Claude

The ribcage of the titan had stood for four hundred years, and in that time no man had thought to call it anything other than the Ruin. The bones rose from the valley floor like the pillars of a drowned cathedral—each rib forty feet high, pale as salt, grooved with the slow erosion of wind and grief. Someone had mortared the gaps between them with river stone and clay, hung the hollow spaces with chain, fitted iron doors where the sternum had collapsed inward. Smoke bled from a dozen cracks in the bone ceiling. The place smelled, as it always smelled, of burning sulfur and soot so thick you could taste it on the back of your tongue, bitter as old regret.

The smell hits me before the sirens do—engine grease and spent shells baked into the regolith, rising off the trench walls like incense at a funeral. Callisto’s sky is the color of a bruise, Jupiter hanging low and swollen on the horizon, its bands of rust and cream indifferent to the men dying beneath it. I press my back against the frozen mud and check my rifle for the fourth time in three minutes.

The lodge smelled of cedar smoke and old wool, a ghost of summers past trapped in the timber beams. I’d come to the Berghaus seeking silence—three days alone to finish the manuscript my editor had been threatening me about for months. The alpine retreat promised nothing but snow, solitude, and a fireplace older than my grandfather.

I found two of those things.