The sky was a canvas of stars, wide and open, too vivid to be real.
No moon. Just endless dark sands stretching toward the horizon, shifting softly beneath the weight of stillness. The wind whispered across the dunes in thin breaths, carrying dust and silence, both older than memory.
Cassius opened his eyes.
He was lying flat on the ground, cold grains of sand pressing against the back of his neck, against the curves of his spine. For a moment, he didn't move. Didn't breathe.
It was quiet - too quiet.
No humming machines. No old man in a white coat. No glass pod. Just him, the stars, and the desert.
He sat up slowly. His head didn't spin, but the air felt... wrong. Heavy. Like it wasn't meant for lungs like his.
The small device was still in his hand.
Its polished metal surface was warm, pulsing gently with an amber glow in its center. It felt strangely alive - like it knew where they were, even if he didn't.
Cassius rose to his feet, brushing sand from his clothes. The same wrinkled shirt. The same worn pants. Only now they felt even more out of place beneath the sharp sky.
He turned in a slow circle, scanning the darkened landscape. Here and there, broken silhouettes jutted out of the sand - jagged corners of half-buried buildings, fractured metal spines, crumbled stone archways worn down by time. Ruins of something long gone. Something forgotten.
Whatever this place was, it wasn't the world he knew.
And if this was the trial…
It had already begun.
***
He collected his bearings once more and glanced around again, slower this time, his eyes adjusting to the star-drenched dark. That's when he saw it - three faint glints of light in the distance. All in the same direction. Faint. Unmoving. But definitely there.
'At least there was something...'
And in a place like this, where the ground stretched endlessly and the air reeked of stillness, his gut told him those glimmers might be his only shot at answers - or survival.
So he started walking.
Toward the lights. Toward the unknown.
***
The sand shifted under his steps, whispering with each footfall. A quiet rhythm against the silence of this strange world.
As he walked, Cassius reached into his pocket and pulled out the device the old man had given him.
It was small - roughly the size of his palm - but dense and cold, like it was made of something more than metal. Intricate patterns ran along its black surface, etched in tight spirals and angular symbols he didn't recognize. In its center sat a faintly glowing slit of pale blue light, pulsing like a slow heartbeat. Alive, almost.
He turned it over in his hand, brows furrowing.
The old man's words echoed in his mind.
"You'll know what to do with it... when the time comes."
Cassius frowned.
"Is it not now? When then?"
There were no buttons. No switches. No obvious purpose. Just the hum, the glow, and the weight of it.
He slipped it back into his pocket, slower this time.
Whatever it was, he had a feeling it mattered more than he realized. The old man hadn't given it to him lightly. And in a place like this - where the sky looked too clean and the ground too quiet - he'd take any edge he could get.
He kept walking, eyes flicking between the lights ahead and the endless dunes. That was when something caught his eye.
Just off the path of his steady march, rising from the sands like the tip of a buried secret, was a structure unlike anything he'd seen before.
It was massive - its sides were steep and precise, sloping up into a sharp point that disappeared into the night. Weathered by time but still defiant, the construct gleamed faintly under the stars, its surface made of huge stone blocks stacked in perfect, deliberate symmetry. Despite the erosion along its edges, there was something about the way it stood that gave Cassius pause.
He couldn't tell if it was ancient or futuristic. Maybe both. Maybe neither.
Sand clung to its base like it had tried to swallow the thing whole and failed.
Cassius narrowed his eyes.
Whatever this place was, it had stories to tell. And that towering relic in the distance? It felt like one of them.
Still, the lights ahead shimmered - his only clue to anything that made sense.
So he made a note of the direction. And then kept moving.
***
After a few more minutes of silent, arduous walking, the landscape began to change.
The dark sand still stretched in every direction, but now, strange shapes broke the monotony -jagged ruins and slanted stone faces, half-buried towers, skeletal frames of forgotten buildings. These odd structures had been rare at first, scattered and crumbling. Now, they appeared more often, dotting the path like remnants of something long lost and not quite dead.
And then he saw them.
The lights.
Three tall constructs loomed in the near distance - taller than the ones before, their angles more deliberate, their presence undeniable. Each of them rose in that same precise, sloped design, larger and more defined than the scattered remains behind him. They stood in a formation, like ancient sentinels watching the desert, unmoved by time or decay.
The glint he had seen earlier danced faintly across their surfaces, a reflection that shimmered like starlight on water. He glanced up again, toward the sky.
There - above him - the stars were clearer than he had ever seen them. And not just clear.
They were... aligned.
A particular set of stars, sharp and white, seemed to form a perfect line in the sky - mirroring the exact position of the three great structures below. Not random. And certainly not natural.
Coincidence? Maybe. But in a mysterious place like this, where nothing felt quite real or explainable, he wasn't so sure.
And yet… he kept moving. Toward the aligned giants. Toward whatever waited beneath those gleaming stars.