Her Storm Warden

The planet tried to kill me in the first eleven seconds.

I remember the Meridian shearing apart. I remember the emergency harness locking across my chest. I remember thinking, very calmly, that I had not finished repotting the ferns in Greenhouse Bay 4, and that felt like the most important thing in the world as the hull tore open above me.

Then impact. Then nothing.

Then air.

Except it was not air. Not the kind my lungs wanted. I took one breath and my throat closed, my eyes watered, and every mucous membrane I owned sent the same signal: not this. Whatever I was inhaling tasted like hot pennies and lightning, and my chest seized so hard I thought I was having a heart attack.

I was on my hands and knees in rubble. The Meridian was a smoking spine of metal across a volcanic plain, cracked open like an egg, and the sky above me was the color of a bruise. Purple and amber and wrong.

Second breath. Worse. My vision blurred. I could feel my lungs refusing, the tissue swelling, and I understood in the detached way of someone who has already accepted the outcome that I was going to suffocate on an alien planet forty-seven light-years from the greenhouse where I had been perfectly happy.

Then something blocked the sky.

It was enormous. Nearly eight feet tall, a silhouette the color of dark stone, and its veins were glowing. Blue light traced paths under skin that looked like weathered basalt, and the glow pulsed with a rhythm I did not recognize.

It knelt. Close. So close I should have screamed, but I did not have the oxygen.

And then I could breathe.

Not all at once. Gradually, like the air itself was changing around this creature. The hot-penny taste faded. My lungs unclenched. I gasped, sucked in a raw, burning gulp that tasted clean, and my body went limp with the relief of it.

The creature, the being, the whatever-it-was picked me up.

Not gently, exactly. Efficiently. It scooped me against its chest like I weighed nothing, which, compared to it, I probably did. Its skin was warm under my cheek. Not human-warm. Furnace-warm. And it was vibrating.

A low, rolling sound, somewhere between a purr and a subsonic hum, was coming from inside its chest. Not a growl. Not a threat. Something else. Something I could feel in my sternum, in the backs of my teeth. It was so low it was almost below hearing, and it did not stop.

I should have been terrified. I was. But I could breathe against its chest, and I could not breathe anywhere else, and terror takes a back seat to oxygen every single time.

It carried me. Across volcanic rubble, past pieces of my ship, past bodies I did not let myself look at. The sky was still wrong. The air was still poison. But in the three-foot radius around this thing, I was alive.

I tried to speak. What came out was a croak.

It looked down at me. Amber eyes, no white, pupils that expanded in the low light. It said something in a language made of consonants and low rumbles, and I understood none of it.

I passed out against its chest.

The last thing I heard was the vibrating. That low hum. And I swear, I swear it got louder the moment my eyes closed.

Like it had been waiting for me.

Naia's Log, Day 1: Alive. Lungs functional. An eight-foot alien with glowing veins carried me out of a crash site. His chest vibrates. I don't know what any of this means. I know I am breathing because of him. That seems like a place to start.