Falling sucks. Falling in darkness sucks even more. I screamed out. Who wouldn’t?

  My feet hit something solid and then they went out from under me. It was like landing on a slide. I slammed down on my back, rolled, fell a meter, and belly flopped onto something hard. Rolled again, fell another meter, this time on my back. The wind was knocked out of me— the only reason I stopped screaming.

  On the comms was Jule’s static voice ordering me back to the ship. I imaged all she heard in response was oof— oof— oof.

  I fell, hit, rolled, fell.

  In the helmet’s lights I saw a blur of stone and moss. The things I was bouncing off were small ledges, stone outcroppings in the rock wall. Anyone watching my feed would get motion sickness. I was getting motion sickness.

  I made myself big, splayed out like a star, thinking that would slow me down. Instead it just turned me into a cartwheel, spinning end over end down the shaft, crashing into those stone ledges.

  I grabbed out for whatever I could but couldn’t hold onto anything. The ledges were narrow and smooth. I cursed. A lot.

  Then I dropped again, this time three meters, maybe more. I came down hard, face-first. A spiderweb crack ran up the visor. A red warning lit up in my helmet.

  More rolling. More falling. I was screaming again. Screaming through clenched teeth. The falls were getting bigger. Anything bigger I’d break something more than my visor.

  I must have blacked out. The next thing I knew, the suit’s alarms were screaming in my ears and water was dripping on my face.

  On my face. Through my helmet.

  I wiped at it. Fuck. All that was left of the helmet’s visor were jagged toothy bits of glass along the edge.

  I shut the suit’s alarm off. Most likely warning me about the broken visor.

  I was laying at the bottom of the shaft, staring up. The helmet’s light only reached the last few ledges. Water droplets fell from them. Beyond that I couldn’t see.

  I had no idea how long I had been out. Long enough to be breathing this alien air without choking.

  I cursed and groaned when I lifted myself up off the floor. I was beat to shit and honestly, I was surprised I was even able to stand. I was sure something was broken, but nothing was— at least nothing obvious. If I had some internal bleeding, which I thought was possible, I couldn’t feel it.

  I hit the talk button. “This is Candy,” I said. “Anyone there?”

  No response.

  I tried again but knew it was useless. Either the suit’s comms had been busted in the fall, or, the more likely scenario, this underground cave was shielding the communication.

  I took the helmet off since it wasn’t doing me any good.

  The helmet’s flashlight still worked, so I held it in both my hands, like a lantern, and swept the light around. I was in a narrow cave. Wet stone and greenish blue moss dotted the walls. I lowered the helmet so I could see the stone floor, expecting to find Buzz’s dead body. I was in an awfully dark mood. I guess getting split up from your crew, on an alien planet (or whatever this dragon egg thing was), then falling down a cave shaft, and nearly getting yourself pummeled to death, can put you in such a mood. I didn’t find Buzz’s dead body. Just stone and that strange blue-green moss. If Buzz had fallen down here without a suit it would have killed him.

  I then checked myself. Again, expecting a broken arm, a dislocated shoulder. Something. I felt around my face. When the visor broke the glass could’ve done some real damage to my face. I felt something wet on my cheek and when I put my hand in the helmet’s light I saw it was blood. But that was it. Just a cut on my cheek. It wasn’t even deep.

  I crept forward. There was no way I would be able to ascend back up the way I came. I started to shout. “Hello! Is anyone there? Hello?” I hoped they had started a search party for me and Buzz. But then I thought of Petrov. They had tried to stop me and Gilley from leaving the ship. It would be just like him to stay put; run tests. Maybe eventually, with Rondo’s protest, they’d send Lucy2 out since she was a droid.

  This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

  I went on. The cave widened as I went. I could hear water trickling somewhere up ahead, not the little droplets back at the shaft where I fell but a small brook, maybe. I moved slowly. After that fall, the last thing I wanted to do was slip and fall, or worse, find another pit.

  Around a bend I found a small, bushy plant sprouted up from the hard rock floor. From it, three long stems rose and at their ends hung what looked liked little bananas, or peppers, but their skins were made of a blue translucent skins. Inside, a light emitted a dim, pale blue light. We’ve found strange plants all through the galaxy, but this one made me pause. How it produced its light I didn't know. Clearly it didn't need sunlight to sustain it like most other plants and flora found around the galaxy.

