My eyes peeled open. My mouth and throat felt as though I’d swallowed an entire cotton field. Sharp pain cut through my brain, pulsating and spreading outward in blistering heatwaves. My first instinct was to touch my head, looking for a blade or foreign object stuck in it—otherwise I couldn’t explain the agonizing discomfort.

I groaned, then held my breath for a second, as I listened to the noise travel before it hit the walls and came back to me. I was staring at white lights mounted on a glass ceiling. Beyond it was black stone. I inhaled through my nose, catching every scent around me.

Moss. Moisture. Glass.

When it felt safe enough to move my eyes and head around without crying out in pain, I checked my surroundings. I was in a glass box, lying in a bed. It felt soft and comfortable. Water trickled somewhere below. I looked down and spotted the little stream going through the moss-covered floor. It looked eerily familiar.

“Derek?” Sofia’s voice made my heart jump.

I sat up—a little too fast. The pain came back with a vengeance, making me hiss.

“Derek, are you okay, honey?” Sofia asked.

She sounded close, yet far away. My blood ran colder than usual as I turned my head and saw my wife in a glass box next to mine.

“What the—” I muttered, then found the strength to stand.

My entire body hurt. I wobbled for a while before I regained my stability.

“Derek… Talk to me. Are you okay?” Sofia replied, looking terribly concerned. She sat in a bed similar to mine. The stream crossed through her section of mossy stone floor, too.

I nodded slowly. “For the most part. I see all my limbs are intact, but I feel like I’ve got the world’s worst hangover,” I said. “I haven’t felt like this in hundreds of years… Turning human felt better than this.”

I checked my bed again. There were soft blankets and a pillow on it. Someone had gone to the trouble of providing us with comfort in our… captivity.

“Where are we?” I breathed.

All around us, there was nothing but stone. Attached to our glass enclosures were several more identical boxes. I moved closer to the wall in front of me and stifled a yelp. We were all here, each kept separately, but close to one another. There was always a wall connecting the couples. Most of them were still out of it, but Lucas and Vivienne were starting to come to.

I dashed over to Sofia’s side, ignoring the earth spinning around me for a moment, and slapped my hands on the glass, desperate to touch her, to hold her, to keep her safe and close… but who was I kidding? We were trapped.

“Sofia, how are you feeling?” I asked her, my voice gruff and trembling.

“Like I chugged down a bucket of glass,” she murmured, glancing around. “Baby, what is this place? How did we get here? Do you remember anything?”

“I… I’m not sure…”

I checked the place out again, this time with more clarity as our circumstances came into focus. This was similar to the cave we’d found, with black walls and a rounded ceiling, and moss growing nearly everywhere. The stream passed through each of the glass boxes, then went around in a circle, delineating our collective prison.

The hall itself was dark, but lights and ventilation systems had been fitted on the ceiling of each of our glass boxes. The air was clean and fresh, and I had a feeling all the vegetation acted like a natural filtration system, despite the seemingly closed space.

I checked every corner and wall bottom. It was sealed tight with a solid mixture of metals. I clawed at it, trying to see how deep I could go, but I stopped when my fingers started to bleed. I was hurting myself, and not making any progress, either.

I punched the glass. All it did was make my knuckles hurt. The pane didn’t even crack or budge. “Honey, I think we’re utterly stuck here,” I said quietly.

“Ugh, I feel like I’ve been run over by an eighteen-wheeler,” Lucas groaned as he slowly got up.

One by one, our group came to and experienced the same stages of shock, horror, and the cold-blooded calm that came afterward, where our critical thinking kicked in.

“I thought this was supposed to be the perfect tropical vacation,” Claudia snapped. “I’m pretty sure it didn’t include getting locked up in this place.”

“It definitely wasn’t in the brochure,” Yuri replied, leaning against the glass wall so he could stay close to her. Claudia gave him a pained look, placing a hand on the glass as tears came up to her eyes.

“I wish I could hold you right now,” she whispered.

It broke my heart to see her like this. To see all of them like this. My Sofia was brave and composed, but I knew that, deep down, she was feeling the same anguish as me. We looked at each other for a while, before she took a deep breath and turned her head so she could see everyone.

“Is everybody okay?” she asked, raising her voice.

We all nodded in almost-perfect unison. Sofia had this way of capturing our attention with the skill level of a snake charmer. She’d gone into damage-control mode, and it was part of the reason I’d insisted that we share GASP leadership from day one.

“What’s the last thing you remember?” she added.

I thought about it, but it took me a while to get past the blur.

“I think we got back from the cave, after I showed it to you guys,” I said.

“Ah, yes, the weird metallic pods and glowing cables,” Cameron replied, pursing his lips.

“Oh, right. And my wife’s blunder. Can’t forget that, now, can we?” Yuri chuckled dryly.

Claudia let out a low growl. “I didn’t think it would come off so easily. Total health and safety violation for whatever was in that pod.”

“Wait,” Corrine grumbled. “We came back to the resort, for sure. We talked about what we’d seen. I was quite firm in my theory that it was a stasis chamber of sorts, meant to preserve a species of intelligent life.”

