A Nightmare's Point of View

Chapter 2

Embrance walked through to the other side of the shadow and ended up standing inside a crater on a small asteroid nearby. To him, shadow traveling was like moving through thick black air with images of the outside floating by; you just had to mentally will yourself to move, by flying or walking. Embrance stood just within the shadow. He closed his eyes, concentrating. Suddenly, his eyes snapped open, solid white with flecks of silver. He brought his left arm up and then made a quick slashing motion from top left to bottom right, cutting five feet across the same color as his eyes, silver white but with a small, long image of where he was going. Blinking, Embrance's eyes returned to the black and purple; he moved quickly and jumped into the doorway that he made and disappeared.

He reappeared through the cut in a in a dark cave, illuminated by strange flora and fauna that resembled a cross between a giant mushroom and a slimy purple fern. They rooted themselves anywhere decay was throughout the caverns. He breathed in the scents of the air and listened to see if anyone was near. He shifted his irises from purple to red. Good, no one has seen me come back, he smirked.

For the longest time, he used this part of the cave outside the clan's borders to sneak in and out of the space he and his species came from. The planet had no name other than Home—that was what all Atheireyn called it; whatever its name was long ago was lost with time.

Embrance made his way around the plants through dimly lit caves as swiftly and as quietly as possible, just to make sure not to disturb others who might be sleeping in the adjacent caverns. This area wasn't part of any clan, so sometimes outcasts or random groups caught in storms would come here to sleep. Within minutes, he peered out of the jagged mouth of the cave and scanned the area. The surface of the planet was dark, dingy, craggy, and in many parts of the planet very plateau-like and mountainous. What little light there was came from openings such as vents or canyons from the planet's surface. The light coming from unknown sources.

Caverns peppered the surface, some small and some leading deep into unknown areas of the planet that still showed remnants of a species that once lived here. Numerous spaceship wreckages of all sorts of shapes and sizes in different stages of decay disfigured the surface. No vegetation grew there, except for the odd mushroom-like plants that Embrance had discovered in the cavern. It was the only plant—if you could call it that—that he found, and he wasn't sure if it was native to Home or somehow came through a doorway on a Atheireyn; but it loved eating away anything decaying and dying, devouring the walls, leftovers, and an Atheireyn that slept too close.

Embrance had only seen one Atheireyn with them on her; she just lay there unaware of what was going on. He figured she was sick and an oddity and just gave up. Whatever they were, most of his

species that came to the cavern stayed clear of them. The only weather on the planet were dust storms that left a haze sometimes. You didn't want to be out in a storm; the stronger ones had been known to strip the flesh clean off an Atheireyn's bones, killing them if they lay out long enough. They slowly stripped down the wreckages, breaking and wearing the crashed ships until they no longer looked like ships. No Atheireyn lived in any of the wrecked ships; they provided no cover from the storms. No one knew why there were storms, but it was speculated that it had something to do with the rotation of the planet. The space that Home resided in only stretched out only a few hundred thousand miles in each direction from the planet. Sparse amount of gravity and thick, heavy air with a variety of broken boulders and broken like planet pieces strewn across the sky. No one knew where these broken planets and floating boulders came from. Embrance and others speculated that they used to be near the planet, part of its rotation at one point long ago. Higher up from the planet, the less gravity, which made it easier to fly or float.