The end of a world is a terrible thing to witness. Especially when it's your own.

  Krell stood alone on the observation deck, watching the sky burn. The atmospheric shield had failed hours ago, and now the toxic gases from the approaching celestial body were creating an unholy light show across the horizon. Beautiful, in its way. Purples and greens that had never before been seen on Xorilia rippled through the night sky like cosmic serpents.

  His people had known this was coming for decades. The calcutions had been precise, the predictions fwless. And yet, they had squandered precious time in political debates and corporate profit-taking. Now, the evacuation ships were gone—those lucky enough to secure passage scattered to the far reaches of the gaxy.

  Krell had chosen to stay behind. Not out of nobility, but necessity. His work was too important to abandon.

  "Director, the final sequence is complete," said the automated voice of the boratory system. "Emergency protocol Seed-7 is ready for activation."

  Krell turned from the apocalyptic panorama and moved to the central chamber of the boratory complex. The hibernation pod gleamed under the emergency lighting, its crystalline structure pulsing with stored energy.

  "Begin final transfer," he commanded.

  Unlike the others, Krell had never believed in saving bodies. Bodies were fleeting things, easily damaged, inherently fwed. What mattered was the mind, the knowledge. Being the foremost bio-engineer of his generation had taught him that much.

  The transfer process began, and Krell felt the familiar dissociation as his consciousness was mapped, molecule by molecule, into the specialized parasite organism he had spent the st decade perfecting. The pain was exquisite but brief—a small price to pay for immortality of a sort.

  Outside, the ground began to tremble. The cataclysm was accelerating.

  As the st of his consciousness transferred, Krell's physical body colpsed, empty now of the essence that had made it more than mere flesh. The parasite, a shimmering mass of iridescent tissue, pulsed once, twice, and then was drawn automatically into the hibernation pod.

  The boratory AI executed its final command, sealing the pod and unching it from the facility. As the small vessel pierced the burning atmosphere, the surface of Xorilia began to crack and rupture. Molten pnetary core erupted in massive geysers, the death throes of a world that had sustained billions of lives for millions of years.

  The hibernation pod, one of thousands of simir vessels unched in those final hours, accelerated beyond the gravitational pull of the dying pnet. Its occupant, neither fully alive nor dead, drifted into dreamless sleep as the vessel's navigation system searched for a suitable host world.

  Behind it, Xorilia shattered into cosmic dust.

  ---

  The journey took much longer than anticipated.

  The hibernation pod's systems, designed for a voyage of perhaps a few centuries to nearby star systems, struggled against the void of deep space. The parasite within, Krell's consciousness preserved in alien flesh, cycled through periods of dormancy and semi-awareness as the pod's power fluctuated.

  Time became meaningless. Stars were born, lived their incandescent lives, and died while the tiny vessel drifted. Occasionally, the navigation system would awaken, assess a potential destination, and find it wanting. Too hot. Too acidic. Too radioactive. The parameters for a suitable host world were exacting—the parasite required specific conditions to thrive.

  Millions of years passed. The parasite, designed to endure through eons if necessary, gradually changed. Evolution, even in near-stasis, was inevitable. Krell's memories began to fragment, to compress. Knowledge remained, but the context that had given it meaning slowly eroded. Personality traits dissolved into more fundamental drives: survive, replicate, consume, adapt.

  When the pod finally encountered a small blue-green pnet on the edge of an unremarkable spiral gaxy, its systems were operating at minimal capacity. Just enough to recognize the atmospheric composition, the abundance of liquid water, and most importantly, the presence of complex organic life forms.

  Not ideal, but sufficient.

  The pod's entry protocol activated, adjusting trajectory for atmospheric insertion. But the long journey had taken its toll. The guidance system failed during descent, sending the vessel off course. Instead of a controlled nding in an uninhabited region, the pod plummeted toward a dense forest in the northern hemisphere.

