Asara walked through the desert.
The sand shifted around her ankles like snakes, whispering hunger, dragging her down grain by grain.
The desert spared no one. It devoured the weak, the strong, the indifferent—leveling all into silence.
The rolling dunes of scorched gold took everything, offering no reprieve to the unfortunate souls birthed upon its belly.
Still, Asara walked. Her legs trembled beneath the weight she bore.
"Ah....It hurts..." came a groan, rasping near her ears.
"Shut up, old Man "She snapped – for the eighteenth time, by her reckoning. She said it to the thing slung across her back, if it could still be called a man.
"A last walk..." he wheezed, punctuated by a hacking cough.
"You're not walking. I am."
Her legs howled in pain, but she could not relent. She had a duty—deliver this man to Dharuj.
Dharuj: the only city of the Desert. A thin shard of civilization stabbed into this sun-sick wasteland.
And it was at war.
She didn't know who the enemy was. Only whispers reached her ears—of fire, of pikes, of death given form.
The old man on her back was what they called a Drowner.
She had no inkling why they called them that—there were no wells deep enough here, no lakes, no oceans to steal a breath. But she knew what they were. Victims of a sickness that blistered their bodies with thumb-sized boils filled with water.
She knew what happened to these people. They were torn open—so that the soldiers might drink. That was this old man's fate.
The desert spared no one. Neither did it's children.
As far as Asara was concerned, it was fair enough. Soldiers fought, after all. They bled so the rest could dream. She didn't pity the old man.
"Do you know what empty skies mean?" he asked suddenly.
It was their game—his questions, her dismissals. "I don't know." Or "Shut up." The ramblings of a man whose fate was sealed.
But this time, she looked up.
Clear skies.
No storm choking the heavens. Odd. Sandstorms rarely raged at ground level, but the sky—home was never without its veil of dust.
"This is Dharuj," she told him, surprising even herself with the reply. "Of course it's different."
Her first time. She was thrilled. Dreaming. What if a soldier noticed her as she delivered the water bag? She'd been praised for her beauty before.
A slender frame, sharp of jaw and cheekbone. Skin the colour of darkened earth. Hazel eyes that caught the dying sun like gemstones. Curls of brown hair—wild, charming. A rare thing, she was told, among the girls of her age.
"And I am of age, too," she mused aloud. "I'll marry someday. Better it be a soldier, so I can live in Dharuj."
She skipped the rest. The daydream. Let the old man fill in the blanks. He liked to pretend wisdom—
he'd understand.
"You've heard of him, haven't you?" he barked, suddenly sharp.
"I will meet him. The man of my dreams!" she cried.
"He comes when the skies are clear."
"He must be handsome. And definitely a soldier."
"Or is it because of him... that the skies are clear?"
"You're talkative today, old man." Asara laughed.
It was a bright laugh—pure, foolish, naive. The kind only a young girl could give. First love for a man that did not exist.
The old man fell silent.
They walked, the quiet between them lengthening.
"Ah.....here it is...the final stretch," came his hoarse whisper.
She looked up.
The walls of Dharuj rose before them, the horizon painted in dust and fire.
Asara felt her breath hitch. Not from exertion. Not from the weight of the old man digging into her spine. No, it was something deeper—something rooted in memory.
Her mother's voice stirred within her.
"Dharuj, my daughter, is the jewel in the desert's throat. A city of sun-baked bricks, where the roads glitter with mica and laughter echoes through the streets. Merchants on every corner, their voices thick with honeyed tongues. Perfumes in the air, colours beyond counting, and water, Asara. Water that springs from a deep, endless well in the city's heart."
She had clung to those stories like a child clutching a precious shell.
In her tribe, water was a myth. Blood was more common.
They drank it when they could. Prey—yes. Enemies—often. Friends—when grief had no time to linger.
Even then, water was a word said with reverence. Not with longing—but with worship—almost fanatical.
And now she was here.
The city loomed, dreamlike, carved from stories.
She imagined the laughter her mother promised. The market stalls. A soldier, maybe, smiling at her like she'd stepped from the legends he'd once heard as a boy.
Her pace quickened.
But the air stank—smoke, and worse.
