The Night the Sky Screamed

The settlement had been asleep for several hours when the night came apart. The campfire had burned down to a low orange glow, its embers barely sufficient to illuminate the ring of logs and stones that marked the boundary of Bixbus's communal space. The tents stood in loose formation around it, their canvas walls slack in air that had grown still and heavy with the particular quality of a world holding its breath. There was no moon. No stars. The Clivilian sky offered nothing but a darkness so total it pressed against the eyes like fabric, erasing distance and shape and any reassurance that the landscape beyond the firelight still existed.

Not everyone had made it to a tent. Kain had fallen asleep by the dying fire, his body curled in the dust where exhaustion and the residual warmth of the embers had claimed him before he could manage the short walk to shelter. He had been dreaming — vividly, disturbingly, with the kind of sensory intensity that the lagoon's influence seemed to produce in anyone who had come into contact with its water. The dream had concerned Brianne, and his body had responded to it in ways that left him gasping and disoriented when consciousness dragged him back to the surface, his hands shaking, the taste of dust in his mouth and the particular shame of a man who had lost control of himself in a place where privacy did not exist.

Inside the main tent, Jamie lay on his mattress with Duke pressed against his forearm. Joel was on the adjacent mattress, Henri curled in a tight ball at his feet, already snoring with the commitment of a creature who had decided that whatever happened next was someone else's problem. The arrangement was domestic in its ordinariness — father and son, two dogs, the soft sounds of breathing — but the evening had not been ordinary. Duke had been unsettled for hours, growling intermittently at sounds or scents that no human ear could detect, his body cycling between tense alertness and reluctant rest in a pattern that kept Jamie from sleeping properly and left Joel staring at the tent's dark ceiling wondering what the dog could sense that they could not.

Jamie soothed Duke with the repetitive stroke of hand through fur, the gesture as much for his own benefit as the dog's. Joel watched the silhouette of his father's arm moving in the darkness and felt the particular ache of being unable to help — his body still too weak from resurrection to do more than lie still and observe, his throat still healing, his grip still unreliable. When Jamie told Duke to stop growling, the instruction carried the thin edge of a man whose patience had been tested by a day that had included stolen breakfast, difficult newcomers, impossible seedlings, a confrontation about coins, and the accumulated weight of caring for a son who had died and returned in ways no one could explain.

It began with Lois.

Glenda's retriever had been restless throughout the evening, her behaviour shadowing Duke's in a register that spoke of something beyond routine canine anxiety. The bark that split the silence was not the playful sound the settlers had grown accustomed to during the day. It was sharp, urgent, and primal — the alarm call of an animal that had detected a threat its human companions could not perceive. The sound cut through the camp with the clarity of breaking glass, reaching every tent simultaneously, dragging every sleeper toward consciousness with the instinctive understanding that something was profoundly wrong.

Duke's response was instantaneous. The small dog transformed from restless companion to coiled spring in the space between heartbeats, every muscle tensed toward the source of the sound. Jamie grabbed for him. Joel, responding to his father's barked instruction, took Duke's weight into his arms and held on with everything his weakened body could offer. Jamie told Joel he thought it was just an approaching dust storm, the assessment delivered with a confidence that neither of them believed, and moved toward the tent entrance to investigate.

Outside, the camp erupted. Voices collided in the darkness — panicked, overlapping, stripped of the composure that daylight permitted. Kain, jolted from sleep by the fire, scrambled to his feet still disoriented from his dream and shouted that they were surrounded. Karen and Chris emerged from their tent into air that bit at exposed skin and carried dust in stinging gusts. Paul attempted to impose calm with the suggestion that it was merely a dust storm, but his sentence collapsed before it was finished, choked by the sight that silenced every voice in the settlement.

The Portal ignited on the horizon.

The flare was unmistakable — a cascade of electric blues, shimmering violets, and streaks of molten gold that painted the distant dunes in colours that did not belong to the natural spectrum of any world. The light was brief, lasting only seconds before the darkness swallowed it again, but its implications were devastating. Karen asked if it was Luke. Luke answered from the shadows beside her. He was here. He was standing in the camp. The Portal had activated without him.

Someone else had a Portal Key. Someone else was in Clivilius.

The scream that followed erased whatever remained of rational thought. It was a sound that belonged to no species the settlers could identify — raw, unfiltered, carrying a quality of terror or fury that vibrated in the chest and turned the blood cold. It echoed off the dunes and distorted in the wind until it seemed to come from everywhere at once, from the darkness itself, from the ground beneath their feet.

Lois bolted. The golden retriever tore into the night as though responding to a command no human had issued, her form swallowed by the blackness within seconds. Glenda did not hesitate. She ran after her dog with the desperate instinct of a woman whose companion was racing toward something that could kill them both. Paul followed Glenda without thinking, driven by the same impulse that had made him volunteer for every task since his arrival: the need to be useful, to act, to not be the one who stood still while others ran toward danger.

Kain snatched the frying pan from beside the fire and sprinted after them. The firelight caught the metal surface for one brief moment, turning it into a glinting beacon, before he too was consumed by the dark.

Luke shouted for someone to grab Duke and then ran out into the night, his figure dissolving into the void as though the darkness had been waiting for him.

Inside the tent, Duke broke free. Joel's arms, still rebuilding the strength that resurrection had not fully restored, could not contain a dog whose every instinct was screaming at him to follow the sounds of chaos into the dark. The small body wrenched itself from Joel's grip and was gone, a pale blur shooting through the tent flap into the night. Jamie, who had been at the entrance, gave chase immediately, his voice cracking with an anguish that went beyond the loss of a dog — this was a father whose son was inside that tent and whose dog was racing toward something unknown, and he could not protect both.

Joel was left alone. Henri remained in his corner, wide-eyed and silent, having made the calculation that whatever was happening outside was not his concern. The tent, which moments earlier had held a father, a son, and two dogs in the fragile arrangement of a family trying to sleep through another dark night, was now empty save for a boy who could barely walk and a dog who had chosen stillness over pursuit.

At the fire, Karen lurched forward to follow the others. Chris caught her arm. His grip was firm, his voice low and steady with the particular authority of a man who understood that running blind into absolute darkness would not help anyone and would likely add two more lost people to a situation already spiralling beyond recovery. Karen fought the instinct to pull free. Every impulse demanded action — the need to be useful, the need to not stand passive while the settlement disintegrated around her. But Chris was right. The darkness was total. They could not see their own feet. They would only get lost.

They stood together at the dying fire, his arms around her, and listened to the sounds of Bixbus emptying itself into the night. The shouts of their companions grew thinner with distance, twisted and warped by wind and terrain until they became ghostly fragments that could have been coming from any direction. The dogs had fallen silent. The scream did not repeat. The Portal's light had vanished. There was nothing left but the sporadic crackle of embers, the hiss of dust against canvas, and the vast, suffocating weight of a darkness that had swallowed every person, every animal, every sound, and offered nothing in return but the knowledge that Karen and Chris were alone in a place they did not understand, surrounded by threats they could not see, waiting for people who might not come back.