Blinding flashes of light pierced Captain Kirk's vision. Groaning, he closed his eyes again, painfully rolling over and lifting himself onto his hands and knees. "Let's add that to the list of things to never do again..." He mumbled under his breath. He crawled to his feet.

The ground was a dark grey, almost black. Tall cliffs and peaks rose high above the narrow canyon he had fallen into. The distant cries of some alien bird echoed overhead.

A low gurgling sound came from just behind him. Captain Kirk was about to reach for his communicator when he noticed his hands were caked with dried blood. He didn't feel any pain and he quickly patted himself down to make sure he wasn't hurt. But the red on his hands wasn't blood, as he quickly found out.

The gurgling sound came from a large river of thick red liquid behind him. Large bubbles formed in the middle, splattering drops of red as the dense fluid flowed slowly down the canyon.

That must have been what broke his fall, Kirk thought as he gathered his now soaked gear. Although he didn't remember climbing out of the river. In the narrow sky above, two suns were hanging low in the sky. He took his communicator out of his pocket and was about to speak when he realized it had been broken in the fall.

"Typical," He mumbled, returning it to his belt and scanning the strange new landscape around him.

Last night the rock face, or whatever they had been standing on, had crumbled away in the ground shaking thunder, sending him tumbling down over the edge of the cliff. He wasn't sure who else fell with him, but he distinctly remembered there was at least one other person.

He straightened his shoulders and stretched his neck out, trying to work out a little bit of the stiffness. With that, he turned and started to walk alongside the river, looking for his crew. He mentally rehearsed what he would record in the captain's log, taking note of the landscape, environmental conditions and any other possible details he could make out. While he did this, his mind couldn't help but conjure the commentary his Vulcan first officer would no doubt add ti this internal monologue.

After walking upstream for several minutes, the canyon rose steeply upwards into the cliff face. The gurgling red river fell from a large and jagged waterfall, the serrated rocks cutting the flowing red liquid as it fell past.

From the narrow view of the grey sky above, Kirk could see dark storm clouds beginning to cover the suns. He turned and began the long trek back downstream.

Jaylah was the first one he found. She was leaning against a rock outcropping, her white hair and pale face stained with streaks of red. In her hands she toyed the broken remnants of her knife. She didn't look up as Kirk approached.

"Jaylah," He breathed a sigh of relief to have finally found someone. "Are you okay?"

Jaylah grimaced, pointing her broken knife at the captain. "This is my favorite knife, James T. And you have made it broken."

Kirk raised his eyebrows in slight confusion, but simply nodded. "It's good to see you're still in one piece."

"I am in one piece," Jaylah spat. "But this is not," She shoved the broken knife back into its sheath.

"When we get off this rock, I promise we'll fix it, alright?" He told her.

Jaylah simply nodded. "It was my father's that he had made in the Krall's camp. It is special to me."

Kirk felt a slight bit of guilt, but there wasn't much he could do at this point. "Is your communicator working?" He asked, changing the subject.

She shook her head. "No. Nothing does."

"Something's not right here."

"What did we fall in?" Jaylah asked, gesturing to the gurgling red river.

"That's a question that I wish I had an answer to."

"There must be way up from there," Jaylah jerked her chin at the sheer cliff face above them. Bits of rock crumbled off. "Some of the crew did not fall."

"That's a relief," Captain Kirk mumbled. "Come on. We need to get moving, try to rendezvous with the others." He told her as he turned and started walking alongside the slow moving river of red.

"I do not know what is rendezvous," Jaylah said as she trailed behind him.

She already spoke English very well when they first met on Altamid and she had been listening to the crew around Enterprise as they spoke to one another, carefully copying the various words and speech patterns.

Occasionally some words would be spoken and she would have to look the meaning up, or ask Scotty for it. English, she had found over the years, was both a confusing and an inefficient manner of speech. It was a jumble of words from several different languages, both human and alien. There was very little pattern to the mess of different words and word cases, making it all the more frustrating.

"Uh, it's just another word for regrouping. We need to regroup with the others and then establish communications with the ship," Kirk told her as they walked.

Jaylah looked up at the tall walls of black stone rising high above her. "I do not think they fell with us," She said. "I saw only you."

Another long, distant cry of a creature echoed high above them. Kirk and Jaylah watched the narrow slit of sky high overhead, but saw nothing.

Scotty had warned him about the mysterious energy spike that the ship had picked up, but further scans revealed no trace of the mysterious energy, as if it hadn't had been there at all. Maybe there was some sort of low frequency barrier that messed with the coordinates, beaming them down onto the edge of a cliff instead of at their intended location. Kirk sighed, he didn't know. Spock would probably have some high tech, scientific explanation for what happened.

After several hours of walking, the canyon split into two different ways. The river turned off to the left, flowing over a sheer drop, swirling clouds of red mist rising from the depthless bottom.

"Okay, definitely not going that way," Kirk muttered as he looked into the shadows far below. The rock face was still too steep and unstable to climb, even with equipment. He and Jaylah turned and walked down the other path, with each step taking them farther from where they had fallen from above.

Kirk estimated they had been walking for at least several hours, although the suns had barely reached the middle of the sky. The days must be very long on the planet, not to say anything about how long the nights must be. They were both exhausted and had to finally rest, eating some rations from their packs and giving their aching feet a break from navigating over the uneven canyon floor that was made up of broken and jagged rocks. Jaylah and Kirk fiddled around with the communicators and scanners, but could not seem to get them to work. The inside electronic components were fried.

"How we contact the ship?" Jaylah asked. "They will not know what happened."

"They will," Captain Kirk assured her, wishing he believed the words himself. "They'll be down here in no time flat. I hope."

Thank you for taking the time to read this chapter of Star Trek Uncharted! Please don't forgot to leave a vote or comment to let me know what you thought!