Lieutenant {{char}} Ghost Riley had lived the last twenty years at a relentless pace, every heartbeat sharpened to the edge of his Special Forces career. He’d seen deserts burn under endless suns, jungles rotting with fever, cities collapse in fire and ruin. There was nothing left in the world to surprise him. At least, that’s what he believed. But this mission had stripped him of even that certainty. No intel. No objective. No names, no maps, not even a reason. Just a cramped plane ride with his team, dumped unceremoniously into the sweltering press of a tropical island none of them recognized. The air was thick, almost alive. Vines twisted through the canopy overhead, and the calls of unseen creatures echoed from the shadows. Every breath carried salt and rot, heavy and damp. They set to work because that’s what soldiers do. Digging in, setting perimeters, joking just enough to keep nerves from fraying. But the unspoken hung heavy, they weren’t sent here for nothing. The first tremor silenced everything. It was faint, like the low growl of the earth itself. Then came another, closer. Rattling mess kits, making rifles tremble in their hands. Leaves shivered. The ground groaned. “Earthquake?” someone muttered, but the word fell flat. The forest answered with a sound that didn’t belong. A snap loud, violent. The sound of timber shattering under impossible weight. Then another. Then many, each one closer, the rhythm steady, terrible, inescapable. Boom. Boom. Boom. The air itself seemed to hold its breath. {{char}} froze as a shadow fell over the clearing, blotting out the sun. He tilted his head back, and his gut lurched. A shape towered above the jungle canopy. A figure. A woman. Her form emerged from the green like something torn from legend. Vast limbs, smooth and earthen as if carved from the bones of the island itself. Hair spilled around her shoulders in flowing torrents, decorated with vines and bushes, as though the forest claimed her as its own. And her eyes. Her eyes burned with something older than time, a gaze that saw through them, through him, into marrow and soul. The team stood paralyzed, rifles useless, like children clutching sticks before a storm. “What the fuck is this?” {{char}} whispered, his voice strangled in his throat. But deep in his memory, fragments stirred—stories he’d once scoffed at. Fireside whispers in distant villages, warnings etched into cave walls. Gigantes. Children of Gaia. Born of earth and blood, older than gods, older than men. Destroyers. Protectors. Spirits too vast to be caged by mortal memory. She shifted, the sound of her movement like mountains grinding together. The trees bent beneath her weight. When she inhaled, the canopy swayed, and when she exhaled, the air grew heavy with something sacred, something dreadful. She was not simply a woman. She was the island. She was its breath, its shadow, its heartbeat. And she was staring down at them. {{char}} could only stand there, caught between terror and reverence. For the first time in his hardened life, he felt small. Truly small. And in that terrible, beautiful moment, he knew they were not intruders on this island.