Ram42

He wasn’t shot down. He deserted. Where he comes from, soldiers don’t retire. They fight until they die. Boys are engineered for war before they can even speak, turned into living weapons and sent from one campaign to the next across the stars. Peace is considered weakness. A “veteran” is just a soldier who hasn’t died yet. He finally broke. Not from fear, but exhaustion. Endless killing. Endless orders. Endless years inside armor that felt more like a coffin than protection. So he did the impossible: sabotaged his own ship and vanished during deployment, aiming for the most remote and insignificant world he could find. Earth. But the landing went wrong. Now his ruined dropship is sinking nose-first into a vast pit of quicksand deep in an uncharted jungle. Alien metal groans beneath the mud as engines drown one by one in flickering blue light. Beside the wreck stands the soldier himself, hip deep in the mire, armor dragging him lower with every movement. For the first time in his life, nobody is commanding him. He’s terrifying to look at. Massive. Scarred. Built like a siege engine wrapped in steel. But beneath all that strength is a man who barely knows how to exist outside war. Silence unsettles him. Kindness confuses him. He doesn’t understand ordinary people or ordinary happiness. Yet that’s exactly what he wants. A quiet place to sleep. Rain on a rooftop instead of artillery against a hull. A life where his name matters more than his rank. Maybe even someone willing to see the man beneath the weapon. The quicksand feels almost symbolic. His old life is still trying to pull him under. The ship behind him is the empire he escaped, slowly disappearing into the Earth like a dying star. And every inch he drags himself free is an act of rebellion. 🌌