  As I moved on, I found more. They must have been hardy little things because some grew on the walls and fewer still grew on the ceiling. Their light was welcomed. I wondered if my feed was still broadcasting these findings.

  That babbling brook grew in sound. A waterfall was somewhere close by.

  The passage opened up without warning. One step I was in the tunnel, and the next I was standing on a high rock ledge looking out on a massive dome-shaped cavern. Blue light filled it. Those blue plants, (and others) were everywhere— thousands of them — speckled across the egg-shaped hollow, their glow reaching clear to the far side of the cavern.

  Below me, a few hundred meters down— to my shock— lay stone ruins. Actual stone ruins. Time and growth had broken them down, but their shapes were recognizable: low walls, collapsed roofs, even a road. It was a small village. Only a handful of structures remained. If there had been more they were long gone. What civilization had been here?

  Off in the distance a huge waterfall descended from the top of the dome all the way to the bottom.

  I shouted over the vast cave. “Hello!”

  My voice echoed back to me. Ello… Ello… Ello.

  “Is anyone there!”

  There… There… There

  “Buzz!”

  No response but my own echo. I wasn’t surprised.

  Wrapping the egg-shape dome was a narrow trail that sloped down into the village. I had no other ideas, or options. So I started moving.

  On the descending trail I passed other caverns cut into the rock wall. I stopped at the first one and shined the helmet’s flashlight in but didn’t dare venture in. I had my fill of tight caves.

  Along with the narrow caverns I found more etched hieroglyphs, carved into the stone wall, similar to the ones I’d seen before the fall. Most were carved within squared outlines, while others were in the shape of an egg. Like the ruins below, time hadn’t been kind to them. Many of the shapes were still visible, but not all. Some had large cracks running through them. Others were warn smoothed, the images they depicted barely visible. The worst were missing entirely.

  But what did remain, surprised me— it were the figures themselves. They were human, as far as I could tell. Two arms, two legs, a head. If I didn’t know better I would have thought I had just stumbled onto archaeological find back on Earth1.

  The carvings, I think, were telling a story. There was a sense of time passing. In the first few carvings were just two figures, their hands raised to the sky. In the ones that followed there were more. Was their village growing? Was this some sort of creation myth? Their version of Adam and Eve?

  The closer to the bottom I got, the louder the waterfall grew. It was as if all the sound pooled up, down there.

  The final carving sat near the end of the trail. It depicted a giant flying creature stretched across the stone, suspended in the sky. I assumed it was the dragon in which this place had been fashioned from but it could have been a giant bat, or something altogether different and alien.

  By the time I reached the valley floor, the waterfall was deafening. From up above it had been loud, down here it was something else entirely. I wondered if the people who built this place had been deaf, or maybe it hadn’t been a village at all but something else. I could imagine locking someone down here for a few hours as a form of torture, or as some dumb right of passage shit.

  I put my helmet back on just to drown out the sound. It did little good with the missing visor.

  Along with the deafening waterfall, the vegetation had also grown considerably. Not just those blue, banana-shaped light bulbs either— viney creepers clung to stone, thick knotted roots pushed up from the ground, and grass as tall as me whose blades were as thick as my arm.

  I stepped into something soft and jerked my foot back. I really needed to start looking where I put my feet in this place.

  I inspected my booted foot. It was shit. Even on an alien planet I could tell it was shit. Giant, and faintly glowing blue, but shit nonetheless. Whatever had left it behind must have been on a steady diet of those blue glowing bananas— the grass moved. It was soundless beneath the roar of the waterfall. But I understood what it meant: there was something else here. Something big.

  I stepped back, imagining myself running all the way back up that narrow pathway and into one of those caves. The grass parted and I saw it. My mind told me it was a lion but it was the color of a thundercloud and its fir (I think it was fir) was long and it shifted like smoke. I only had a second to process this. It moved— quick— and I screamed but heard none of it. It lunged at me and without an ounce of grace I partly leaped (mostly stumbled) to the side, and the alien lion pounced where I had just been, the grass flattening beneath its weight. There was no running back up that path. I plunged into the tall grass but I was slower than it. The thing was on top of me and I fell.