Many, many days earlier
Elizabeth sat on the edge of the docks and wondered if she had the nerve to get on one of the many ships drifting in and out, up to the heavens and beyond. It was quite a conundrum. She didn’t belong on this alien planet she found herself on, but she didn’t necessarily belong off it either. She belonged on Earth, but that had disappeared quite suddenly, all at once, and she wasn’t sure she was ever going to find her way back there.
She was also not all that sure she wanted to find her way back. Earth had a few things going for it. It was inhabited largely by humans, which was sort of comfortable for her. But it wasn’t exactly ideal in a lot of other respects. Humans were hard to get along with. Aliens of the kind which frequented the docks, they were easier because they barely seemed to notice her at all.
Elizabeth had spent most of her twenty or maybe was it thirty-something years on Earth desperately chasing fantasy. Sometimes she found her escape in movies, other times, books, but most of the time it was in the tales she narrated for herself. Now that she was adrift on an alien world, the fantasy was all around her. The world she’d found herself unceremoniously and entirely accidentally released onto was made mostly of lava. The floor was lava. The sea was lava. There were a few bits of land that weren’t lava, and it was to those bits of land that the city clung, and the port jutted out from.
Ships would sweep down from the outer atmosphere and make their landings at various floating docks. Some were shiny. Others were sleek. The one she couldn’t take her eyes off was… astounding. She couldn’t believe what she was seeing, and compounding that, she couldn’t believe how lucky she was to be seeing it.
It looked like an ancient city had fallen out of the sky. It had turrets and spires all rusted and creaking, and it had what looked like drawbridges and bits of moss and vines. It looked, in other words… alive. But not in the way an animal was alive. In the way a planet was alive. It wore its outsides on its insides. It throbbed and it pulsed, the metals and substances which should have been dead like the rest of the constructed universe somehow maintaining a life-force all their own.
Elizabeth found herself moving toward it, wanting to see it in more detail. It was the sort of creation which demanded to be inspected from every angle. There was something about it, something far more than mechanical. Something magical.
In spite of having been sucked from her world without a moment’s notice, Elizabeth didn’t really believe in magic. That’s because she hadn’t actually encountered it before. There was a field around this ship, just like a magnetic field, or an electric field, but instead of making bits of metal bang into one another, or shocking those who got too close, it sent a frisson down her spine and made her feelings all stand on end. There was a charge about this magnificent vessel, and it tasted like destiny. It was metallic on her tongue, and all tingly on the back of her neck. She had a feeling as though she somehow belonged to it.
Touch me, it seemed to say. Feel my cosmic uniqueness, and take some of it into you. Your loneliness is over.
If she had been thinking straight, she would have realized she was projecting her desperate loneliness onto an interesting-looking alien ship, but Elizabeth lacked that self-awareness, being gripped instead by the tendrils of something she had often toyed with, but never truly understood the power of: a story.
The lower part of the hull was almost within reach, if she just climbed over a few safety barriers, and ignored the sign which very clearly read DANGER: KEEP OUT, in a language she didn’t understand.
With nothing between her and the vessel besides a good two feet of open space leading down to a literal sea of lava, Elizabeth reached out with all the misguided human hope which had been building up in her.
Her hand made contact with the ship. Everything on this planet was hot, but the hull of the ship was cool and mossy, like touching a log in the middle of an enchanted forest — if that log had somehow flown itself into the world’s most fiery port without harm.
“WHAT ARE YOU DOING!?”
“Just looking!”
The two words, squeaked out like she was trying to avoid a conversation with a sales assistant, did nothing to deter the guard who grabbed her in his powerful hands and dragged her away from the lava, and toward the gangway.
He was of an alien species she had not encountered before. Big and bipedal, he had eyes like hers, and a mouth like hers, and a nose like hers, and he might even have looked like her if not for the scales which covered his forehead and temples, and likely many other parts of his body as well. Both the hands which had taken hold of her were scaled along the back, a fact she noticed as she started to panic.