TOBRAK

ACT I – Arrival

Sunlight spilled through translucent cloudbanks—like gold melting through silk—drifting over Ereya’s vast emerald canopy in slow, deliberate strokes. The shuttle descended in silence—a dark shape gliding over rivers that shimmered like spilled light, through forests so precise they seemed grown with intention. Not chaos, but design.

Inside, no one spoke. The comms were quiet. So was the planet.

Commander Rios stepped out first. Moss yielded beneath his boots. He scanned the clearing with a soldier’s instinct—disciplined, deliberate, always reading the room for threat. The silence wasn’t dead. It choked on what it wouldn’t say.

Behind him, Dr. Yara paused at the threshold and breathed deep. The air was rich with bloom and rain-soaked wood—so dense with memory it felt like incense clinging to ruins.

She murmured, half to herself, "Smells like a place that remembers being sacred."

Parr, the youngest, laughed softly. “It’s like stepping into a painting.” He stepped forward, slow and reverent, eyes wide. “Do you think Earth ever looked this perfect?”

Yara smiled faintly. "Maybe once. Before we drained her veins and called it growth."

Rios turned toward the treeline, where shadows pooled too deeply for the sun to touch. “Then let’s not drain this one.”

Their mission was routine: reestablish contact with Alpha Team—five days silent beyond protocol. No distress signal. No warning. Just... gone.

They approached the camp in silence. Everything was in its place—too perfectly. A mug still half full. A journal abandoned mid-sentence. Not abandoned, exactly. Paused. No struggle. No wreckage. Just stillness, like a body still warm.

Parr crouched beside the chair, brushing a layer of golden pollen from the seat. "They didn’t run."

Rios didn’t move. “Too neat,” he said. “Like they vanished between one breath and the next.”

Yara watched the trees. They didn’t sway—they pulsed, like veins beneath skin. “Or like something else moved in.”

That night, they gathered around a fire. Flames crackled gently, light flickering off unused gear. The trees encircled them, not threatening—but attentive.

Parr stirred the coals.“You ever forget how loud Earth’s forests were? Like they were strangling on their own green breath.”

Yara nodded, fingers wrapped around a warm mug. "Because they were."

Rios leaned back, firelight flickering in his eyes. “Maybe Ereya’s not a second chance. Maybe it’s just a place that learned to live without us.”

Above them, the stars shimmered in constellations unclaimed. Ereya didn’t hum like Earth. It listened.

And in that stillness—something unseen listened back.

ACT II – Encounters

Dawn smeared the sky in strokes of rose and bruised lavender. The clouds were thin—like they’d been whispered into place. Dew caught the light—sharp and silent, like teeth in grass.

Parr adjusted beside Yara, restless. “Feels like the ground’s just stretched its spine.”

Yara smiled softly. “Or maybe it’s listening for the wrong kind of footstep.”

They moved deeper. Trees closed in behind them like thoughts half-formed. The light thinned to strands, trailing between limbs like pulled sinew.

Flowers like spun glass shivered toward the sun—delicate, uncertain, as if blooming betrayed them. And in the branches: motion. Not glimpsed, but sensed. Not seen, but remembered.

Like something trying not to be.

Then—

A shape that didn’t belong.

It stood beneath a low, bone-pale branch—tall, unnervingly upright, with limbs too long in places they shouldn’t be.

Its surface was neither skin nor fur, but something between—fine as dust, shifting like breath across glass.

It didn’t walk. It adjusted. As though remembering how movement worked. Its face held only two eyes, wide and waiting—reflective enough to show them to themselves.

Rios raised a hand. "Hold."

Yara stepped forward. “Hello?” Her voice didn’t travel—it just fell, soft as ash.

The creature tilted its head. Something inside it pushed a sound forward—one word, clumsy with effort.

"Torbak."

It vibrated strangely—didn’t land in his ears so much as settle behind his teeth, like a breath he didn’t take. The sound slithered down his spine, urgent and wrong, stirring something ancient that screamed for him to turn, to retreat—now.

Stillness folded over them, soft and sudden.

It left Parr’s mouth before his mind caught it. “Torbak.” It tasted like bark and bone—like a word meant for a mouth with no name.”

The creature lingered for a beat—then unraveled into branches and shadow.

Later, Yara sat cross-legged in the moss, turning a wristwatch over in her hands—one of the few things Alpha had left behind.

A second shape waited at the treeline—still as bark, eyes fixed on the watch.

It didn’t approach. Just looked.

Not with fear. With memory, worn thin.

It reached out—slowly, as if repeating a gesture it no longer understood.

Then stopped. Hand open. Holding nothing.

It said the word again—softer this time, like it was forgetting how. "Torbak."

“Did you keep them?” she whispered, like asking a grave.

It was gone—like it had never stood there at all.

Yara turned to leave—then stopped.

Something pale glinted beneath the moss where it had stood.

She knelt. Brushed it clear.

A bone. Small. Human, maybe.

Wrapped in a rusted chain. A dog tag. The name was almost gone. But her breath caught like it had once been hers.

