Down below, in the boiling steam of the hot springs, the crimson-tinged water wouldn't stop churning.
The dark elf lunged like a cornered beast, throwing the weight of his ruined body into a devastating punch.
Suki dodged, gliding over the water, the wind howling around him, and counterattacked with a spinning kick that dug into the warrior's stomach.
The sound of fractured ribs echoed through the hall, but he didn't stop.
Ignoring the blood gushing from his mouth, Lucas grabbed Suki's ankle and pulled him brutally closer, delivering a blind elbow strike toward the boy's face.
Suki raised his forearm, blocking the blow with a barrier of air.
The clash generated a kinetic wave that carved a circular trench in the thermal pool.
With each impact, Lucas's mind shattered a little more.
*BAM!*
Suki landed a straight punch to the elf's dislocated jaw; Lucas's vision flickered.
For a fraction of a second, he didn't see the glowing boy in front of him; he saw the iron boot of a human sinking into his face, pinning him against a cold wooden floor.
*BAM!*
Another strike from Suki, this time a gust of wind that slashed the warrior's shoulder.
The steam of the hot springs seemed to freeze.
The smell of blood was replaced by the smell of fire, a burning forest.
Lucas heard cruel laughter, aristocratic voices mocking his pointed ears and dark skin.
"Freaks of the forest."
"AAAAAH!"
Lucas bellowed, a sound drowned in pure despair, and attempted a chokehold.
Suki twisted his torso, fluid as smoke, slipped beneath the warrior's open guard, and slammed both open palms into the center of Lucas's chest.
A sonic explosion detonated at point-blank range.
Lucas was ejected backward, bouncing violently across the water's surface until he crashed into the marble rubble.
The boiling water gradually calmed.
Lucas tried to get up, supporting himself with trembling hands on the stones, but his arms gave out.
The irrational monster, forged by centuries of carnage, had finally broken.
The blind fury evaporated, leaving behind only the exhaustion of a soul that had carried too much weight for far too long.
Lucas fell to his knees, the red water lapping at his waist.
The elf looked at his own calloused, trembling hands, stained with the blood of thousands. His chest rose and fell in a silent, dry sob, where sweat mixed with the steam and dirt.
Suki walked slowly over the water.
The white wind around him exhaled one last sigh, dying down until it became just a thin breeze that barely parted the dense steam.
The boy stopped in front of the fallen warrior.
Broad shoulders, once the foundation of an empire of fear, now slumped forward.
He was trembling.
A pathetic, uncontrollable tremor of someone whose spirit had fractured long before his own body.
"Kill me..." Lucas's voice wasn't a sound, it was a fracture.
It came out scratched, choking on blood, tearing at his vocal cords.
He didn't raise his face to look at the boy, soaked strands of hair clinging to his disfigured skin, hiding the abyss in his eyes.
"Please... end this."
Suki furrowed his brows, the divine aura receding, sinking beneath his pale, bruised skin.
Lucas hunched over even more.
The elf's thick fingers closed into blind claws, and he dug his own nails into his ruined thighs.
The animalistic force was so great that the skin tore, and fresh streams of blood ran down his legs, staining the thermal pool an even darker red.
"I can't..." the warrior sobbed.
The sound was raw and animalistic, the whimper of a dog that had been beaten into madness.
"I failed myself."
Slowly, the boy bent his knees.
The boiling water invaded the deep gash tearing across his chest. The exposed flesh burned in an almost paralyzing agony, but Suki clenched his jaw and ignored the burning, lowering himself until he was at the same level as the ruined giant.
Suki reached out with his left hand, the skin still slippery with his own blood, and touched Lucas's shoulder. A shoulder cut and dislocated from their fight.
"I'm not going to kill you, Lucas," Suki replied.
His voice reverberated with the gravity of the wind, direct and profound.
"Death doesn't erase the blood that's already been spilled. It doesn't absolve anyone; it only hides the dirt beneath the earth."
The elf whimpered at his own distorted reflection in the water.
"Monsters don't cry over the damage they cause," Suki corrected, his fingers squeezing his enemy's shoulder.
"This armor... it wasn't born glued to you. Someone poured this iron over your skin until you forgot the shape of your own face."
