Ocular Astra Journeys: The Seven Hearth

Oxygen critical: 8%. 6 minutes remaining.

The alert blinked bloody red in Stollen’s visor, washing the silent stars in a pulse of emergency light. He jerked awake, the last memory a scream—not his own, but Allie’s, cut short by the shriek of tearing metal. He floated, untethered, in the deep black. The silence was absolute, broken only by the ragged sound of his own breathing.

Think. Move.

He twisted, the stars spinning dizzily. His suit thrusters sputtered, weak but responsive. A shape drifted fifty meters away, limned in starlight. Lyra. Her suit was dark, her helmet a dead black sphere.

No.

He burned the thrusters, ignoring the shrieking pain in his side. The distance closed with agonizing slowness. Thirty meters. Twenty. His oxygen readout ticked down.

7%. 5:15.

He grabbed her armored shoulder, spinning her gently. Her face was pale behind the visor, eyes closed. He tapped her chest panel—dead. But her oxygen tank gauge, visible through a small port, showed a sliver of green. Half-full. Impossible. If her suit was dead, the tank should be empty or vented.

His training took over. He pulled the emergency sealant from his thigh compartment—a thick, putty-like compound. With clumsy, gloved fingers, he smeared it over the visible crack along her primary oxygen line. His own breath was loud in his helmet, each exhale fogging the glass.

He patched her main comms relay next, splicing two wires from his own backup. A spark jumped. Lyra’s suit lights flickered, then glowed a weak, steady blue.

Her eyes snapped open. She gasped, her body convulsing.

“Easy!” Stollen’s voice was tinny over the direct link. “You’re okay. You’re with me.”

“Stollen?” Her voice was a ragged whisper. “The others… Paq, Allie…”

“Gone.” The word was a stone in his throat. “Life signs… zero. We’re the only signals left.”

He linked their suits. Oxygen equalized. The combined readout flashed: 12 minutes.

“Where…” Lyra began, then she saw it over his shoulder. “Oh.”

A planet hung in the blackness, close enough to see swirls of white and blue. But it was wrong. The light from its sun—a dull, cold white disc—glinted off something geometric in the upper atmosphere. A faint, hexagonal grid, like a vast honeycomb made of light.

“What is that?” Lyra breathed.

Stollen’s suit AI chirped, scanning.

SCAN COMPLETE.

ATMOSPHERE: NITROGEN-OXYGEN, BREATHABLE.

GRAVITY: 0.3G.

ANOMALY: ARTIFICIAL ATMOSPHERIC PATTERNING DETECTED.

ORIGIN: UNKNOWN.

“Artificial?” Lyra echoed.

“No time.” Stollen oriented them, feet toward the world. “We go. Now.”

They burned the last of their maneuvering fuel. The planet grew, its strange glowing grid resolving into a vast, shimmering lattice. It wasn’t heat. It was structure.

“That’s not re-entry plasma,” Lyra said, her voice tight. “It’s made.”

They hit the atmosphere. The world screamed around them. The grid flared blindingly bright, each hexagon a cell of fiery light. Their suits shuddered, heat shields glowing cherry red. For a terrifying second, Stollen thought they’d be incinerated by the sheer geometry of the place.

Then they were through, falling.

“Brace!” Lyra yelled.

They hit water. A colossal splash, then shocking cold. They tumbled, disoriented, before bobbing to the surface in a wide, shallow stream.

For a long minute, they just floated, gasping.

Stollen clambered to his feet. The water came to his knees. He helped Lyra up. They stood in the stream, dripping, suits scarred and steaming.

The world came into focus, and with it, a deep, unsettling wrongness.

The trees were stubby, their trunks no thicker than Stollen’s forearm. They didn’t tower; they clustered, like a thicket of oversized bonsai. The grass was a dense, spongy mat that gave way under his boots, each blade shorter than his fingernail.

A flicker of movement. A creature darted from under a broad leaf—a six-legged thing with an iridescent shell, the size of his thumb joint. It scuttled over a “boulder” that was, in truth, a pebble no bigger than his fist. The scale was collapsing in on itself, a reality where everything was shrunk down, compressed.

“Stollen,” Lyra breathed, not in wonder, but in dawning horror. “Look at the mountains.”

He followed her gaze. The distant purple ridges weren’t distant at all. They were maybe a mile away, sharp and cartoonishly steep, like a painted backdrop held too close. This wasn’t a planet. It was a miniature.

A shadow passed over them. They looked up. A flying creature with leathery wings the span of his arm glided silently overhead. Not a bird. Something with too many joints, a long, whipping tail. It circled once, then vanished into the stunted forest.

They were not just survivors here. They were monsters. Giants in a dollhouse world.

Wordlessly, they waded to the bank. The “grass” whispered against their suits. Stollen’s boot scuffed something hard. He looked down, nudged a half-buried object with his toe.

A metal bolt. Hexagonal. The size of his thumb.

He bent and picked it up. It was warm. It glowed with a faint, internal blue light. The metal was smooth, seamless, unlike any alloy he knew. It was manufactured. Perfectly.

He turned it over. A series of fine, hair-thin grooves ran along one face.

“What is that?” Lyra asked, coming closer.

“I don’t know.” He ran his thumb along the grooves.

The bolt hummed. A light shot from its tip, projecting a shimmering hologram in the air between them. A simple star map: a bright central point, with six smaller points arranged in a vertical line above it, each connected by a thin strand of light.

A map of a solar system. But not theirs.

“It’s a map,” Stollen said, his voice hollow. “But these aren’t our stars.”

A sound made them freeze. A chorus of tiny, high-pitched chirps. Organized. Rhythmic.

They looked toward the treeline.

The “grass” at the edge of the forest was moving. Dozens—no, hundreds—of small shapes emerged. Humanoid figures, standing no taller than his index finger. They wore intricate clothing made of woven plant fiber and tiny bits of polished metal. They carried spears that looked like sharpened thorns.

They fanned out with silent, disciplined coordination, surrounding the two astronauts.

At the front, a slightly larger figure stepped forward. It wore a circlet of braided silver leaves. In its hands, it held a polished, acorn-sized object. It lifted the object to where its mouth should be.

A tiny, amplified voice rang out, clear and sharp in the vast, quiet air.

“Do not move, giants. You are prisoners of Hearth.”