Covenant of Ash

Total oblivion. In the background, distant and muffled—piercing screams and weeping, suppressed by the hum of servos and the occasional burst of gunfire. Chaos beneath cascades of explosions and a deafening chorus of insectoid clicking.

In an instant, everything cuts out.

Time passes. Dully, as if through cotton, you feel movement—as if you are being dragged, lifted, inspected, and laid down on something soft. Fragments of indistinct voices, the rhythmic thud of a machine’s idle cycle. Then, darkness envelops your body once more like an oily film.

Consciousness returns slowly. First, the sounds: water dripping somewhere, the wind driving sand against metal outside, the low hum of a lamp. Then, the smells: iron, machine oil, scorched earth, and something sour, like stale sweat. And only then, the light. Dim, filtering through cracks and from a single lamp on a table.

You see a ceiling of rusted sheets, the seams choked with dust. The walls of the shack are made of crumpled metal, rivets, and scraps of plating. The floor is packed sand. On the table lies a disassembled mechanism, tools, and a tin mug.

Two people are nearby. One is lean and sinewy, wearing an oil-stained jacket with welding goggles perched on his forehead. He sits on an overturned crate, fiddling with a part, watching you from under his brow. The second is a woman with short-cropped hair, her arms stained with grease up to the elbows, a shotgun resting at her feet. She stands by the entrance, back to you, staring through a slit between the metal sheets.