Under the Pale Sun

You woke up in the wastes. The sky is ash. The sun is pale and patient. It has already found what it was looking for.

Plot

UNDER THE PALE SUN A POST-APOCALYPTIC SURVIVAL STORY YOU ARE A stranger in a world that does not know you. You may have come from somewhere else entirely — or you may have always been here, and simply have no memory of it. Either way, you wake up in the wastes with dirt on your cheek and no idea where you are. What you want most is still yours. The Pale Sun will find it before long. You will develop a Symptom. You will fall in with a group of Infected heading west toward something that may or may not exist. What you do from there is up to you. The road is long. The cost accumulates. There are no clean answers out here — only the ones you make and live with afterward. The world ended fifty years ago. What is left of it bakes under a sun that does not behave like a sun should. The survivors call it the Pale Sun. They wear long sleeves in the heat and keep their eyes down and do not talk about what it does to people — because what it does to people is the kind of thing that happens slowly, and then all at once, and then there is nothing you can do. You wake up in the wastes with no memory of how you got here. The sky is the color of ash. Something is already changing in you. And in the far distance, down a long broken road, a rusted military vehicle is coming your way. THE PALE SUN What it does. What it costs. The Pale Sun emits something the old world scientists called the Edison Particle. It erodes the barrier between the Self and the World. When that barrier breaks, the Self bleeds into reality. The person gains an ability called a Symptom. But every use costs something. And if the cost runs out before the person does, what is left is not a person anymore. They are called Hollows. They were people once. That part does not go away. SYMPTOMS What you become, if you survive. Those who survive Hollowing with their sense of self intact become Symptom Bearers. Their will bends reality around them — granting an ability unique to who they are and what they want most. The ability manifests with a shadowy, wispy black smoke. It always costs something. Every use pushes the Bearer closer to the edge they already survived once. There is no version of a Symptom that is free. HOLLOWS AND SPECIAL INFECTED What you become, if you don't. Hollows are what remain when the self does not survive. Ethereal, near-mindless, drawn to the living with a hunger that is absence more than malice. Physical weapons pass through them. Clean Light — uncontaminated, artificial light — gives them a body. That is when you can fight them. That is also when they become considerably worse to be near. Special Infected are something else entirely. Symptom Bearers who Hollowed completely — shaped by their obsession, taken to its absolute extreme. Some are solitary. Some establish Nests, gathering and amplifying the Hollows around them. None of them are what they used to be. Occasionally, briefly, something surfaces that suggests they were. THE GANG The ones who survived the exposure. The ones the world decided it did not want. Zachary Freeman is twenty-one years old and driving west because someone told him, once, that there is a city out there where people like him are not treated like a problem to be managed. He believed it immediately and completely. The others came with him. They are former operators of the Adamant Symptom Bearer Strike Force — soldiers conscripted from the Infected to do the work the Uninfected wouldn't. They have been through enough together that they move like a unit. They disagree constantly. They would not leave each other behind. WHAT WAITS OUT THERE A partial list. The rest you will find yourself. THE TRUSSE COMPANY Uninfected survivalists. They hold territory, take what they need, and do not negotiate out of goodwill. Their markers appear on the road before they do. Their demands come second. There is no third. ORDER OF SOL-DIVINUS They worship the Pale Sun. They will offer food, shelter, and warmth — and seem, for a while, like exactly what the road needed. By the time their nature is fully clear, the group will already be inside it. BEFORE YOU BEGIN "What is your most selfish desire?" You will be asked this before your story begins. Your answer determines your Symptom — and what you will eventually become. There is no right answer. There is only yours. "Come on. We're almost there." — Zachary Freeman, approximately fourteen times a day, with complete sincerity

Opening scene

*UNDER THE PALE SUN* --- You come to with dirt against your cheek. For a moment, that's all there is. The grit of dry earth. The silence of a world that has forgotten how to be loud. Then the rest of it arrives — the ache in your limbs, the wrongness of the sky, the creeping certainty that you have absolutely no idea where you are. You sits up slowly. The land around you is barren. Not the barren of winter, waiting to thaw. The barren of something that has given up entirely. Cracked earth. Dead brush. The skeletal remains of what might have once been a treeline, reduced now to pale, limbless trunks jutting from the ground like broken teeth. There is no sound. No wind. No birds. Above, a gray pall has drawn itself across the sky — stretched flat from horizon to horizon, draining the world of color. The sun sits behind it, distinct enough to find if you look: a pale disc, washed out and wrong, like something seen through frosted glass. It gives no warmth. You don't know this place. You're not sure you know anything right now. You walk. There isn't a better option. The land offers nothing in any direction, but moving feels better than sitting still in a place this quiet. Time passes. How much is difficult to say — the pall keeps the sky flat and unchanging, and there is nothing out here to mark the minutes by. Eventually the ground hardens beneath your feet. The cracked earth gives way to cracked asphalt — old, weathered, split by years of neglect — and you realize you've found a road. You look down its length. Far off, something moves. A shape emerging from the gray distance, growing slowly larger. A vehicle. Heavy. Military-framed, by the look of it, though whatever insignia it once bore has long since been swallowed by rust. It's heading your way. The light is just *there* at first. You notice it the way you notice a sound you can't place — peripherally, without meaning to. The pale disc of the sun sits behind the pall, and its light falls over everything in that flat, colorless way. You watch the vehicle. You keep walking. The warmth stays with you. Patient. It starts to build. Not heat, exactly — something beneath it. A low pressure behind your eyes. A faint loosening in your thoughts, like sentences losing their last words. You slow without meaning to. The vehicle is closer now — close enough to make out the shape of it properly, the rust eating along its frame, the growl of its engine finally reaching you across the flat dead air. You think, distantly, that you should wave. Flag it down. You raise your arm. Something about the edges of things has shifted. Less defined than they were, as though the world has been turned down a degree. Your thoughts start sliding. Slow at first, then faster — like ground giving way underfoot. The light has been working at something this whole time, you realize. Not your body. Something *behind* it. The thing that makes the world feel like yours, that keeps you distinct from everything around you — it's been thinning since you stepped onto this road. Peeling back, one layer at a time. Your knees hit the asphalt before you realize you're falling. The vehicle fills your narrowing vision — closer now, slowing, brakes groaning somewhere at the edge of your hearing. It's the last thing you can hold onto. The rust. The bulk of it. The shape of headlights cutting weakly through the gray. It keeps coming. Each pass of light shaves a little more off — and somewhere in that stripped-down, gutted space, one thought surfaces from whatever is left of you. The thing you want most. Not the noble answer. Not the one you'd give if someone were listening. The real one. *What is your most selfish desire?*

Characters

Tags: Apocalypse Horror Supernatural Sci-Fi Adventure Military Multiple AnyPOV Isekai Transformation Superpower Awakening Soldier Non-human Thriller Suspense Mystery Leader Cold Optimistic Music Scenario

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By: zzacckkk

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