The storm ate the sky.

  Outside the cracked biodome of Outpost Theta, Martian winds screamed like dying animals, hurling red dust against the reinforced glass. Inside, the air tasted stale, metallic—a cocktail of recycled oxygen and desperation. Twelve colonists remained. Twelve, down from eighty. Their bones crumbled from calcium deficiency. Their skin peeled in papery sheets from solar burns. They were ghosts in sealed suits, waiting to join the others in the makeshift graveyard beneath the greenhouse.

  Then, the light came.

  It began as a flicker on the horizon—a shimmering thread of gold, stitched into the roiling dust clouds. Little Mira Sato saw it first. Six years old, her face mottled with radiation blisters, she pressed her palms to the observation deck glass. “Momma,” she whispered. “The sky’s crying.”

  By the time the others arrived, the light had taken shape.

  A humanoid figure, ten feet tall, strode across the dunes. Its body was a storm of fractured starlight—limbs dissolving and reforming with each step, its face a shifting mosaic of geometric patterns. Where its feet touched the sand, glass bloomed. Where its hands brushed the air, auroras rippled.

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  Commander Voss gripped her sidearm. “What in God’s name…”

  The child laughed.

  Mira’s blisters faded as the light pooled around her. Her cracked lips healed. Her matted hair softened into silk. The colonists watched in silent awe as the figure knelt, its featureless face tilting toward the girl.

  “It’s warm,” Mira giggled.

  Then she screamed.

  Her skin turned translucent. Veins glowed cobalt beneath the surface. Her eyes clouded over, pupils fracturing into kaleidoscopes. She collapsed, convulsing, as the light retracted like a wounded serpent. The figure—the Lumen—recoiled, its golden hue darkening to a guilty indigo.

  “Stay back!” Voss shouted, firing her pistol. The bullets disintegrated midair, vaporized by the Lumen’s radiant aura.

  But the Lumen didn’t attack.

  It wept.

  Glowing tears fell, burning holes in the Martian soil. Then, with a sound like shattering crystal, it vanished.

  Mira stopped breathing three hours later. Her body, cold and waxy, lay on the medbay table. Doctor Renn, his gloves flecked with her luminous blood, whispered, “Her cells… they tried to photosynthesize. Like it wanted to turn her into something that could live here.”

  Voss stared at the child’s hands. Tiny leaves, desiccated and brittle, clung to her fingertips.