Kazuki wasn't sure what he expected when Ilya joined their group.
Maybe someone cryptic and brooding, who would speak in riddles and draw symbols in the sand. But what he got instead was a sharp-eyed woman with a dry voice, sharper wit, and an alarming tendency to appear directly behind people when they were mid-conversation.
"Stop thinking so loudly," she said during their third hour into the trek through the lower dunes. "The sand picks up stray thoughts like burrs."
Kazuki blinked. "Wait, the sand... listens?"
"No," Ilya said, frowning. "But you're annoying enough that I assume it could start."
Uzaki snorted from behind a scarf that covered everything but her eyes. "I like her."
"You would," Kazuki muttered.
Sel Eran had granted them an escort—not an army, but a compact group of guides, supply runners, and a silent boy named Rafi, who seemed able to summon camels by sheer will. Their goal: reach the Mirage Spires, a place where the stolen winds reportedly spun wildest.
Vren and Kaelis led the forward team, their movements smooth and measured, checking terrain and guarding against potential ambushes. Leo remained with Yasira for further diplomacy but had sent a message: Follow Ilya. Trust your fire. The desert remembers differently.
"So," Hoshino asked, walking beside Kazuki and sketching again, "are we pretending this wind isn't watching us?"
"No," Ilya said. "You should absolutely assume it is."
Uzaki raised an eyebrow. "And you're not concerned?"
Ilya adjusted her veil. "If it wanted us dead, we wouldn't be having this conversation."
"Well," Kazuki mumbled, "that's comforting."
The landscape changed as they descended: the sand turned from gold to bronze, scattered with shards of blackened glass. Heat shimmered, but it wasn't oppressive—it pulsed. Kazuki felt it in his chest, like a second heartbeat, matching the rhythm he remembered from Cryptos.
But beneath that hum, something else stirred. A delay. A skip. A silence where there should have been pulse.
"Did the sand... just stutter?" he asked aloud.
Uzaki tilted her head. "That a thing now?"
"No, really," Kazuki said, kneeling and placing a hand on the ground. His fingers twitched with static. "It's like my attunement just dropped for half a second. Like someone flicked the connection off."
Hoshino crouched beside him, pulling out a tiny prism from her pouch. She pressed it against the sand. It dimmed. "The ley current's inconsistent here. This is the third node I've checked. They're... fragmented."
"Like someone carved out pieces of the flow," Kazuki said.
"Or shredded them," Hoshino added.
Ilya nodded. "The wind-thieves move through here often. You're not just walking into broken land—you're walking into land that forgets it was ever whole."
Kazuki stared at her. "Is that... literal?"
"Literal enough," Ilya said. "You'll see soon."
They made camp that night beside a half-buried shrine—a collapsed obelisk half-covered in silk cloths and bound with glowing threads.
"It's a tether-stone," Ilya explained, stirring sand over their fire. "One of the last in this region. We rest here because the wind avoids places still remembered."
Kazuki sat by the fire, watching the threads of light pulse around the stone. "These things... stabilize the desert?"
"Not exactly," Hoshino said, sitting beside him. "They anchor memory. Not personal memory—place memory. When the terrain itself starts losing form, these objects act like beacons. They help reality remember where it left its boots."
Uzaki tossed a date into her mouth. "Poetic. Also terrifying."
Kazuki rubbed his palms together. "This whole wind thing—it's not just a freak storm, is it? Zargoth's behind it somehow."
"That's the theory," Hoshino said. "But I think it's more than just disruption. It's replacement. Something's not just erasing; it's trying to overwrite."
"Which means," Uzaki muttered, "we're not just tracking storms—we're tracking a rewrite of how this world works."
Kazuki looked down at his hand—stormfire flickered at his fingertips, faint but present. "And I'm apparently walking in with a giant glowing target."
"You're not a target," Hoshino said. "You're a beacon. There's a difference."
"Try telling that to the sand."
The next morning, the team reached the outer edge of the Mirage Spires.
They weren't spires in the traditional sense. They were warped columns of glass and stone, twisted as if molten, reaching toward the sky like fingers frozen mid-collapse. The landscape shimmered oddly here—not just from heat distortion but from something else.
Vren frowned. "Light shouldn't bend like that."
"Neither should sound," Kaelis said. "Listen."
They all paused.
Nothing.
