Starfire

Chapter 18: -Cruel Salvation-

Najma had no direction to go in, no haven towards which he could direct his steps. Civilization didn't exist on Scutarrii. Any creature he came across would only pose another danger. Anything he might try to eat would eat him back from the inside out, or cause him to wither away; Though luckily, he didn't need to eat just yet. A bigger issue was water. Every stream or pond he passed was steaming with toxicity, or the murky greenish color of sickness, or filled with deadly fauna, or all of the above.
  
  

   Lungs clogged with humidity, it seemed to get harder to breathe with each laborious step. The burn on his hand stubbornly refused to get any better as time scraped by. If anything, it got worse. The pain and burning seemed to spread another inch with each passing second, or day, or minute, or whatever it was that was passing so slowly, and after a while, his whole arm was aching with the dull, acidic burn. If he didn't do something about it soon, he might lose use of his hand altogether.

    He hoped with each second, and with each throb of the burn, that nothing lethal had been in the venomous glue. He'd never paid very much attention to any of his schooling on the subject of the carnivorous planet, and after the head injury, most of his knowledge of the place had been devastated to a few scant facts.

   However, he had remembered a good deal about the surrounding solar system and thusly how the planet would rotate, and he knew enough to figure that he'd spent at least a standard week on the desolate and deadly planet, despite the fact that night had only fallen twice, and even those brief calculations had taken too much effort to complete. Everything that happened was simply a fog of fatigue and danger.

   The monotony was so sure that it may as well have been a time loop. On and on Najma went, until something changed. He'd tripped plenty of times, sure, but when he landed, he hit something that made a decidedly metallic clank.

   Of course, Najma was too busy falling flat on his face to realize that it wasn't normal.

   He got up and dusted himself off, careful of any dangerous burrs or acidic soil, and he would have kept walking as if nothing had happened, but he realized that clanging things weren't very common on Scutarrii. The second realization followed soon after: He might have just called every nearby danger to his immediate vicinity, and he needed to find shelter before night drew more dangers into the open. He took a step but curiosity and desperation drew him back.

    Sure enough, he found something very... out of place.

   It was perfectly circular, just the barest trace of something by hidden among the leaf mold and dark soil. He clawed at the debris and began to unearth something he never thought he'd see with his own two eyes: a deep space probe from the first Era. Of course, he'd seen many pictures of the same sort of craft. They'd been revolutionary in their time. It was a shred of history, crawling back from the abyss of his memory. It might also prove to be his salvation.

    He braved himself and took a deep breath, panting his hands on either side of the round handle. Then he yanked. His hands slipped, and his scabbed burn broke open again, leaving a slick of blood to mark his failure.

   This might be his only hope. He couldn't just give up. He paused and sent up a silent plea to whatever cruel fate was watching him, then he doubled down and gave another jerk.

   The wheel budged.

   It was slow, rusty, and fighting against him with every rotation, but it was turning. He hoped that there was an actual ship down there, instead of just more black swamp dirt and things that wanted to eat him alive.

   He closed his eyes as he swung the heavy door towards the sky, letting the metal hatch fall over onto the dirt with a thud before he finally allowed himself to look down.