Lucas froze.
The warrior's fingers stopped tearing at his own legs.
Suki leaned forward, his gentle tone cutting through the deafening roar of the thermal waterfall.
The mention of that word, *forget*, didn't carry physical force, but it pierced the warrior's brain like an incandescent sword.
Suki then finally spoke:
"Return to Sillys, Lucas. Fight for our cause, and if you must kill, be the cutting spear of the new queen."
Lucas's breath hitched abruptly. The sound of the bubbling water and the scorching heat of the room simply ceased to exist.
Suki's wet touch seemed to push the elf out of his own flesh, violently hurling his consciousness to the bottom of a dark abyss he had spent a century swearing never to look at again.
Arbo, Lucas's home planet.
The crack of gut ropes tensioned against ancient wood was the first thing Lucas heard when he woke up.
The Web-House swayed gently five hundred meters above the ground.
The boy opened his eyes; the thick canvas roof vibrated with the forest breeze.
Arbo wasn't a world of plains and mountains. It was a vertical ocean of Titan-Trees eight hundred meters high, where gravity was a chaotic joke and the ground was a dark, green graveyard.
The hard straw cot creaked as Lucas sat up, tossing aside the rough Leaper-leather blanket.
He had just turned fourteen, but on Arbo, childhood was a luxury the wind quickly blew away.
The boy stretched his arms, his bones popping in the cold morning.
His shirtless body told the story of the blood the tribe so despised.
Lucas didn't have the pale, translucent, fragile skin that was the pride of pure elves; his skin was a warm brown tone, marked by small tree bark scratches—the undeniable human heritage that earned him spit and looks of disgust.
His musculature wasn't bulky, but it was lean, rigid as tensioned rope.
His shoulders and forearms were visibly hypertrophied, shaped not by vanity, but by the brutal, daily necessity of supporting his own weight hundreds of meters above the abyss.
Beneath the skin, his hollow flight bones were coated with dense layers, ready to withstand the shock of any gravitational failure.
Lucas flexed his calloused hands, riddled with dark dirt.
At his fingertips, thick hook-like nails had already hardened, curving slightly downward like bone claws.
He ran a hand over his face, his only slightly pointed ears twitching as they picked up the subtle shift in air pressure outside.
He was a half-blood.
Half-elf, half-human.
And on Arbo, having human blood was an unforgivable sin.
In the corner of the suspended cabin, illuminated only by the phosphorescent sap seeping from the bark walls, his mother was already awake.
She was an elf with fine, tired features, but the smile she gave him was warm as a hearth.
She was sewing the boy's old leather harnesses.
"Today is the day," she whispered, her voice heavy with pride that tried to mask the dread.
She stopped her sewing for a moment.
The elf's hands, thin but calloused from years of hard work, rested on the leather harness. She avoided looking him in the eye right away, focusing on tightening a Leaper bone buckle with far more force than necessary.
"The web elders shortened the plank on the Farewell Branch," she said, her voice low, almost swallowed by the constant rustling of the wind against the cabin's canvas.
"They say it's to test the reflexes of this new generation, but we know the truth."
She finally looked up.
There was fear in her eyes, a deep, maternal terror, but also a latent anger against that cruel world.
"They want you to fall, Lucas," she whispered, her voice hitching slightly.
"They look at your skin, they look at your features, and they only see the enemy. They'll stand up there, arms crossed, rooting for gravity to swallow you and drag you to the ground."
Lucas didn't harden his expression. He felt no anger. Instead, the boy reached out his scarred hand and touched his mother's cold fingers with surprising softness.
"Let them root," Lucas replied, a calm, almost gentle smile curving his lips.
"They don't know the wind like I do. Their pure ears don't catch the change in pressure before the leaf trembles."
His mother let out a shaky sigh.
She brought her hand to her son's face, caressing the brown cheek that was the exact reflection of the man she had loved and lost.
Her eyes shining with stubborn tears she refused to shed.
"Don't jump to prove anything to them. Don't defy the abyss out of pride, nor to earn the respect of those who don't truly see you."
"I don't care about their respect, Mom," Lucas replied, covering her hand with his.
"I'm doing this for me, because it has to be done."
Her smile finally broke the tension filling the cabin.