Not wind. Not sand. Not even footsteps.
Kazuki swallowed. "Why is it quiet?"
"It isn't," Ilya said. "You've just stepped into a dead zone."
"I hate everything about that sentence," Uzaki said.
Kazuki took a careful step forward. The moment he crossed a shallow ridge, the connection between him and his stormfire thinned—then snapped.
He gasped. His hands sparked once—then nothing.
"Okay!" he yelped. "Nope! No fire, no flow—I'm empty!"
Ilya yanked him back. "Step lighter. Don't let your magic lead. Let the land reintroduce itself to you."
Hoshino slid down beside them, examining the sand. "There's pattern residue here. I can see traces of a flow grid. Something used to anchor energy here, but it's been unraveled. Burned out."
"Can we fix it?" Kazuki asked.
"No," she replied. "But we can trace it."
She pulled out a small rod and jabbed it into the ground. Glyphs burst into light, forming a circle—then staggered, flickering at odd intervals.
Uzaki whistled. "That doesn't look stable."
"It's not," Hoshino said. "But if we synchronize Kazuki's stormfire with the imprint, we might be able to temporarily stabilize a path."
Kazuki raised an eyebrow. "And if we don't?"
"Either it collapses or we vanish—possibly into each other."
He stared.
She shrugged. "Just saying."
An hour later, Kazuki stood at the edge of the largest glass column, sweat pooling under his collar, focused on not panicking.
Hoshino adjusted the runes. "You're going to feed just enough of your stormfire into the tether that it acts like a tuning fork. You're not forcing energy out—you're humming with it."
"Great," he muttered. "Now I'm a tuning fork."
Uzaki leaned over. "Sexy tuning fork."
"That doesn't help."
"Didn't mean to."
Kazuki took a deep breath, pressed his palms to the sand, and exhaled. This time, instead of forcing energy out, he listened. Not with his ears—but with the strange rhythm in his chest. The one he first felt in Cryptos. It was here, too—weak, uncertain, but still present.
He matched it. Leaned into it. Became part of it.
A hum—not a sound, not even a feeling—a presence spread from his hands through the sand. The glass spires pulsed faintly, as if exhaling.
Hoshino's runes flared to life. The dead zone shifted—became real again.
Ilya stepped forward, visibly surprised. "You're not just attuned. You're resonant. That shouldn't be possible for someone not born here."
Kazuki stood slowly. "Maybe I wasn't born here. But something in me knows this place."
Uzaki raised a brow. "Are we talking 'fated hero' stuff now, or just coincidence flavored with trauma?"
Kazuki sighed. "Probably both."
That night, as they camped again—this time in a windless bowl surrounded by petrified palms—Kazuki sat with Hoshino and Uzaki, watching the distant dunes shift under starlight.
"Can I ask something?" he said.
"Dangerous words," Uzaki replied.
"I'm serious. You've both been with me through... well, everything. But now that this is getting more than personal, more... world-breaky—are you okay sticking with me?"
Hoshino blinked. "Do you think we'd just pack up and leave?"
"I don't know," Kazuki admitted. "I keep feeling like I'm dragging everyone into something I don't understand."
Uzaki leaned back, arms behind her head. "Kazuki, I've known you since before your hair could defy gravity. You think I stuck around because I understood you?"
"I did," Hoshino added. "And I still came."
He looked at them both and smiled. "Thanks."
"Also," Uzaki said, tossing a date pit at him, "if this all goes horribly wrong, I'm blaming you. But I'll do it loyally."
As dawn broke, a sudden commotion rippled through camp.
Kaelis ran up, holding a glass shard marked with jagged runes. "We found this embedded in the sand. It's a directional anchor. Someone's been placing waymarks here... recently."
"Scouts?" Hoshino asked.
"More like surveyors," Vren said, arriving with two others. "But not ours. They're not from Sel Eran or Cryptos."
Kazuki stood. "Then who?"
Ilya examined the shard. "These are tether maps. But look at the etching technique—these are replicas. Someone is forging the desert's ley map."
Uzaki's face darkened. "You think they're trying to rewrite more than pathways?"
Kazuki's thoughts spun. If they can forge leylines... they can redirect the world's energy. twist it. Control it.
And maybe, he realized, that's what Zargoth was really after.
Not destruction. Not conquest.
Rewriting reality itself.