“We had dinner,” Lucas said, frowning. “We agreed to go back to Strava twelve hours earlier to bring back a research team and organize a proper study of that cave. We went to bed early, too.”

As I replayed that evening in my head, I made it to the point when I’d closed my eyes, in bed, with Sofia soft and purring in my arms. I nodded slowly, then felt chills running down my spine.

“I woke up in the middle of the night,” I remembered. “I’d heard a noise, I think. And I found myself staring into a pair of big, black eyes.”

A couple of seconds passed, until Marion gasped. “Mon dieu! I remember that too! Big eyes, and black like ink! All over! There were no pupils, just black, glossy eyeballs beneath the eyelids…”

“And there was a strange scent,” Sofia added. “I can still smell it. Lemony and… something else, something pungent, like ammonia or something.”

“Holy crap, they knocked us out with gas or something!” Xavier croaked, staring at us with wide eyes and a gaping mouth. “We were knocked out!”

I sighed. “Then nothing. Everything went dark. I woke up in here, just now.”

“How long do you think we were out?” Ibrahim asked.

I shrugged. “I don’t know. It depends on how potent that gas or whatever they took us out with was.”

Corrine brought her index and middle fingers up to her lips. She whispered a spell, then placed her fingertips on the glass. We all heard the sizzling sound. Smoke came out from her contact with the glass. Flames burst violently and nearly swallowed her whole, but Corrine was quick to pull herself out of harm’s way. The fire got instantly sucked through the ventilation system above them, then dissipated.

“Corrine, are you okay?” I asked, worrying about her.

She checked her blistered fingers, then looked at me and nodded. Her face was covered in soot. “Not doing that again,” she replied.

“What were you thinking?” Ibrahim reprimanded her.

She scoffed, then leaned against the glass wall where he stood. “I was thinking fire might get us out of here, but, clearly, I was wrong.”

I looked at the glass box again. Only then did I notice the tiny incisions along the ceiling’s edges. Symbols had been carved into it, smaller than my fingernail. That was magic of some kind, for sure. The scribbles reminded me of runes.

“There’s some kind of magic at work here,” I said, pointing at them.

Corrine followed my gaze, then looked up and gasped. “Hah! I see them! But wait…” She frowned again. “I don’t recognize any of it. What the hell?!”

“Maybe it’s there to repel magic of any kind,” Ibrahim offered. “That was a low-level fire spell you performed. It shouldn’t have blown up in your face like that.”

“Someone’s deliberately keeping us in here and prohibiting us from using magic?” Lucas concluded, extremely alarmed. He checked his pockets. “Dammit. My lighters are gone. I’m useless without a fire source. And the box is sealed tight with something, I can’t thin myself and sneak out.”

“Whoever trapped us here seems to know something about our abilities,” I said.

A loud clang tore through the hall. We all turned our heads to see a narrow door open, somewhere farther to my left. A tall figure walked in, the silhouette black against the yellow light coming in from the doorway.

We stood still, listening to every sound, waiting for the creature to come into full view. When he did, my stomach basically hit the floor.

He wasn’t just tall. He was downright the most beautiful creature I had ever seen—and I wasn’t one to say such a thing lightly. His hair was long, pale gray, and perfectly straight, combed down his back. His figure was mostly humanoid—like the rest of us, he had two legs and arms, a head and whatnot. His beauty was something ethereal, pretty much out of this world.

His cheeks were high and sharp, his eyebrows arched and slim. The blade of his nose cast a dramatic shadow over his small, cupid’s bow mouth. His lips were pale, with barely a smidge of pink. His ears reminded me of the Dhaxanians, strangely pointed at the tops. But his eyes were the strangest I’d ever seen. One was a vivid green, the other a most intense blue. And they were both fixed on… me.

He wore a white, silken tunic, covering his masculine figure. He wasn’t bulky, but he wasn’t slender, either. He was somewhere in between, and the soft fabric stretched over his toned muscles, broad shoulders, and narrow hips. Self-confidence beamed out of him, but not in a narcissistic fashion. This was a creature who carried great intelligence. I could see it in his eyes.

He was calm, almost clinical. His lips stretched into a polite smile as he measured each of us from head to toe. I had to set my anger aside, even though it was bubbling up to the surface and pulling a curtain of scarlet red over my eyes.

“Who are you?” I asked, my tone firm and demanding.

I had to stand my ground, and he didn’t seem to mind. It didn’t even affect his posture or half-smile. He nodded once, his hands resting behind his back.

“I am Ta’Zan Marduk,” he said.

His voice made my insides melt. How was it possible for a creature like him to have such an effect on me? A quick glance over my shoulder made me realize that the rest of my group was equally entranced and stunned by his presence. Whatever Ta’Zan was, he was powerful. I could feel it, deep in my bones. That kind of energy was nearly impossible to come across. I’d never felt anything like it.

“Why are we here? What do you want from us?” I replied.

He didn’t answer this time around, but he kept his gaze fixed on me. His eyes were going to haunt me for an eternity.

