Drag this piece ruthlessly

it's an opener to a new work. I want you to tear it apart. Be funny about it. Be cruel. Just give 0 compliments.

Year of Noctis, 133rd day, 53 A.E.

Spontaneous cranial collapse. That’s what the coroner’s report said. No one will question it as he has no apparent external injuries. To them, he appears to be like any other fifteen year old, apart from his grayed skin. They didn’t clean the trails of blood from his ears.

googled “tacky sci-fi”

By the time we got him back to safety, to Sanctus, rigor mortis had set in. The last stretch of our return was awful. It took all my strength to keep him from stiffly rolling around the back of the scouting cart as our wheels turned over rocky dirt paths.

He isn’t the first I’ve seen fall in some undefinable way. Whenever we venture too close to the Core things go awry. The further away from Sanctus we get, the more men we lose. In this specific incident, I have hints as to what went wrong but can draw no suitable conclusion.

I believe he was targeted by Astaris. Him specifically. His last words were , “Do you hear that?”. The fear in his eyes. His fingers scratching at his ears, pulling them so tightly that I thought they would pop off. His final scream.

He may have died from spontaneous cranial collapse as the doctors say, but it was not random. It was an attack. The weapon in question? I haven’t a clue.

I want to protect others from this. I want to protect myself from this. But these forces are beyond me. Beyond my expertise. There is nothing in our scouting histories that I can lean on. All I know is that men will die on our expeditions.

And something I have yet to share, because I don’t see a possible solution for it… every man that falls is the youngest of us.

Astaris is targeting them specifically. This I know to be true. But the expeditions have to continue. It is our only way to find freedom.

To their future,

Scouts’ Leader KJ