  Impact was violent and definitive. The pod, its exterior shell compromised by micrometeorite impacts over millions of years, shattered on contact. Fragments of the ancient technology scattered across the forest floor, some burrowing deep into the soft earth.

  At the center of the impact crater, the parasite y exposed to the alien world for the first time. Sensing the unfamiliar atmosphere, it instinctively secreted a protective coating and began to assess its surroundings. Organic matter was abundant, but none of it matched the optimal host parameters from its original design.

  Adaptation would be necessary. Survival depended on it.

  The parasite settled into the soil and began the slow process of altering its structure to interface with this world's life forms. It would wait as long as needed for the perfect host.

  As it happened, it only had to wait three weeks.

  ---

  Darius Bloom had always felt most at home among the trees. Even as a child, when the other kids were pying video games or sports, he could be found cataloging leaves or sketching fungi in the woods behind his parents' house. His mother had called him her "little forest sprite," a nickname that followed him through awkward teenage years and into his academic career.

  Now, at thirty-two, Dr. Darius Bloom was exactly where he wanted to be—traipsing through an old-growth forest with collection bags and a field journal, searching for rare botanical specimens. His position at the university gave him the freedom to pursue these expeditions, though his department chair frequently reminded him that publication timelines were more important than "communing with pnts."

  "If they could see what I'm seeing right now," Darius muttered to himself, crouching to examine a patch of unusual moss growing on a fallen log, "they'd understand why this matters."

  The moss dispyed a bioluminescent quality he'd never encountered before—a faint blue glow barely perceptible in the dappled sunlight filtering through the canopy. He carefully removed a small sample and pced it in a collection vial, making detailed notes about its location and the surrounding ecosystem.

  It was nearly sunset when Darius noticed the peculiar depression in the forest floor ahead. At first gnce, it appeared to be a natural sinkhole, perhaps caused by an underground spring or a colpsed animal den. But as he approached, the systematic nature of the depression became apparent.

  "That's not natural," he said, the excitement of discovery quickening his pulse.

  The crater, roughly twelve feet in diameter, had walls that were too uniform, too precisely shaped to be the result of natural processes. At the center, partially buried in soil and leaf litter, y what appeared to be fragments of some crystalline material.

  Darius took photographs from multiple angles before cautiously entering the crater. The material, whatever it was, didn't resemble any geological formation he was familiar with. He reached out to touch a fragment that caught the dying sunlight, refracting it into prismatic patterns.

  "Beautiful," he whispered, running his fingers along the smooth surface.

  The fragment felt warm to the touch, warmer than it should have been given the cool evening air. As he examined it more closely, he noticed a small crack in the crystalline structure, from which extended what looked like fine, root-like fiments.

  Fascinated, Darius used a small trowel from his pack to carefully extract the fragment for closer examination. As he worked it free from the soil, one of the fiments brushed against his wrist, creating a momentary stinging sensation.

  "Ouch!" He jerked his hand back instinctively, dropping the fragment back into the dirt. He examined his wrist, seeing nothing more than a small red mark, like a paper cut or a thorn scratch. "Weird."

  The light was fading quickly now, and Darius decided it was time to head back to his campsite. He carefully collected a few smaller fragments of the crystalline material, along with soil samples from the crater, and marked the location on his GPS.

  "Tomorrow," he promised the mysterious crater. "I'll be back with better equipment."

  As he hiked back to his campsite, Darius felt an unusual tingling sensation spreading from the small wound on his wrist. By the time he reached his tent, the sensation had faded, and he thought nothing more of it. He cataloged his day's discoveries, ate a simple meal of rehydrated camping food, and settled into his sleeping bag, excited to return to the crater in the morning.

  That night, Darius dreamed of strange skies and crystal cities. He dreamed of a world burning, of knowledge preserved, of consciousness transferred into alien flesh. He dreamed of a journey across the void between stars that sted millions of years.

  And as he dreamed, something ancient and patient began to spread through his bloodstream, cell by cell, altering, adapting, preparing.

  The st survivor of Xorilia had found its host.