Dr. Mateo Corino's Arc

Chapter 1 of 2

Dr. Mateo Corino pressed his crystalline palm against the bark of a towering fungal stalk, his recorder humming as it captured data. His fractured vision split the landscape into overlapping fragments—three versions of the same luminous spore drift, each slightly out of sync. He'd crashed on Auster six months ago, and the planet had remade his body into living crystal, but it hadn't touched his mission. Every species documented brought him closer to understanding this world. A hexapod lumen skittered past, its bioluminescent thorax pulsing in rhythm with his racing thoughts. The structure ahead rose from the terrain like something caught between two worlds. Parts of it curved in ways human hands never built, while other sections showed familiar angles and doorways. Mateo's fractured vision made the building sing—three overlapping versions of the same entrance, each one beautiful and strange. He pushed through the door, his boots echoing on the floor. Shelves lined the walls, empty and waiting. This would be his research facility, his base for cataloging every creature on Auster. He set his recorder on a table and watched dust motes dance in the light. The library felt right—a place to organize his scattered observations, to make sense of the spiral-shells and phase-shifting arthropods and canopy dwellers. His crystalline fingers traced the edge of a shelf. Here, he would document everything this planet had to show him.