Names carry power.
That's what they say on Earth. That knowing someone's name is knowing a part of their truth.
Ka'lenna didn't say hers lightly.
She dropped it like a blade—clean, final, sharp. Then she vanished into the dark, leaving me with the fire and the ache in my chest.
I repeated it under my breath: Ka'lenna.
A name like stone striking steel.
The camp was quieter that night. Not silent—nothing on this world was truly silent—but calmer. The chanting had stopped. The fires had dimmed. And the ones who had watched me walk the Trial of Ash now gave me space.
Not out of fear.
Out of uncertainty.
I wasn't one of them. Not yet. Maybe never.
But I wasn't bait anymore, either.
That mark on my chest—it hadn't faded. If anything, it was darker now. Like ash baked into flesh. They called it a blessing.
I wasn't so sure.
I lay on a bed of woven bark and stretched animal hide, inside a shelter that blended metal scrap with native design. A power cell from an old fusion rifle was repurposed to heat the floor. Someone knew how to work with tech, even if they didn't understand it fully.
I did.
As soon as my ribs let me stand, I'd take a look. Figure out what they'd salvaged. What could be rebuilt. What could be used.
Because this wasn't temporary anymore.
I wasn't getting rescued.
The next morning, Ka'lenna found me.
She didn't knock. Just swept aside the hide flap and entered like a storm wrapped in bone armor.
"You're awake," she said. It wasn't a question.
I nodded, pushing myself upright.
She tossed something at me—a bundle of rough clothes. Woven fibers. Light armor. Smelled faintly of smoke and leaves.
"You wear this now. Metal clothes are for before."
"Before what?"
"Before you walked fire."
Right.
She led me out of the shelter and into the village proper.
It was larger than I'd realized. Dozens of structures. Tents and half-domes built from native materials fused with scraps of crashed ships, old-world drones, rusted hull plating. Children darted between huts. Warriors sharpened spears of carved bone capped with melted rebar.
This wasn't primitive.
It was adapted.
Ka'lenna guided me toward the central ridge, where a cracked satellite dish now served as a communal platform. Around it, strange totems carved from scorched alloys stood like sentinels—remnants of tech turned sacred.
I stopped near one and ran my hand along the edge.
"Human," I murmured.
"Older than you," she replied. "Older than me. Older than the sky."
I glanced at her. "You believe that?"
She shrugged. "Doesn't matter what I believe. The truth is in the bones."
We passed through the ridge toward a fenced clearing filled with glowing plants and bioluminescent moss—some growing over the husks of old satellites and buried power cores.
At the center stood a terminal.
Mostly intact.
Partially fused to the stone beneath it, as if melted into the land.
Ka'lenna saw me staring.
"You recognize this?"
"Yes," I said softly. "GENUS tech. Colonial-era. This entire planet… it was part of an old human experiment."
"We know."
I turned to her, surprised.
Her gaze was unreadable.
"We have stories," she said. "Of gods from the sky who came to seed the land, then vanished. Some say they built the ash path. Others say they were hunted down by what they unleashed."
"And you think I'm one of them?"
"I think you smell like metal and speak like lightning and you carry the mark." She stepped closer. "But I also think you bleed like we do."
A pause.
Then, quieter: "That makes you dangerous."
Later, I worked on the terminal. My fingers moved instinctively, scraping away moss, checking for data ports, rerouting power from a nearby salvage coil.
Ka'lenna watched me the entire time. She never sat. Never relaxed.
Only when the interface flickered to life—dim and damaged but alive—did she speak again.
"Will it tell you who you are?"
I looked at the flickering screen.
"No," I said. "But maybe it'll tell me why they left me."
Her voice was soft this time.
"They feared you."
I turned to her. "Why?"
She didn't answer.
Instead, she reached out and touched the edge of the ash-mark on my chest—just once. Her fingers were warm. Rough with calluses. Careful.
Not soft.
But not cruel.
"I watched the fire," she said. "I saw it try to take you. It could not."
She looked up at me.
"Maybe the fire chose you. Or maybe it knew you were already burning."
Then she left.
I stood alone in the glow of half-dead tech, the ash still etched into my skin, and wondered how long a man could burn before there was nothing left but smoke.