A smile that, for a brief second, made Arbo seem like a less brutal place. She handed the reinforced leather harness to the boy and gave his dense chest two firm pats.
"Then go," she said, quickly wiping her eyes.
"And don't you dare leave me eating dinner alone tonight."
Arbo hated humans because they were feared outsiders, mercenaries who invaded the system to hunt half-elf children who were worth fortunes on the intergalactic black market.
The purebloods, in turn, couldn't stand the idea of an elf getting involved with a human, much less the existence of a child from that relationship.
Because of that blood, the tribe treated Lucas and his mother like a magnet for tragedies.
Elven mothers pulled their children away when he passed on the vine bridges.
The elders spat into the void when his shadow crossed their platforms.
But Lucas didn't care.
He never used the exclusion as armor. He had his mother's embrace, and to him, that was all that mattered.
The boy put on his worn leather tunic and stepped out of the tent. The cold morning air hit his face.
The world was a vertical labyrinth of colossal trunks and mist.
He walked across the vine bridges toward the Farewell Branch, the platform from which fourteen-year-old youths were thrown into the abyss for the Ritual of the First Fall.
If you surfed the gravity pockets and found a branch to cling to within two minutes, you were an adult.
If not, you became fertilizer for the great titan trees down below.
Halfway there, light, quick footsteps sounded behind him.
"Lucas!"
He turned and smiled.
Yasmin came running across the bridge, her small, swift feet nimbly dodging the cracks in the wood with the lightness of a leaf in the wind.
She was twelve, but the vivacity in her face was a welcome anomaly in the brutality of Arbo.
Unlike Lucas's brown skin, the girl had the pale, almost translucent complexion typical of pure elves, her freckled cheeks slightly smudged by bark dust.
Her hair, a very light, almost silvery blonde, was tied back in thick braids roughly secured with vine strands.
The braids whipped through the air, flying chaotically in the morning breeze, revealing the long, tapered tips of her elven ears with every gust.
She wore a simple, faded leather tunic, slightly loose on her narrow shoulders, but what really caught the eye were her eyes: large, almond-shaped, and a deep moss-green, which completely ignored the revulsion of the rest of the village and shone with pure, genuine admiration when looking at the boy.
Yasmin was the only child in the entire village who ignored the adults' crooked glances.
She only saw the boy who fixed her tree-bark toys.
"You're jumping today," she said, stopping in front of him, panting.
Her eyes shone with admiration.
"You're going to show the tribe Chief that you're the best glider here."
"Just gotta make sure I don't miss the pocket," Lucas laughed, rubbing the top of her head.
"I'll be back before the Exhalation."
The boy's smile was confident, but both knew the lethal brutality behind those words.
On Arbo, time wasn't measured by the position of the sun, but by the breath of the world.
The Titan-Trees, with their hollow trunks the thickness of mountains, functioned as the colossal lungs of a living, fractured planet.
Every twelve hours, the entire ecosystem breathed.
When Arbo inhaled, the oxygen was sucked into a suffocating vacuum for forty minutes, where the thin air killed any creature that moved too fast.
But when the planet exhaled...
The Exhalation was an apocalyptic hurricane.
Two-hundred-kilometer-per-hour winds gushed through the hollow wooden veins, capable of tearing away and destroying any living being that wasn't anchored down.
Lucas needed to finish the trial before the gale swept the sky.
But the wind was predictable.
The true terror of Arbo, the thing that killed the most youths in the ritual, was gravity.
The planet's core was shattered, generating a chaotic magnetic field.
The space between the branches was mined with invisible, random, and constantly shifting "gravity pockets."
One false step in the air, and the axis of gravity could rotate ninety degrees, sucking a boy into the side of the trunk in a brutal crush, hurling him fifty meters into the sky, or accelerating his fall straight into the carnivorous roots on the ground.
The Ritual of the First Fall was throwing oneself blindly into this physical Russian roulette and trying to "surf" the gravitational anomalies until finding a safe branch.
Yasmin looked down at the green abyss beneath the vine bridges, her little fingers clutching the edge of Lucas's tunic.
"The village elders say the pockets are unstable today," she murmured, her high voice trembling slightly.