There was no gate. Perhaps there never had been. No one greeted her.
She walked into emptiness.
The old man said nothing as they approached.
He lay slumped against her back like a bag of brittle bones, yet his mind wandered.
Drifting across the centuries like wind over dunes.
"Caladan."
The name was a stone in his chest. A forgotten weight.
"So. You've awakened again, old friend. So have I."
The king of Dharuj—some preening monarch drunk on illusions of permanence—had challenged Caladan.
The master of the Pyke.
A man who bent the sorcery of mountains to his will.
A man who carved his citadel from obsidian and floated it over empires.
A man who had once, long ago, sat beside him—sharing wine beneath a ruined moon.
"Wisdom without humility breeds ruin," the old man mused. "Arrogance is a fire that needs no spark."
And so Dharuj would fall.
He smiled, though his lips were cracked and hidden.
What irony, to be carried like a cripple by a mortal girl—an offering of flesh to the pyre of a dying city.
She thought he was a Drowner—sickly abominations. She thought she was helping the city.
He played the part well. He always had.
But he was no victim. He was no man.
"She walks to her death, thinking she walks to deliver salvation." He thought, with amusement.
What a theatre life continued to be.
"Let it burn. They have forgotten their gods. Let me see Caladan again, the boy must have grown."
The streets of Dharuj were bleeding.
Asara's sandals slipped on blood-slick stone, and the air pressed down on her chest, hot and thick, like breath from a furnace. The city stank—not just of fire and iron, but of rot, of hope charred and rotting in the corners. Broken carts, shattered pottery, painted signs burned black and unreadable. Once, someone had loved this place.
Now, screams bounced off the walls like dying echoes.
She stumbled forward, wide-eyed, clutching at the old man as if he anchored her to some version of reality that hadn't yet crumbled.
Her stomach twisted.
Where were the people? The laughter?
Where was the well?
Instead, there was blood in the streets, painting the bricks in shades darker than rust. The air sang with heat—but not from the sun. This was the residue of sorcery.
From the distance—screams. The clash of iron.
"Here it comes..." the old man muttered. "The Pyke."
Startled, she spun—no one behind her.
"Don't scare me. We're here. Say your farewells."
The ground trembled. The walls groaned and split.
Soldiers poured from the breach ahead—fleeing, screaming.
Their mouths were agape with terror. Blood painted their armour, their skin. One soldier's entrails dragged behind him like a tail, unnoticed, flapping wetly against the bricks.
Something hit him—a spike, black and jagged, fired from nowhere. It pinned him to the wall, high, and he stayed there like a grotesque tapestry.
Asara gasped. Froze.
A woman knelt beside the fallen, hands pressed against a man's chest. His lifeblood sprayed between her fingers. His hand reached up, touched her cheek—and fell limp.
She kissed his brow.
Then she rose.
A mage.
Her hair lifted on invisible winds, and her mouth opened in a scream that split the heavens. Symbols burned into the air around her. The street warped, blistered, cracked beneath her feet.
Asara watched as flames poured from the woman's body—first in wisps, then in waves.
She had heard stories of mages giving their lives for one last blaze of vengeance. She had never believed them.
The mage did not channel magic. She was the magic now.
She offered her body like dry kindling to the gods, and the gods—if they watched—answered.
Inferno.
Fire erupted around her in a dome of crimson and gold. Buildings vaporized. Stone ran like wax. Men burned where they stood, bones cracking before they had time to scream.
The sky caught fire.
Asara fell to her knees, hands trembling. Her mouth moved, but there was no sound. Just the roar.
Just heat.
And the silence that followed.
Nothing was left of the mage—not ash, not bone.
Just scorched streets. Shriveled corpses. Molten glass where windows once stood.
The man she'd loved remained—still skewered—now blackened like overcooked meat.
Asara sat. Numb.
Her eyes stung from smoke, from tears she didn't remember shedding. Her breath came in short, ragged pulls. Something inside her was breaking, quietly. Something soft and warm.
She'd believed.
She had dreamed.
Of a city. A new life. Of water, of marriage. Of laughter.
Now her dream walked beside her, laughing.
She turned, heart pounding.
"The soldiers!" she gasped aloud.
