Voice of the Diarchy
Voice for the Voiceless
Cold Blooded Contracts - Base Camp
The descent into Dalna's Southern Abyss begins in silence.
Snowflakes fall like shards of glass, dry and angular, swirling in slow spirals around the dropships and freighters as they punch through the frost-choked atmosphere. It is mid-morning - a half-light hour. The horizon glows a pale blue, jagged with the silhouettes of crystalline cliffs jutting from the ice like broken teeth. The ground below is not flat but treacherous, a shifting maze of pressure ridges and buried crevasses that groan beneath each gust of wind. Every footstep here might echo across a frozen ravine or vanish into nothing.
No friendly signals. No auto-landing beacons. Just a string of outdated coordinates and a warning loop that crackles intermittently over comms: "Atmospheric instability detected. Proceed at your own discretion."
Nearby, a shallow basin; once a frozen lake, now partially collapsed rests beneath the cliffs. Ice stretches over it like old scar tissue, crisscrossed with wide claw-marks and collapsed tunnels where creatures have risen from below. It is here that many choose to make camp: low-profile thermal shelters or buried repulsor sleds that can be disguised beneath snow.
The only sounds beyond the low blow of snow covered wind - come from the wildlife, and even those are rare.
A distant howl rolls through the air - Shard Wolves, perhaps, hunting in threes. Their crystalline fur shimmers in the low light like ghosts. Closer, a frost-leaper bursts from the snow, snapping at something unseen before vanishing just as fast. The planet itself seems reluctant to wake anything fully. Even the weather waits, tense and expectant.
Storm clouds pulse on the far edge of the abyss, backlit by veins of lightning that flicker, like the breath of some colossal thing buried deep in the storm wall.
The Ice Gators are out there.
Beneath the stillwater.
Inside the ravines.
Waiting for you hunters.
Tags:
Eivii
Tork Lok
Amelie Berionne