"If gravity pulls you into a lateral fall, straight into the dark forest..."
"It won't," Lucas interrupted, his tone soft but loaded with a certainty that instantly calmed her.
He touched his own slightly pointed ear, referring to his triple hearing.
"They rely on luck, and I don't. I feel the pocket's shift in my stomach three seconds before I even feel it. You don't need to be afraid."
They reached the preparation platform.
The Farewell Branch was crowded with hard-featured elders and tense youths, but destiny, just like Arbo's gravity, followed no rules.
Lucas was crouching at the edge, tightening the bone buckles of his canvas harness, when the world gave its warning.
It wasn't a tremor in the wood. It was a violent, sharp, and painful crack deep inside his Triple Inner Ear.
The boy's stomach churned with a nauseating brutality, bile rising in his throat.
The gravity pocket was forming right there.
Right on top of the village.
An elder yelled from atop a watchtower, but his voice was distorted.
The physics of the air simply broke.
A low hum tore through the space, heavy as the breath of an invisible monster.
From one second to the next, gravity on the Farewell Branch was ripped from its axis, tilting violently at an impossible angle.
The colossal wooden platform cracked, the gut ropes stretching to their limits, groaning under the force of a tide that pulled everything outward.
Dry leaves, dust, and forgotten spears levitated in the air and shot diagonally, and panic exploded.
Elders and warriors threw themselves to the ground, digging claws, knives, and hooks into the living wood so as not to be swept into the sky.
The youths desperately clung to the thick safety roots.
But Yasmin was near the edge, untrained, inattentive, and far too light.
The gravitational anomaly hit her like the tide of an invisible ocean. The girl's feet were ripped from the floor.
She widened her eyes and tried to grab a nearby wooden stump, but the surface was slick with morning moisture.
Her small fingers slipped, leaving only a trail of dust on the bark.
"LUCAS!"
Her scream tore through the cacophony of winds, shouts, and cracking wood.
Lucas snapped his neck around and saw absolute terror paralyzing the girl's face as the pocket ejected her over the edge.
The Farewell Branch had no railing; it was designed for deaths and voluntary jumps, not accidents.
Yasmin plummeted backward into the green abyss, her thin arms flailing uselessly against the distorted gravity, her body quickly being sucked into the darkness of the lower forest.
Lucas's blood ran cold.
His mind ran the calculations in a fraction of a second.
She didn't have dense bones to withstand a lateral fall. She didn't even have a bark glider tied to her arms.
If the predators at the bottom of the abyss didn't devour her, the sudden change in pressure mid-fall would shatter her spine.
Lucas didn't wait for the chief's drum to signal the jump. Instinct silenced every cold rule of survival Arbo had ever tried to teach him.
He tensed his leg muscles, pushed off the splintered wooden edge, and threw himself into the absolute void right after her.
The wind tore at his ears.
Freefall on Arbo was a disorienting nightmare. Lucas dove headfirst, stretching his arms and flattening his body to gain aerodynamics, cutting through the cold air like a falcon.
*A pocket!*
Lucas's Triple Inner Ear popped.
An invisible gravity fault passed over him. He curved his body, using the shift in weight to eject himself diagonally, gaining absurd speed.
He saw Yasmin spinning wildly a hundred meters below, panic locking the girl's muscles.
They were passing the two-hundred-meter mark.
Below that, the sun didn't reach. Below that, only Arbo's fauna reigned.
Lucas tucked his body in, entering a corkscrew dive. Fifty meters from the lethal ground, where the thick roots could already be seen pulsing in the dark, he reached Yasmin's wrist.
"HOLD ON TO ME!" Lucas bellowed.
He pulled her to his own chest.
With his free hand, he stretched his arm toward the vertical wall of the nearest colossal trunk and ejected the hook nails from his fingers.
*CRAAAACK!*
The nails dug into the stone-hard bark. Gravitational force nearly ripped Lucas's arm from its socket, but he dug his feet into the wood as well, skidding and kicking up a cloud of sawdust for twenty meters before finally locking in place.
They were a mere fifteen meters from the ground. The dark floor beneath them was swarming.
Lucas panted, his arm muscles trembling violently from the superhuman effort of keeping them anchored to the vertical wall.
