or I felt everything—a vast, abyssal void that swallowed any emotion before it could form.
From time to time, the beasts returned.
But now I saw—or thought I saw—that the beasts never left. They only changed shells. And the next shell... was always the one we carried inside. Or was it?
The main beast advanced, slow steps making the ground tilt at impossible angles. The rotting towers around us bent the wrong way, as if gravity remembered an older geometry.
Kael raised the blade one last time—not to attack the creature, but to offer it to me. A ceremonial gesture, without hope, without certainty.
"Finish it," he said. "Or let it finish in you. Or... perhaps it has already finished."
I took the blade. The metal burned, but not the skin; it burned the mind.
When I raised it, I saw not just the beast, but layers upon layers: overlapping forms, colliding eras, previous batches emerging like ghosts of flesh and bone. I saw Marta, João, the hollow-eyed children—all recycled, all remade, all part of the same fabric now tearing within me.
Or perhaps I saw them because I wanted to see them. Perhaps they were just echoes of my own unraveling mind.
I struck.
The blade pierced the central mass of the beast. There was no resistance; only a void that opened, a black hole sucking in light and sound. From the hole emerged a sound—not a roar, but the echo of all roars that had ever been, mixed with the silence that would succeed them.
The ichor gushed, but did not stain; it dissolved in the air, leaving only a metallic taste on the tongue, a taste I recognized: the flavor of dissolution itself. Or perhaps the flavor of nothing.
The beast collapsed—or retracted—into itself, leaving a void the planet filled slowly, like water in an old well. The ground stopped shaking. The steam dissipated. The festering sun hovered motionless, indifferent.
Kael fell to his knees. His gray form came undone in flakes carried by the wind. Before dissolving completely, he looked at me one last time.
"The cycle has no end," he whispered. "Only longer breaths. Or perhaps... there is no cycle at all."
Then he was gone, reduced to black dust absorbed by the moss.
The survivors—the few—approached slowly. Their eyes no longer held terror; they held doubt. They looked at me as if I were something they couldn't name.
And I looked back at them. Not with hunger. Not with pity. Just... looking.
I sat on the edge of the crater, the curved blade fallen at my side. My skin still moved beneath the surface, but the pain had ceased. In its place, a vast, abyssal calm.
I saw now what Kael saw—or thought I saw what he saw: the planet was not a prison. It was a womb.
Or perhaps it was just cold stone, and everything else was an illusion of a breaking mind.
From time to time, the beasts returned.
Or perhaps they never came.
Or perhaps I am the beast, and they are the dream I try to wake from.
In the silence that followed, under the violet sky that never changed, I waited for the next dawn.
Or perhaps I had already been waiting for eras.
Or perhaps the dawn would never come.
The cycle—if there was a cycle—exhaled once more.
And I inhaled.
Or exhaled.
Or simply... remained.