“It’s in your best interest to let us out,” I added. “We’re not the kind of people you want to keep in a cage.”

“It’s not a cage. It’s a glass box,” he replied, quite matter-of-factly.

“Semantics?! Seriously?” Lucas snapped and punched the glass wall in front of him. “Let us out, or, I swear, you will regret it!”

Ta’Zan briefly glanced at him, then sighed and shifted his focus back to me. For some reason, I had a feeling I was the one he was interested in talking to.

“I don’t respond well to threats,” Ta’Zan said.

“Well, we don’t respond well to being abducted and crammed into glass boxes,” I shot back. My nerves were stretched too thin. “What do you want from us? Why are we here? Where did you come from?”

“Why don’t you let us out, so we can talk about whatever this is peacefully?” Sofia interjected.

“You drugged us, didn’t you?” Claudia crossed her arms as she scowled at him.

“You’re using some kind of magic to keep us from getting out,” Corrine added. Coming from her, it was more of a statement, rather than a question.

Ta’Zan ignored them all and kept his eyes on me. There was a glimmer of fascination in them. It set my survival instinct on fire, as I suddenly felt like a most prized lab rat.

“You should really let us out now. The longer you keep us here, the stronger my urge to rip your throat out,” Lucas said, his tone clipped.

“I thought I made myself clear,” Ta’Zan replied, deliberately ignoring him. “I don’t respond well to threats.”

“And I thought I made myself clear, as well. Crystal, in fact. We do not belong in glass boxes,” I said, my hands balling into fists.

Ta’Zan stepped forward, narrowing his strange eyes at me. The entire atmosphere around us shifted. The air was supercharged with that incredible energy of his. For the first time in a very long time, something clutched at my throat—something I hadn’t felt in years. Crippling dread. Whatever Ta’Zan was, he inspired fear, even to creatures like me.

My instincts told me that I desperately needed a new approach with this guy if I wanted to get us out of here. I assumed that our people were going to come looking for us, but what if they couldn’t find us? What if he’d taken us off the planet, or hidden us so well and warded us with such powerful magic that we’d never be found? Part of me was already convinced that setting ourselves free was on us, and only us.

“You should get used to this place, Derek,” Ta’Zan said.

His reply cut my breath off. He knew my name. Quick reasoning reminded me that he’d taken us from the resort. There was plenty of stuff there with our names on it, including IDs and personalized leather items we’d had crafted on GASP’s thirtieth anniversary.

“He knows your name,” Aiden whispered.

“I know all your names,” Ta’Zan replied, staring at me. “Derek. Sofia. Xavier. Vivienne. Lucas. Marion. Cameron. Liana. Corrine. Ibrahim. Aiden. Kailyn. Claudia. Yuri.”

“Congratulations. You remembered all our names. I’ll bet you’re a hit at parties,” Claudia muttered.

“You should get comfortable,” Ta’Zan said to me. “You’ll be here for a while. I must say, I’ve never encountered specimens such as yourselves before. I don’t say this lightly… In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever said it with such pathos, but… I’m thrilled, I’m fascinated, and I am downright excited by the prospects of your genetic material,” he added, his tone still weirdly flat. “I look forward to working with you.”

“Wait, what… what do you mean?” I replied.

He didn’t answer.

I dashed forward and pressed my palms against the glass. He stood a couple of feet away. The energy coming out of him felt even stronger and heavier, pulling my shoulders down. It was physically overwhelming to be so close to him.

“What are you talking about? What do you want?” I insisted, gritting my teeth.

“You will be fed soon,” he said. “I’ve lifted some genetic samples off you already. I’ve understood your dietary needs and restrictions. But you should all just calm down and get comfortable.”

He turned around and walked back to the open door. His movements were so fluid, it looked as though he was gliding across the floor. The farther he got, the easier it became for me to breathe and actually focus.

I opened my mouth to say something, but, deep down, I knew that none of my words would persuade him to release us. I knew nothing about him, yet he knew so much about us.

He stopped in the doorway and gave me an over-the-shoulder glance.

“This is your home now,” he informed us.

“Wait, no—” I managed, but the door shut behind him with that loud, almost unbearable clang.

Dread rumbled through my veins, making my blood thicken. I looked back at Sofia, my brother, my sister, my closest and dearest friends… and I had nothing to say to them. Nothing to comfort them or shed any light on our situation.

I had no idea who Ta’Zan was or where he’d come from. I didn’t know how he’d captured us, or where he was keeping us. I didn’t even know if he was acting alone, or if he had help. The black eyes I remembered made me think he wasn’t operating on his own, but still, everything was so blank, so vague.

There we were, our vacation on Strava dramatically cut short. Stuck in glass boxes with no way of getting ourselves out. A promise of feeding that would suit our “dietary needs,” which Ta’Zan knew about because he’d “lifted genetic samples.”

It looked as though our lives had gotten us off the shelf, thrusting us back into the strangest and most troubling of messes. This wasn’t what I’d hoped for our Shadian founders’ club.

However, the solution was clear: survive and get out.

Dear Shaddict,

Thank you for reading !

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