The place Ash had been sent to felt like an entirely different world. Or perhaps not. perhaps somewhere on Varagos he'd never known. The planet was immense, after all, and Ash had spent most of his life inside city walls, never free to learn what lay beyond them.
The sight before him was magnificent and deeply unsettling. Still, it was difficult to make out much through the gray fog smothered everything. The ground was gray. The sky was gray. Even the figure standing beside him was gray.
Ash narrowed his eyes.
'Gray?'
He turned toward the figure. And his stomach made a violent, lurching decision. He dropped to his knees, certain he was about to be sick. The portal, apparently, had opinions about being used, and Ash was about to receive all of them at once. Bile rose in his throat; he forced it back through sheer, furious refusal.
The half mask helped. He couldn't have let it out even if he'd wanted to.
'What in the absolute—'
Ash breathed through it. Slowly and deliberately.
Then he heard it... the steady ringing of metal on stone, spreading through the fog in every direction. For a place supposedly maintained in silence, the noise was remarkable. Through the gray, silhouettes raised pickaxes and drove drills into the ground with mechanical, rhythmic intensity. Whatever they were mining, they meant to extract it quickly.
Ash turned back to study the gray figure, and stopped.
That... That wasn't a person.
It had the shape of one, if you were being generous and had never actually encountered a person. The skin was stone… cracked and uneven, carved by hands that had been told what a human looked like but never met one. Faint light pulsed through the fissures, slow and rhythmic, like breathing. Its head was smooth and featureless. A blank pale surface tilted loosely forward, as though attention were something it had either surrendered or never possessed.
It breathed. The sound bore no resemblance to anything a chest produces. It was closer to a cavern, air moving through hollow underground stone, deep and resonant and profoundly wrong.
Ash raised his hand toward it.
A hand cut between them.
He flinched and spun. And standing next to him was Paul. Even with the lower half of his face covered, his expression was entirely legible. Paul shook his head once. A sharp, final, the kind of refusal that doesn't invite discussion, then pointed into the fog toward the miners.
Ash wanted to say several things. He could say none of them. He pointed at the statue instead, with what he hoped conveyed:
'what is that.'
Paul shook his head again, seized his arm, and hauled him away. Ash looked back as he was pulled past the statue. Then another. A few steps further, another. Then more, spreading through the fog in every direction... standing perfectly motionless among the ruins, blank faces directed at nothing.
'What...'
He had assumed those still shapes were workers at rest. They weren't. They were carved stone, hundreds of them, distributed silently across the entire landscape like a crowd arrested mid-thought.
The pickaxes grew louder as they neared the other miners. Even here, statues loomed at the periphery. The workers struck hard and fast, faces down, moving with the particular energy of people who had made their peace with fear and decided it would have to be their resting state.
Some gathered the broken fragments and placed them into large stone barrows. No movement wasted. No one looked up any longer than necessary.
Paul tapped his shoulder and pointed down.
Ash looked. At first, he saw only rock. But then he noticed: certain patches of the gray ground had something threaded through them. Thin black veins running just beneath the surface, like something buried and resolved to stay that way.
Ash looked at Paul. Paul nodded once, then gestured him back.
As Ash stepped aside, Paul raised his pickaxe and drove it into the earth. Cracks spread with each blow until every dark-veined patch had broken apart. Within moments, someone was already there to gather the fragments, swift and soundless.
Paul waved for him to follow.
The deeper they went, the heavier everything became.
Ruins rose and crumbled across the gray landscape in jagged fragments. Half-swallowed buildings, collapsed archways, stone shaped by hands and now simply wreckage.
Through all of it, the statues persisted, wrong in every possible way. Some lay toppled across rubble, limbs broken and scattered as though something enormous had swept through. Some were buried to the shoulder or waist, a single hand pressing upward through the ground. Some stood frozen in poses that defied physical logic.
Several had pickaxes buried in them, handles jutting at odd angles, the stone around each strike dark and fractured. They had not fallen. The blows had landed and The creatures had elected not to acknowledge them.
Between them: bones… Human bones, not buried, but simply lying in the gray earth the way things lie when dropped and never collected. A ribcage scattered across rubble. A hand still locked around a drill, grip unbroken. A skull resting against a broken wall, jaw open, tilted as though mid-word.
Through the fog, something enormous loomed. A structure, or what had once been one, too vast to take in and too strangely shaped to identify. The fog shifted slowly around it. Ash had the quiet, unsettling sensation the structure shifted too.
Everything in its vicinity had the texture of a dream remembered wrong, the kind where something is fundamentally wrong and you cannot move and you cannot stop looking.
***
They settled eventually near a half-collapsed building, three of its walls still standing and offering some semblance of shelter. Paul produced a stick, crouched, and wrote in the gray ground:
So… Questions?
He held out a second stick. Ash took it and wrote:
Many. Starting with: what are those things.
He pointed toward the nearest statue.
Paul looked at it. Looked back. Wrote:
Stone Horrors. Our name for them. Right now they're harmless.
He wiped the ground clean and continued.
As long as we don't produce sounds that don't originate from the earth, they stay asleep. The moment we do, they don't.
Ash retrieved his stick.
You're all hammering the ground with pickaxes. How does that not count?
Paul stopped his hand before he could write further. Pointed at the words. Wiped them. Wrote:
Less. No essays.
He wiped again.
Ground vibrations are invisible to them. Digging, drilling, anything transmitted through the stone. They can't distinguish that from the earth moving on its own. They aren't listening for the earth. They're listening for everything else.
He paused, then added:
That's also why you don't touch them. Your hand against their skin is a sound they recognize.
Ash studied the words, then wrote very small in the corner:
You told me not to write too much.
Paul looked at it. Looked at Ash. Looked back at his own lengthy explanation.
He wiped everything and wrote:
Shut up.
Ash almost smiled.
Fine. What sector of Varagos are we in?
Paul considered the question for a moment.
We are not in Varagos.
Ash's hand moved before he could stop it:
What do you mean we're not in Varagos. Are you saying we crossed to the unknown half? Through a portal? Is that even—
Paul seized the stick. Wiped it all. Held up a single finger.
One question.
He handed it back.
Ash exhaled.
Where are we?
There was a reason he asked: Varagos divided in two — not by a rift in the rock, but by an impenetrable wall of fog that severed one civilization from the other entirely. Even approaching from space proved fruitless. Ash had watched documentaries of people attempting exactly that, only to land on the fog's surface as though it were solid ground.
The side Ash had been born on was called the Known Half. A place where humanity had taken root, where people struggled to survive against various horrors. The other side was the Unknown Half. As the name implied, it was unknown. No human had ever entered it.
So how was he here?
Paul nodded. He crouched, smoothed the ground, and wrote. Ash read each word as it appeared.
No. Not Varagos. Not the known half. Not the unknown half.
He wiped and continued.
...But a different planet entirely. A place that was full of life, once.
He smoothed the last patch of ground and wrote slowly, like someone who had spoken these words before but still felt the full weight of them.
Welcome to the Gray Planet.