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Deep in the badlands of Earth Sector 14, dawn spills over miles of dunes. It isn’t a beautiful rising of the sun; the dying star only brings with it a bleak, orange sky, highlighting the ancient shipyard that stretches as far as the naked eye can see. There, inside the belly of a half-buried, Explorer-class starship, Cas jumps from a broken ledge and catches himself on a fallen beam.

His shoulder aches from the strain of the angle he’s hanging at. Sweat drips down his spine underneath his Garrison-issued flight suit. The climb through the smoggy ruins is demanding, but it’s everything he’s been training himself for. He swings a leg up on to a damaged walkway and forces his body higher.

Dust covers his gloved fingers and the front of his helmet, making it hard to see and even harder to get a good grip on the metal he’s climbing, but the holoscreen lit before his eyes shows him a 3-dimensional scan of the objects surrounding him. It’s easy to trust the tech he’s survived with on his own for almost a month now.

He stops for a moment to catch his breath. Beneath his suit, an old, tattered map passed down through generations sits comfortingly against his chest. He presses his fingers to it. When he looks up, he can see bright light above him. His mask reads a higher amount of toxicity in the air than below.

Close.

Elation spreads through him. Cas feels a familiar tug in his gut, the pull of adventure, the lust for power right at his fingertips. He climbs for the light, the sounds of his breath shallow and reverberating off the confines of his helmet.

With one last pull, his upper body shaking, he rolls onto the platform. Without sparing a moment to rest, he pushes himself onto his knees and takes in the object that he’s only ever heard about in legends told to him by his elders.

The Artifact is a crystal in the center of the tomb-like room. He switches the night-vision off on his mask and gasps when he sees the vibrance of the air. It shimmers and shifts, glowing an oppressive, sickly green. For a moment, he basks in the room, letting the power of the Artifact seep through his flight suit and coat his skin.

Cas drags himself towards it, skin prickling at the proximity. The crystal itself looks like a shard, hovering in a beam of light almost too bright to look at directly. Something inside of it seems to swirl in a manner that beckons Cas closer. His holomask short circuits, cutting out after a pitiful round of alarms. He’s so near he can feel it pressing on his ribs, making it hard to breathe the recycled, stale air of his suit.

There, in the heart of the starship, Cas stares at the answer to his problems; the source of the kind of alien power that can alter worlds, left untouched for centuries amidst ash and death. Sluggishly, like pushing through molasses, Cas reaches for the Artifact. He barely hesitates before grabbing it out of the air.

Immediately, his arm goes numb. The overwhelming glow the Artifact emits starts to seep into his glove. Feeling returns to him as acid simmering like mist through his bones, atoms splitting apart and zapping back together simultaneously.

Cas begins to scream. He stumbles to his feet, tripping as he backs away from the crystal. When he tears the glove from his fingers, he sees his skin blossoming with rivers of green light. He doesn’t get the chance to see where it spreads—his foot slips, and he plummets off the edge of the platform into blackness.

He comes back with a gasp. Though his surroundings look familiar, he doesn’t know where he is or how he got here, just that his body aches and he wants to go home. A shattered mask lies beside him on the broken ground of the bottom of the ship. Coughing, he pushes himself from the ground, and the metal screeches and bends beneath his touch like soft butter. Cas scrambles away.

He’s only shocked for a moment, because everything in his mind tells him that this is normal, no matter how much his body is shaking. Uncertain, he splays his fingers on the floor beneath him and pinches.

It’s like molding clay.

“This is our gift to you, Number Eleven,” a voice says in his mind. It does not belong to him. “Now you must do something for us in return.”

Images flash before him: arms raised in violence to a scarlet sky; Cas standing in front of his peers at the Garrison, their eyes glinting a radiant green; children with glowing veins playing in tall grass.

Cas takes a deep breath of unfiltered, sweet-smelling air and smiles at his hands.