Cold sweat poured from his forehead, dripping from his nose to vanish into the darkness just beneath his feet.
"We're alive," he whispered.
His voice, cracked and hoarse, was almost swallowed by the wet sound of thick roots whipping the sludge below, like blind serpents feeling the air for the scent of fresh blood.
Yasmin buried her face in his neck.
She was trembling; the little girl's entire body convulsed in choked sobs of pure terror.
Her thin fingers dug into Lucas's tunic with such force that her knuckles were white.
"The tribe..." she stammered, her childish weeping breaking the funereal silence of the abyss.
"They never come down here, Lucas... Never. No one comes looking for those who fall. They'll turn their backs... they'll think we died!"
The boy swallowed hard.
Panic scratched the base of his own throat as he stared at the seething hell beneath them, but he forced his jaw to lock.
He squeezed Yasmin against his chest, trying to be the shield the forest denied them.
"Don't look down," Lucas ordered in a tense whisper.
The promise wasn't just to calm her; it was a desperate oath to himself.
"Let them think whatever they want up there. Breathe, Yasmin."
"I'll figure something out. We're getting out of this hell, I promise."
It was five days of absolute, slow, rotting terror.
What little sunlight there was never crossed the canopy of the Titan-Trees.
The air on the ground was thick. The tribe was right to fear that place.
Down there, the ground wasn't dirt; it was a living carpet of carnivorous roots and seething sludge that pulsed hungrily with every step.
Lucas was determined to prove that his human blood wasn't a curse, but a gift of endurance.
But the planet demanded its toll.
On the first day, when the dreaded Inhalation sucked the oxygen from the planet, Lucas hid Yasmin inside the empty shell of a dead Anchor-Shell. It was an animal of about 300 kilos that resembled a giant armadillo, but its carapace was so hard it seemed to be made of thick metal.
The main characteristic that gives it its name are the four retractable hooks attached to the base of its shell. He held his breath in his own lungs so as not to suffocate.
On the second day, hunger punished them.
Lucas hunted a lost Leaper cub. The Leaper is one of the most agile and dangerous predators in the canopies and the abyss of the planet Arbo.
In a world where gravity is deadly chaos, this animal evolved not only to survive the gravity pockets, but to use them to its advantage; it was a sort of six-armed monkey.
But, when trying to climb the first twenty meters of the tree to look for an escape route, the bark gave way.
He plummeted.
The impact twisted his knee and tore a nasty gash in his left shoulder.
On the fourth day, the fever hit him.
Sheltered in a recess of the colossal trunk, surrounded by bioluminescent fungi, Yasmin shared the water accumulated in a broad leaf with him.
The girl used scraps of her tunic to clean the infected blood from the boy's shoulder.
"They say humans are monsters," Yasmin whispered in the dark, her voice weak but full of pure certainty, as she adjusted the makeshift bandage.
"They say your blood attracts death. They're idiots."
Lucas smiled weakly, his face pale from exhaustion.
"Maybe they're just afraid of what they don't understand."
"You're different," she squeezed his warm, wounded hand.
"They hate you, but you jumped into the void to save me without a second thought. You're very kind, Lucas."
Those words dug into his soul, keeping his heart beating.
Still on the same day, he had tried to climb the ninety-degree trunk three other times, and every time, his arms had failed.
He was trapped, but he didn't show it to his friend.
Until, at the dawn of the fifth day, the sound of the world changed.
It wasn't the rustling of giant leaves, nor the screech of an animal or the rumbling of roots.
It was a melody.
A rhythmic whistle, clean and perfectly timed, cutting through the greenish mist of the ground.
It was a song.
Lucas's blood ran cold. No animal on Arbo whistled melodies.
And the canopy elves never came down there.
The boy ignored the throbbing pain in his shoulder, pushed Yasmin behind a thick dead root, signaled for her to be absolutely silent, and raised his makeshift weapon: a hard branch sharpened with a stone knife, the same branch he had killed with to feed them.
Lucas dug his feet into the wood, his muscles tense, ready to kill whatever came out of the shadows.
The mist parted as beams of artificial, blinding white light swept through the darkness.
Heavy footsteps from synthetic boots crushed the sludge, and then, they emerged.