ACT III – Fray

Subtle things fractured first. Dreams soured. Conversations thinned.

Parr started wandering at night.

He dragged his fingers through dirt, tracing spirals he no longer wrote down.

He kept thinking of home, but the faces he tried to remember blurred at the edges. The more he tried to hold on, the more memory felt like silt washing through his fingers.

His journal filled with loops and scratches—language unlearning itself.

Each night, they edged closer—like dusk drew them in. Eyes wide. Silent. Unblinking.

Once, a rusted can rattled across camp—loud enough to snap whatever was left of Parr’s leash.

Parr flinched.

At the treeline, a creature stood—rigid as bone.

"Torbak!" it spat—sharp, like a sound made of splinters.

The word became rhythm—lodged deep, pulsing beneath the skin like something alive.

At the edge of camp, where the firelight didn’t reach, Yara stepped into view.

"You’re still calling this nothing?"

"It’s mimicry. Parrots with better posture." Rios replied.

"Then why does it feel like it remembers our mouths?"

They asked what they dared. But not what mattered. As if the truth itself might never let them leave.

ACT IV – Descent

Moonlight stained the camp in shades of spilled wine. The fire was long dead. Parr sat in the ashes like an echo, whispering to the page.

Yara stepped out of the tent like she’d crossed into the wrong dream. “Parr… it’s late.”

“They’re trying to say something,” he whispered. “I just haven’t learned how to hear it.”

“You haven’t slept. You’re shedding pieces you won’t get back.”

He looked up. His eyes didn’t blink right.

“None of us are right anymore. And you know it. There’s no going home.”

She moved like not startling him might save them both. “Parr…”

Parr stared at her hand. Not fingers—vines. Blooming. Writhing. Ready to root in his skin.

He blinked hard, but the image only deepened. Maybe this was a trick of Ereya’s light—or maybe he was seeing what the planet wanted him to see. His thoughts scattered, frayed.

His breath hitched. Shoulders hunched. Fingers curled—ready to climb, to strike, to flee. A rustle stirred—too rhythmic to be wind.

From the trees, a low murmur:

“Torbak.”

Parr flinched, muscles coiling like a trapped beast.

"You’re not—" his voice broke.

His body jerked forward—raw panic driving him.

It wasn’t a strike—just chaos made flesh, instinct unleashed.

His hand crashed into her shoulder, fingers splayed like fractured bone.

A soft, wet crack echoed through the moss.

Yara collapsed like silk slipping from a thread—limp, crumpled, breath stolen.

The trees held their breath. So did Parr.

He crouched, trembling—eyes wide, chest heaving, mouth tasting the cold air.

His hand twitched in the void between them, as if unaware to stop.

“I didn’t mean to…” His voice faltered. “I thought you…”

Her gaze held his—not pain, but grief. Lips parting to speak a language long buried.

“We promised we’d do better.”

He almost said her name. But the shape of it was gone.

Their moment unraveled beneath Ereya’s indifferent sky.

Not with monstrous cruelty—

But with something far quieter:

A soul forgetting how to be one.

What made him human thinned—stretched so gently, so completely, it forgot how to return.

ACT V – Return

He wandered barefoot. Limbs loose, slack. Soil darkened his skin.

The forest pulsed. Trees breathed, bending like ribs. Light pooled where shadow should fall.

Branches twitched mid-thought, like nerves firing in a dreaming body. Bark split in fine seams, sap gleaming like wet teeth—trees trying to cry, but only knowing how to grin.

The moss beneath him didn’t give—it breathed. Insects scraped rhythms into the silence, like bone dragged across hollow wood. Above, the canopy mouthed a word it had forgotten how to speak. It repeated—not in sound, but in pressure—whispering inside his skull, too close to hear. All around him, the wild didn’t grow. It remembered.

The camp sagged. Tents collapsed. Rios—gone. Once, Parr glimpsed him beyond the treeline. Still. Listening.

The creatures walked with Parr now. Not chasing. Not leading. Mourning.

They repeated it. Again and again.

“Torbak.”

It wasn’t a word anymore—just something that held him as he forgot the way out.

At the clearing’s edge, the emergency shuttle waited like a tomb. Parr crawled inside.

His voice cracked through static: “This is Parr. We found them. Alpha team. They’re not gone… They’re still here. No—no, they’re us. We didn’t feel it… it just got in.”

He choked. “I don’t know if it’s the light, or the breath, or the forgetting. But I’m not me anymore. I’m… full.”

His hand hovered over the send button.

He leaned forward.

Spoke the word.

“Torrn… Bahk.”

The sound wasn’t spoken, but remembered—something from the beginning. Or the end.

He didn’t know he was saying it.

The message sent.

Above, a red light blinked aboard the orbiting vessel. Logged as routine. Ignored as noise.

Below, Ereya exhaled.

Parr collapsed at the shuttle door.

His fingers curled into dirt.

His spine arched with unnatural grace.

There was no fear. No rage.

Only stillness.

Only return.

From the trees came a final, reverent whisper:

“Torbak.”