ALIEN ETERNITY

Location: Continent Eden-Ta (Antarctica)

Time: 12,000 years before our era

The world was dying under a searing heat, but no one yet understood that this lethargy was the pre-execution spasm.

Toba wiped the viscous sweat blurring his vision. The air in the valley possessed the density of raw milk; an atmosphere heavy with the fermentation of giant ferns and the sweet effervescence of decaying orchids. Up high, where the tree canopy devoured the light, scavenger lizards emitted a screech akin to the striking of two stones, tearing through the oppressive midday silence.

“Do not delay,” the Shaman hissed without turning.

The elder advanced, leaning on a bone staff. Every footfall on the bubbling mud resonated with the gravity of a sentence. Toba loathed this march, loathed the jungle suffocating his lineage with its botanical embrace. But above all, he feared what awaited at the end of the trail.

Three moons prior, the earth had suffered a convulsion. It was no ordinary seismic event, not the kind where mountain spirits stir in their sleep. It was an impact from the bowels of the planet. A dull, nauseating vibration that made teeth chatter and caused birds to drop from branches like rotting fruit.

As if something colossal was attempting to fracture the world’s shell from its core.

Then they reached the Water.

The trail died abruptly at the shore. Toba knew the lakes: turbid after the rains or black as obsidian on moonless nights. But this mirror was an aberration. The water did not reflect the firmament; it was the source of the light itself.

A violet radiance, dense and magnetic, ascended from the depths. It pulsed with a slow, hypnotic rhythm. Thump-thump. Thump-thump.

As if a heart the size of a mountain range beat beneath the bedrock.

“Do not search for the bottom,” the Shaman warned, striking Toba’s leg with his staff. “It is the eye of the Underworld. Whoever stares too long will see that which has no right to exist.”

Skeletal remains lay on the black sand. Fish spines the size of a warrior, their scales retaining a metallic gleam.

“Those Who Live By the Rock celebrated here,” Toba whispered, eyeing the remnants of bonfires with apprehension. “They claimed the flesh of this new lake granted the vigor of the gods.”

“And where are they now?” the Shaman’s voice was the crack of a dry branch. “Where are their chants? Where is the smoke from their hearths?”

They walked half a day more before reaching the neighboring village. An unnatural silence governed the thicket. Neither the buzz of insects nor the clamor of apes. The forest seemed to have held its breath, afraid of disturbing the stillness of that site. Even the wind had ceased, surrendering to the immobility.

Toba found the first “sleeper” by the palisade. It was Ka, the most skilled hunter. He was seated, the back of his neck resting against a trunk, contemplating the zenith. His mouth formed a grimace of eerie beatitude, a mineral peace that does not belong on the faces of the living.

“Ka?” Toba called out, but his voice broke into a hiss.

The warrior did not blink, even as a green fly traversed his open pupil. Toba overcame his nausea and touched his shoulder. The skin was rigid. Cold and mineral like a river pebble. He recoiled as if burned. Beneath the dark dermis, where veins usually flow, a network of violet filaments showed through. There was no pulse. They had petrified, turning the man into a vessel of solid light.

“They have not died,” the Shaman decreed as he advanced into the center of the settlement.

The entire tribe was there. Men, women, infants. They formed an immense circle around an extinct bonfire. No one had attempted to flee. They remained linked by their hands, a chain of flesh transmuted into stone. Their eyes, devoid of white or pupil, were sockets of continuous violet darkness. They did not look at each other; they looked through reality, toward the abyss from which the luminescent water emerged.

“They listen,” the elder murmured. “They still perceive the Voice. The lake claimed them, but did not allow them to depart with the ancestors. Now they are part of the world’s structure.”

“Is it a curse, father?”

“It is something older.” The Shaman raised his face, testing the air.

The atmosphere was mutating. The heavy fermentation yielded to a penetrating, metallic chemical presence, akin to the ionization before a lightning strike.

“It is the end of the cycle, boy. And the fault lies with those who arrived at dawn. Those who cast no shadow.”