There were eight figures.
Humans.
They didn't wear the leather rags of the tribes, but survival suits that Lucas only knew from horror stories: tactical polymer jackets, lightweight exoskeletons attached to their legs to aid their march, and energy rifles slung over their shoulders.
Yasmin let out a muffled whimper, trembling violently.
The tribe's worst nightmare was right there, ten meters away from them.
"Stay where you are!" Lucas snarled.
The fourteen-year-old boy's voice cracked through his dry throat, but he didn't back down an inch, aiming the wooden spear directly at the chest of the man in front.
"One more step and I'll tear the throat out of the first one of you."
The group stopped instantly; the flashlight beams lowered so as not to blind the children.
The man who had been whistling raised both open hands in a universal gesture of surrender.
He was tall, with closely cropped gray hair and a stubble beard.
His dark eyes lacked a hunter's predatory gleam; they just looked exhausted, very tired.
"Easy, kid. We're not enemies," the man said.
His voice was deep, but incredibly calm.
He moved his hand slowly, unhooked the heavy rifle from his shoulder, and dropped it into the sludge with a dull thud.
"My name is Kaelen. Drop your weapons, people."
One by one, the other humans obeyed.
Vance, a giant wearing a cargo exoskeleton on his arms, snorted before dropping a plasma cannon onto the ground.
Jax, a lean and agile scout, lowered two curved knives.
Corin, an older man with a tactical eye patch, and Tarus, a silent sniper, leaned their rifles against a root.
The youngest of them, Milo, who seemed only a few years older than Lucas, let go of his weapon with trembling hands.
Two women stepped forward.
Rhea, with grease-stained safety goggles on her forehead and tools attached to her belt, raised her oil-slicked hands.
And Elara, a soft-eyed woman with an armband glowing with blue medical lights, offered a pacifying smile.
"We're not here to bother anyone. You're the first conscious beings we've seen in days,"
Kaelen continued, his voice soft, gesturing to his own suit, dirty and torn in several places.
"Our ship lost its engines in the upper atmosphere. We crashed through that damn canopy and ended up in this nightmare of roots. We're just trying to find a way out of here before we're eaten by the ground and those bizarre animals."
Lucas didn't lower his spear, but the tension in his shoulders eased a fraction.
They were lost, ruined, exactly like him and Yasmin.
He kept the sharp tip of the branch pointed at Kaelen's chest, his arm muscles trembling violently from exhaustion and pain.
It was Elara who broke the stalemate.
The medic took a cautious step forward, her analytical, kind eyes sweeping over the boy's deplorable figure.
She noticed the twisted knee Lucas could barely put weight on in the sludge, the deep, purulent gash on his left shoulder exuding the cold sweat of fever, and Yasmin's skeletal frame huddled right behind him.
"We're in tatters, kid,"
Elara murmured, her voice gentle, devoid of any threat.
She moved her hands slowly to the side pouch she carried and pulled out two silver, vacuum-sealed packets, along with a small cylinder pulsing with a blue medical light.
"But you... you're falling apart. How long has it been since you ate?"
Lucas gritted his teeth and growled through his nose, refusing to answer.
But he didn't need to.
The loud, painful rumble of Yasmin's stomach cut through the silence of the abyss. The little girl sobbed from shame and hunger, her emerald eyes glazed over staring at the packets in the human's hands.
Elara gave a sad, understanding smile.
Slowly, she crouched down and placed the food and the medical cylinder in the sludge, right in the middle of the distance separating them.
She took two steps back and raised both open hands.
"Let's make a trade," the medic proposed, her eyes locked on Lucas's.
"Real food and clean bandages for your shoulder, in exchange for a peaceful conversation. No wooden spears. No firearms," she said, pointing to the spear and to their weapons on the ground.
"Just lost people trying to survive this hell together."
Lucas looked at the food, then lowered his eyes to Yasmin's pale, cadaverous face.
The half-blood's instinctive fury fought desperately against his protective instinct, but seeing the girl he swore to save on the brink of starvation, hatred lost the war.
Hunger and exhaustion spoke louder.
Slowly, with trembling hands, Lucas lowered the wooden spear and gave in.
Under Lucas's guidance, the group left the seething sludge behind.