Maybe they'd regroup. Maybe they needed her.
She clung to the thought like driftwood in a flood.
She ran—crushed limbs beneath her feet, eyes wide, mouth dry.
Behind her, the old man cackled.
It was not joy in that laugh. Nor malice. Just a kind of delight in inevitability.
The sort of laugh one might give to an old joke with a cruel punchline.
"He comes... Caladan."
The sky darkened.
No clouds. Just presence.
Something blocked the sun—something vast.
A fortress—no, a floating mountain of obsidian, defying nature. Its walls shimmered with runes older than language. The symbols rotated across its base like circling vultures. The air itself recoiled from its passing. It hovered above Dharuj like a god's finger poised to strike.
Caladan.
Master of the Pyke.
Red-skinned. Armourless. Barefoot. Hair floating as if underwater.
His eyes met Asara's—distant yet precise, as though measuring her soul grain by grain.
She could not move.
She could see her life laid out before her.
The one she hadn't yet lived. The water she hadn't tasted. The kiss she hadn't given.
His lips moved.
There was no sound. Just a pull—as if something vast had inhaled.
A wave of darkness descended.
Not black—but void.
Colourless, emotionless, endless.
A breath stolen from death itself.
Asara's skin cracked.
Her scream never made it past her lips.
Her body melted—eyes first, then flesh. Muscles dissolved into ribbons of soot. Bones turned black, cracked, and crumbled.
The wind took her.
Dust and Dreams.
A life given to hope. And consumed by it.
The old man hunched deeper, spine bent like a broken bow. He sat slumped amidst the ruin, blistered hands trembling, lips chapped and bleeding.
It began low. A wheeze of breath. Then a chuckle, cracked and fragile, like something dying. And then it grew—a cackling sputter of a man undone by madness or mirth. Or both.
The ash settled in slow spirals, like falling memories.
Dharuj had died screaming. The bones of its soldiers fed the cracked earth. The mage's inferno had devoured even the silence. And now, where once dreams clung like dew to a girl's skin, there was only dust.
A god sat in the wreckage, hunched beneath the weight of nothing.
The Pyke floated above, still as judgement.
And from its edge stepped a man dressed in stormlight and shadow.
Caladan.
He looked down at the old man below.
"You've not changed, Horus."
The old man smiled through a face of withered parchment, water still dripping from the blisters on his arms.
"Change is for the living. I've grown tired of pretending I ever was."
"Still playing cripple?"
"Still playing king?"
Caladan said nothing.
Horus's laughter was dry, rasping, endless. He coughed at the end of it, hacking up a glob of
something that steamed on the scorched ground.
"They called me a name, you know. Drowner. As if the water in my flesh was all that defined me. Mortals are ever poetic with their cruelty."
"You let her carry you."
"I let her believe it mattered."
"She died for you."
"No," Horus said, looking up. "She died for the stories she told herself. I merely waited long enough for the truth to catch her."
Caladan's voice was brittle. "She dreamed of love."
"And found fire instead. There's symmetry in that, don't you think?"
"You could have saved her."
"I could have stopped the tide," Horus murmured, "but the ocean would only come again. Let the shore break for once."
The god leaned forward, resting his chin on his knees. His eyes, rheumy and ancient, fixed on the Pyke.
"I stood at the birth of this continent. I held the hand of the first empress as she wept over her crown. I walked with famine, slept beside plague, sang lullabies to grief. And yet… here I am. Watching you, of all people, burn down the last dream these people had."
"You carried a girl to her grave."
Horus shrugged.
"And you flew a fortress into a city of orphans. We all wear different boots to walk into damnation, Caladan. Some softer than others."
A pause.
"You came all this way," Horus said, "just to speak with me?"
"I came," Caladan replied, "to see what was left."
"And?"
Caladan looked away. "Nothing worth saving."
Horus grinned. "Then I've done my part."
There was a long silence between them. No wind now. Just the sound of stones cooling.
"You know," Horus said softly, "when gods start talking about salvation, the only thing that ever gets saved… is the fire."
Caladan turned to go.
"Horus."
"Yes?"
"You're still a bastard."
"I know," Horus replied, a blister bursting softly on his cheek. "That's why I'm still here."