Snow ✓

In the Beginning

Earth ended how it began—with a bang.

Those who survived The Great Implosion would remember their once marbled planet as a smoldering speck in their red-rimmed eyes as space crafts that had been built for intergalactic travel but never known it ferried them out of the radioactive smog and into the Milky Way. Jetting through the atmosphere as test subjects in an experimental escape to save humanity was a risk passengers who could pay the right price were willing to take—one many thought they wouldn't survive until they woke up on the G-type star Niccoran's third world.

The displaced Earthlings crash landed on a continent that had looked like a sleeping mountain goat from outer space. It was there they settled and called their new home Helithica. The fuel from the airships that hadn't broken apart pushing through the atmosphere went to stone and timber cutters to cultivate the landscape. All but a few of the tip-top airships were cannibalized, and the colonists took up work as farmers, breeders, fishermen and timber miners.

The flora and fauna was so akin to their home planet that some speculated they hadn't leapt through space but time and were back on an infant Earth, the only blip in this theory a colossal forest with gargantuan trees no arbor enthusiast recognized. The tree line stretched further than any eye could see, that any boot was willing to tread. Curiously, the trees could not be chopped down nor razed, their thick hides dulled every blade. Herbalists recognized nothing of great quantity or importance that grew there, though it was difficult to tell; the limbs grew closely together, the boughs were dense and the canopies so thick and entangled, it was a wonder anything flourished on the forest floor at all. It was dank, dark and the undergrowth too dense for big game, and yet, those dumb or brave enough to venture in complained of feeling watched, hearing growls, snaps and howls, and swore that if you ventured in far enough for the birdsong to stop, voices you weren't sure were inside your head or out would start clamoring for your attention. It was even rumored a few venturers were never seen again, though when questioned, not a single someone could put a name to a decidedly missing face. It reminded most of the enchanted forests that pepper fairy tales—the ones that swallow up princesses and spit out monsters, where witches live comfortably, awaiting weary travelers to persuade to part with their souls in exchange for black wishes. It became a source of mystery Helithicans avoided, serving as little more than a backdrop in parents' stories about the horrors that befall children who misbehave.

That is, until the incident.

The legend goes that a couple of kids gave their caretaker the slip and took up a game of daring each other to approach the dreaded woods, round-robin style. During the antics, a small someone not of their ranks peeked out from behind a tree. Naturally curious in the way that children always are, they invited the stranger out into the open to play a new game they would never begin, for upon closer inspection, they discovered she wasn't quite like them—her eyes were too big, her limbs too long, her ears too pointy, and her clothes strange.

The screams could be heard all the way in town.

No one's sure what happened next; the children were hysterical in their recollections. But they all agreed: her face had slipped to make way for another, bone-white and not the least bit human.

A delegation returned to the spot to investigate but found no one. There was nothing odd but the trees, as quiet and conspicuous as they had always been.

It would take many more orbits around Niccoran for anyone to believe that what the children had seen was anything more than a fantasy.

With every new generation, Earth receded from Helithican history until tales of the Gone World degenerated into myths tweaked by scribes and embellished by orators.