"Only step where the moss is blue," the boy instructed, his voice still hoarse but gaining firmness as he pointed with the sharpened branch at a rocky formation of hardened bark.
"It means the main root is dead. It won't try to digest us while we sleep."
The giant, Vance, let out an impressed whistle and let his heavy metallic backpack slide off his shoulders, hitting the wood with a dull thud.
"The kid knows his stuff, boss."
What followed wasn't the tense silence of prisoners and captors that Lucas and Yasmin imagined humans would enforce, but the cautious rhythm of teamwork.
Corin and Tarus used their rifles not as weapons, but to push aside dense, dry foliage.
Rhea, with grease-stained hands, pulled three small metallic discs from her belt and tossed them into the air.
They floated silently, bathing the makeshift camp in a warm, yellowish light that chased away the sickly gloom of the abyss.
Yasmin shrank behind Lucas at first, her large emerald eyes fixed on the floating discs as if they were pure magic.
Elara noticed the girl's fascination.
With a maternal smile, the medic sat on a dry root, crossed her legs, and opened her backpack.
She pulled out two more silver packets, broke the vacuum seal with a sharp crack, and held them out.
"It's not exactly a high court banquet," Elara said in a gentle voice, squeezing the bottom of the packaging until a thick, gray paste came out the tip.
"But it has enough protein and calories to keep a soldier on their feet for three days. Taste it."
Yasmin hesitated, looking at Lucas for permission.
He gave a slight nod.
The little girl took the packet, brought it to her mouth, and widened her eyes. It tasted like metal and dry earth, but the energy it injected into her starving veins was immediate.
She started gulping down the paste with a famished desperation, drawing a soft chuckle from Kaelen.
The group's leader sat on the ground, leaning his heavy rifle against a root—a clear, calculated gesture that there was no threat here.
He looked up, toward the ceiling of impenetrable darkness.
"You saved our hides today, kid," Kaelen said, pulling the canteen from his belt and offering it to Lucas.
"How did you know the pressure was going to change like that a few hours ago?"
Jax was also curious, "And what are those invisible things you kept telling us not to walk into?"
Lucas hesitated, his hand gripping the wooden spear, but the warmth of the artificial light and the smell of food loosened the knuckles of his fingers.
He stabbed the spear into the ground.
"The tree warns you," Lucas answered, swallowing his first gulp of clean water in days.
He pressed his free palm flat against the bark floor.
"The wood isn't dead. Before the inhalation sucks the oxygen away, the Titan-Tree's pores contract and the bark vibrates."
"And as for the gravity pockets..."
He picked up a stone from the ground and tossed it into the dark, beyond Rhea's light.
Instead of falling, the stone shot off at a bizarre ninety-degree angle, vanishing into the mist.
"They break the air before they appear. It makes a sharp pop. Pure elves can't hear it right, but I do."
Kaelen smiled, shaking his head.
"You really saved us from certain death, kid. So let me tell you about other places."
He picked up a twig and started scraping the dry dirt between his boots, drawing a long, continuous horizontal line.
"Arbo is just wood and giant leaves trying to kill you, kid," Kaelen said, his voice taking on the deep tone of a storyteller.
He looked at Yasmin, who had stopped eating to listen to him.
"Up there, far beyond this forest belt and those poisonous clouds, there are things you wouldn't believe. Oceans, for example."
"O-oceans?" Yasmin stuttered the unknown word.
"An immensity of water," Elara elaborated, drawing waves in the air with her hands.
"So much water you can't see where it ends. Saltwater, blue like that little light I gave you, crashing against the earth with a sound that makes you want to sleep in peace."
"And the ground..." Kaelen continued, tapping the twig on the hard bark.
"There are entire plains covered in soft, green grass. You can run with your eyes closed, taking a deep breath, and the wind won't try to tear off your skin."
"You can walk for miles, Lucas... and the earth will never, under any circumstances, try to swallow you."
Silence fell over the lit platform; it wasn't a silence of fear, but of wonder.
Yasmin slowly turned her face to Lucas, the warm reflection of Rhea's floating discs dancing in the girl's emerald eyes.
A world without fear of the ground.
A place where the air didn't need to be measured and gravity didn't hate them.
