There's nowhere to turn to. She runs into a dead end, blocked off by a sheer cliff face that extends miles high, surrounded on either side by the purple trees. Their branches sway in the wind, although all she feels is the creature's heavy breathing, hot breath drowning her.

Her lungs sear with the effort of inhaling another breath. Without regret, she’d take her own life in a heartbeat, if only to escape the orange creature, but she has nothing except the clothes on her back and herself. Which the beast is about to devour.

Terror petrifies her, leaving her at the mercy of a creature that shouldn’t have ever existed. Its nose writhes, each wormy extension brushing over her, its lips pulling back to reveal sharp teeth.

Her terrified reflection bounces off its teeth. There’s nowhere to turn, nowhere to run as it opens its maw and clamps down on her head and its teeth dig into her neck-

The world explodes in a fury of light.

Through half-lidded eyes, the burst startles Cora awake, eyes burning as she furiously tries to blink away the green imprints over her retinas. The underside of the clouds, having been nearly perfectly black against the night, shine a brilliant crimson, the shadows of other bizarre structures flashing within their bodies before the illumination fades away.

Exhaustion keeps her anchored to the ground. Somewhere through the curtain of static, she makes out a single voice calling her name, too distant for her to ascertain if it’s even real. Her limbs shake with the effort of sitting up. Every muscle screams in protest when she turns towards the direction the voice is coming from.

Through the faint green, a human figure contrasts against the lit woods. Its arms reach out towards her, and she screams, until his face becomes clearer once he’s close to her. Liam’s shaking, his eyes hollow and bags hanging beneath his eyes, although they seem trained on her.

His lips move in sync with his chin. The static is too loud. She feels the edges of her consciousness collapse in on themselves, leaving Liam left.

Something in her ear must’ve shifted, because suddenly she hears him.

“-go, now. I don’t know what the fuck was that thing, but it--God, we need to go.”

He doesn’t wait for her reaction. His hand grabs her wrist, and in that split moment she jerks her arm away, her other fist punching his stomach. Her knuckles connect with pure muscle. Her blow barely fazes him as he scoops her up and drapes her over his shoulder.

In one swift motion, they take off away from the source of the ghostly woods, shadows dancing within the trees.

She bounces up and down with Liam’s movements, her upper body supported by the backpack. He takes them far past the illuminated woods, sticking to the trees rather than the open clearing between one patch of forest and the next, his stride never faltering despite him having stayed awake the entire time she was asleep.

However long that was. The ghost of tiredness keeps trying to pull her eyes down, because soon enough she finds herself struggling to stay awake, venturing between that fuzzy border of alertness and dreams. A few times, she thinks she sees glowing eyes open within the darker sections of the woods, but when she blinks, the eyes disappear.

They traverse a vast expanse of weeds. Liam’s blanket proves beyond helpful when she pulls the edges over her exposed forearms. Alien flora bounces off the blanket, some leaves and branches scraping the back of her neck, but it’s nothing compared to what he must be enduring.

The gentle bobbing of her body lulls her to the edge of sleep. It’s so easy to close her eyes and teleport her mind elsewhere, where she isn’t thirsty or tired or fatigued or feeling the individual painful scratches run down her neck. A fantasy of being back home, jolting awake in the middle of the night, realizing that everything was a horrible nightmare.

But the scab on her forearm. It hasn’t disappeared since she first pinched herself upon arriving. Liam’s warm presence reminds her that if she truly is dreaming everything up, then it’s a very convincing dream.

Everything about this world screams against what she’s known since birth. Science never supported anything like this. Her mind’s fragmented as she tries to figure out how something like this is possible. The tiredness only makes her lose herself to the mental traps running her mind.

“You’re heavy,” Liam breathes heavily, stopping once the last traces of the pale light are obscured behind clumps of vegetation. He sets her down, her body limp as a rag doll, and then he unties his blanket from his neck and sets it on the ground. He unshoulders the backpack and places it at one edge, holding it down when a breeze blows through the forest.

“I’m not… fat…” Cora mumbles, rubbing her eyes furiously to see Liam better. It’s then that she notices that the land around them is brighter than she remembers night being on Earth. Then, when her eyes trail up the sky, she sees it. A single moon twice the size of the moon she’s known her whole life, with a large crater interrupting the bottom surface.

If she squints hard enough, she swears faint metallic rings surround the crater, each successively stacked so that they occasionally glint. The constellations she’d seen are much dimmer compared to the blinding moon, but the stars still form new images, each with their own story as her mind whirs to process new dreams.

“I think we’re safe here,” he whispers, sitting down so that he’s hovering over her. She’s about to protest that she can handle herself just fine--then a yawn overpowers her, forcing her to stifle it with a hand covering her mouth. “I won’t be able to sleep after that. I have to watch out for the two of us.”

“I’ll keep watch,” she says, another yawn threatening to overtake her.

“You need to sleep. I can stay awake,” Liam says. In the dim lighting of the world, his eyes flash fiercely. “You didn’t see it. It was this huge animal, about as tall as one of these trees, and one moment it appeared in front of me and the next it went to the place where the light exploded after.” His voice shakes slightly, so she doesn’t press him further, but he continues. “By tomorrow we should reach the mountains. I hope you’re right about this.”

She peels her eyes open to look at him. “I swear on my life that we’ll find water. And then…”

She looks out to the horizon. To the moon. To the stars, one of which may have a planet orbiting it that has her life there, waiting for her to reclaim it. If they’re even in the same universe.

“We’ll find a way home.”