The Shaman pointed toward the estuary. There, where the fresh water merged with the ocean, floated vessels. They were not canoes, but black, predatory silhouettes, with tall masts bearing gray sails, similar to the membranes of a bat.

On the shore, figures wrapped in matte fabrics absorbed the sunlight. Their faces remained hidden behind masks of opaque metal. The leader—a man of translucent complexion and eyes like a winter sky—consulted an instrument: a black stone disk where a needle of pure light spun frantically in a pool of mercury.

“Resonance confirmed,” dictated an assistant. His voice vibrated, distorted by the metal. “The membrane of reality has yielded. The Substrate leak is critical.”

The Magister nodded slowly. He observed the green exuberance with poorly concealed disdain.

“The savages call it a miracle,” his voice was the friction of iron on frost. “They do not understand it is an infection. If we do not excise the source, this ‘garden’ will devour the planet’s crust. It will assimilate everything in its image.”

He shifted his gaze to the north, where, at high noon, a second malignant star burned in the firmament, leaving a trail of ash in its wake.

“Is time short?” the assistant asked.

“Exactly what is necessary,” the Magister decreed. “We will take the Origin, and the celestial rock will execute the cleansing protocol. Ice is the best vault: it will conceal our trail and seal the Lake for millennia.”

The Magister turned and saw Toba, who emerged from the undergrowth holding an earthen vessel with trembling arms. The container radiated an internal heat.

“Deposit it there,” ordered the Stranger in the tongue of the Akar.

Beside the man lay an ark of dark metal with veins of silver. Upon contact with his hand, the lid slid back, releasing a frigid mist. The Stranger, protected by gloves that simulated a second skin, extracted a long needle and suctioned the liquid from the vessel. The fluid hissed, shifting from violet to scarlet as it entered the glass cylinder.

“Are you taking the curse?” Toba asked.

“We are Gardeners,” the Magister replied as he sealed the capsule. “We come when the garden begins to rot, to rescue the cuttings. The rest... the rest must be removed. Look to the sky, child. The season is ending.”

The Magister returned to his black vessel. The sails swelled without the need for wind. The ship glided over the swell with a velocity that defied fluid mechanics.

Toba was left alone. And then, the firmament fractured.

First came the sound. Not thunder, but the cracking of the world’s spine. The impact struck his ears with such violence that Toba fell, feeling blood welling from his temples. The earth vaulted beneath his feet, knocking him down.

He saw the horizon tilt. The ocean in the north rose like a wall of impossible proportions. But the water never reached him.

The distant impact of the celestial stone displaced the Earth’s axis. What a moment before was a suffocating tropic found itself projected into the polar zone. The atmosphere, unable to follow the lithosphere’s rotation, transformed into a hurricane that ground mountains to dust.

The burst of cold was a physical wound. In three heartbeats, the temperature plummeted one hundred degrees. Toba watched the emerald wall of the jungle mutate before his eyes. The fern fronds blanched, coated in frost, and shattered into a thousand vitreous fragments. The trees burst with the roar of artillery: the sap in their trunks froze instantly, tearing the wood from its core.

Toba tried to scream, but the air had become liquid glass. The first inhalation calcined his lungs as if he had breathed molten lead. The moisture in his eyeballs transformed into ice shards, blinding him permanently. He tried to stand, but his dermis had welded to the earth. The cold did not merely kill; it preserved. He felt his blood densify until it stopped.

The last thing Toba perceived was the Lake. The violet water boiled from the thermal shock, but the vapor did not ascend: it froze in mid-air, forming capricious structures. The surface sealed beneath a stratum of opaque, black ice in a single breath.

Those at the bottom... those listening to the whisper... were entombed. Walled within a sarcophagus of strict geometric rigor that would keep them intact for twelve thousand years.

The wind buried the green hell beneath a mantle of eternal snow. Ten minutes later, barren silence reigned in Eden-Ta. Only a white desert where the Garden would wait, in lethargy, for its next harvest.