For a boy who had spent fourteen years hearing that his only destiny was to rot hidden among the high branches, those words were not just an astronomy lesson.
They were the irreversible planting of a dream.
And, that night, under the golden light of his race's natural enemies, Lucas talked and laughed, alongside Yasmin.
The days blurred together.
Lucas guided the humans along safe paths on the ground to avoid the Carnivorous Roots. In return, on the seventh day since the fall, Elara approached him with her medical kit.
"Have a seat, tough guy," the medic said.
Her affectionate smile softened the deep bags under her eyes as she patted a dry root, indicating the spot.
Lucas obeyed, hesitant, his eyes glued to her kit.
"How did you manage to climb with this?" Elara asked, analyzing the purulent tear on his left shoulder and the knee disfigured by swelling, even wrapped up.
"Any normal elf would have passed out from fever days ago. The infection should have reached the bone by now."
"I'm not a normal elf," Lucas muttered, immediate defensiveness hardening his voice and making him look away.
Elara pulled a small metallic cylinder from her kit and let out a soft chuckle.
"Good thing. That means you can handle a little shock."
With a squeeze of the valve, the tool released a sharp hiss, spraying a silvery, freezing mist directly over the open flesh and the bruised joint.
Lucas dug his nails into the wood and held his breath, expecting the burn, but what came was an overwhelming relief.
An absolute, anesthetic cold swallowed the fever burning his skin, sweeping away the throbbing pain as if it had never existed.
He let out his breath all at once, the accumulated tension of days draining from his instantly relaxed muscles.
"Better?" the medic asked, her voice gentle, as she grabbed a tube containing a thick, bioluminescent green gel.
Lucas just nodded, his eyes wide with surprise.
"Now comes the weird part," Elara warned.
She spread the gel into the depths of the open wound.
"It's going to tingle a lot. Try not to move."
The substance reacted with his blood, moving like hundreds of cold needles.
Lucas held his breath, fascinated and frightened, staring at his own arm: right before his eyes, the torn muscle fibers began to writhe.
They stretched and crisscrossed, sewing the torn flesh from the inside out with terrifying precision, closing the skin and leaving behind only a pale line.
"Do you use... magic?" Lucas asked, his voice wavering as his knee popped back into place on its own.
"Pure science, kid," Elara replied, putting the tube back into the kit with a metallic click.
She ran her fingers lightly over the new scar on his shoulder.
"And your genetics helped a lot. Your muscle structure is incredibly dense. Some part of your blood... it makes you a perfect survivor for rapid regeneration. It's fascinating."
Lucas froze.
He looked at the woman's face, expecting to find the usual glare of repulsion or the lip curled in disgust his tribe gave him when mentioning his blood.
But in Elara's eyes, there was only medical admiration and a care he had only ever known from his own mother.
He opened and closed his calloused hand.
Rotated his left shoulder.
The tendon didn't pull; the cartilage didn't scrape.
The sickly weakness was gone, replaced by the brute, vigorous strength of his half-blood nature pulsing back in his veins.
He was no longer sickly prey; he was whole again.
"Thank you," the word came out strange from the boy's mouth, rough and rusted from lack of use.
"Don't thank me," Elara smiled, the perfectly rehearsed lie hidden beneath a maternal gaze.
"We take care of those who take care of us."
At dawn on the eighth day, their paths separated.
"We mapped the parts thanks to you, kid," Kaelen said, squeezing Lucas's shoulder firmly.
"We're heading back to the ship's wreckage to try and get the communicators working. If we make it off this planet, I promise the first broadcast will be a toast to you."
Lucas nodded, feeling a strange lump in his throat.
He had hated humans his entire life.
But those eight treated him not as a freak, but as a savior.
"Keep your eyes on the ground. If the earth vibrates, run to the dead roots," Lucas instructed one last time.
Elara said goodbye to Yasmin with a hug. The eight humans waved one last time before disappearing into the mist of Arbo's lower hell.
Lucas turned to the vertical bark wall rising five hundred meters above them.
The angle was ninety degrees, perfect and unforgiving, but now, the boy's muscles were restored.
His blood boiled with the energy of the food and the warmth of a dream of a world beyond those leaves.