November Cerberus. All shall pass. None shall leave.

On November 21st, Chen tried to fly the shuttle manually. The ice reached up from the ground and swallowed the landing struts. The craft tilted, and the cockpit glass frosted over in a fractal that looked exactly like a snarling dog’s face. Chen didn’t scream. She just hummed that three-tone chord, her fingers tapping the controls in a rhythm that wasn’t hers.

Commander Vale fired her gun into the ice. The bullet stopped mid-air, frozen in a web of crystals. The ice hummed a fourth tone—deep, final, like a stone door closing.

By November 27th, only Thorne and Vale remained in the central hub. Kovac had walked out onto the surface without a suit two days prior. The ice had welcomed him. They watched his outline on the monitor as it shimmered, broke apart, and reformed into a statue—a perfect, translucent copy, still smiling.

The station logs for —that’s what the crew called it, halfway through the third week—read like a slow-motion scream.