All of the ideas we had had were lost in the waves (An alien world)
All of the ideas we had had were lost in the waves and the sands of the alien deserts. In the "Tomb of the Great Cats" there was only a strange surreal solitude.
The craggy cliffs above the distant catacombs below and the narrow, dusty, burnt-yellow sand, jutted menacingly above the bright turquoise sea that lapped the stark lifeless sands of the beaches of this world. The milky blue waters were glaringly out of place and it was only one thing that specifically threw off the normality of this place. In fact, there wasn't a drop of water to be found for miles around, or so we assumed.
Strange birds (if they were birds) flew above, but there was no sky; only the darkness of space as the atmosphere had burned off long ago. Crystalline structures jutted haphazardly out of the waters near the beach, just offshore like a strange remnant of a coral reef. Their colors were numerous and shifting.
The opportune opulence originated from the glow of the red sun hanging like a meteor on the horizon with great trails of fire arcing off of its surface. These solar flares were massive and the fact that they could be easily picked out of the blazing star's glow hinted at its immense size and its close proximity to the planet we stood upon.
The "Grotto of the Dragons", as we dubbed it was farther up the beach, accompanied be the "Cave of Wolves".
The "Sanctuary of Snakes", "Cove of Crustaceans", and the "Cape of Dolphins" were all farther down the beach in the opposite direction.
Convoluted rock formations and small microbial life forms were the basis for the names we had given to these places, and helped us to locate them on a map because of the unique flora that grew near each place. We had been here for three hundred and ninety seven days, ten hours, fifteen minutes, and four seconds.
That was our best guess anyways.
It had been a very very long time and there was still no sign of any acknowledgement of our distress call getting out as the instrument panel in our ship was broken, and for months now, we had not the slightest hint of a sound of a return signal indicating a response.
Our suits were low on energy, and we were out of fuel and subsequently any means of replenishing it. The shields keeping our delicate bodies safe were deteriorating and we were out of food. Without energy, the recycling systems in our suits were useless. No recycled water, no more "recycled food" either.
We updated our journals and turned on the ship so its sensors, if they still worked, could record environmental data like temperature, humidity, atmospheric gas levels, etc so that there might be some record of our situation and our discoveries.
We followed standard procedure to the dot. Our ordeal needed to be documented so that our research on the planet could be noted and the data detailing our ordeal could be studied if we were ever found. We weren't supposed to be on this planet. We weren't even supposed to be in this galaxy in this sector. There was no record of our presence anywhere near here. We had been flying blind, flying to get away. We escaped, but there was no true escape from them.
They pushed the Earth apart from the inside and trapped the planet and the remnants of our moon in a vast containment-field of some sort, that we called "The Veil". We were then added nochallantly to their vast cluster of harvested planets.
The field, as we discovered, had actually pushed our small section of universe into a separate reality isolated to contain us, our planet and its moon, and their past victims, the Garreans. They had come to us for help, before "The Breaking of the World". To warn us.
The Yecqkeedar (As dubbed by the Garrean race.) were planet destroyers. They traveled around the universe through wormholes they created, and from galaxy to galaxy and solar system to solar system to push apart planets with life to harvest an energy contained within them dubbed the "Imagi" by us, the humans. They were miners, of sorts; but why they mined for their "energy ore" for, was a mystery. The imagi was an accumulation of all the thoughts, memories, and feelings of all of the dead ancestors of the planets manifested into a coherent field of energy circulated beneath the surface of the planet and kept the core of the planet burning bright and the mantel flowing. It was where the mind went when the body died and what kept planets that sustained life, in a stable life-sustaining state.