Cassius approached the smallest of the three towering constructs.
'Smallest,' of course, was relative. Now that he stood at its base, craning his neck to look up, it hardly felt small at all. Its dark, angular face stretched high into the sky, sloping upward with a silent defiance that made him feel... insignificant.
Up close, the thing looked less like a ruin and more like a monument - intact, deliberate, eternal. The material wasn't something he could name. Stone, maybe, or something older. Something smarter. Its surface shimmered slightly under the starlight, dull and dark, but with veins of something metallic running through it, like the entire structure was alive and dreaming.
He reached out and placed his hand on the wall.
The surface was cool - too cool for the warmth of the desert night. Smooth, but not flat. The closer he looked, the more he noticed faint carvings etched deep into the stone. Symbols. Lines. Patterns too complex to follow. They didn't glow. They didn't move. But they hummed.
Cassius blinked.
'Huh...'
It wasn't a sound exactly, but a pressure in the bones of his fingers. A low, quiet vibration beneath his skin - as if the entire structure were breathing, remembering. The touch sent a shiver up his arm.
He pulled his hand back slowly.
Something about this place wasn't right.
Or maybe… it was right in a way that made everything else feel wrong.
Then - something subtle.
A quiet click. A shift in the air.
He noticed it.
It was coming from his pocket. Or, more precisely, the device.
Cassius fished it out, fingers brushing the strange, intricate surface. Only now, it felt warmer - its bronze-like casing no longer cold but pulsing faintly with a steady rhythm, like a second heartbeat.
And then, without warning, the top segment of the device slid open with a faint mechanical sigh.
From its core, a thin strand of black mist unfurled - slow, ethereal, and almost invisible against the dark. It twisted in the air like smoke underwater, snaking gently forward.
"Wha-what the..."
Cassius took a step back.
The veil didn't lead to the construct in front of him. Not the one he had just touched.
Instead, it stretched across the sand, reaching... elsewhere.
Toward the farthest of the three. The tallest.
The one that loomed above all the others like a crown cast in shadow.
Cassius stared blankly at it.
"That's awfully convenient..." he muttered.
His grip on the device tightened slightly.
Did it mean something? Was it deliberate? The way it ignored this structure entirely and chose the furthest one instead... It didn't feel random.
He had no answers - just a trail of smoke, a building too massive to ignore, and a growing sense that something unseen was pushing him forward.
Whether it was fate, design, or something stranger… he guessed he'd find out soon.
***
Cassius narrowed his eyes at the drifting black veil. He waved a hand through it - nothing. No resistance, no feeling. Just mist curling around his fingers like breath in winter air.
Then he tried the obvious.
He shook the device.
Nothing changed.
He flipped it upside down.
The veil still pointed unwaveringly toward the tallest structure in the distance.
"Okay," he muttered, frowning. "Maybe you're broken."
He tapped the side a few times, lightly at first - then a little harder.
No effect.
He sighed, crouched down, and placed the device flat on the sand.
It hummed louder, the veil intensifying just slightly, as if annoyed.
He gave it a skeptical look. "You're really set on this, huh?"
With a sharp exhale through his nose, he stood and walked a few paces away - just to see. The veil extended further, its trail stretching like an obedient ribbon, refusing to break.
Cassius squinted at it. "That's... incredibly suspicious."
He tried circling around, testing if the mist would adjust.
It did.
Always bending, always realigning toward that one massive silhouette across the desert.
"Wonderful," he muttered, rubbing his temple. "A haunted compass."
The humor faded quickly, though.
Because the more insistent the device became, the more his unease grew. Why that one? What made it different? And why did the damn thing seem so certain?
He glanced toward the towering construct in the distance, its shape half-swallowed by the dark.
Cassius exhaled through clenched teeth.
Whatever this trial was, it clearly didn't care about his feelings.
"Well," he muttered. "Lead the way, then."
***
Up close, the largest of the three structures felt impossibly vast. It loomed above him like a mountain carved from blackened stone, its angles unnaturally smooth, its surface cold and silent under the starlight. Where the previous construct had felt ancient and imposing, this one felt... aware. There was a weight to it, a pressure in the air that prickled against his skin the closer he got. His earlier discomfort began to congeal into something heavier - an unspoken dread, crawling up his spine like unseen fingers.
It was like standing in front of a god that had long since died, but whose body still radiated a forgotten kind of power.
And what's more…
The device in his pocket had begun to pulse gently, the dark veil whispering upward before curling downward again, slithering through the air and stretching toward the structure's base. Not just toward it - into it. The mist flowed as if drawn to something invisible, slipping along the surface like water against glass. There wasn't a door that he could see, no archway or sign or carving. But the veil was clear in its guidance: there was a way inside.
Cassius hesitated, then stepped forward, circling around the base in search of anything that resembled an entrance - some crack, some mechanism, anything at all. The structure was massive, and each of its smooth black walls towered with quiet, unyielding silence.
Then he saw it.
Something in the sand - subtle, almost easy to miss.
Footprints.
They led along the edge of the structure, half-swallowed by shifting dunes, but still there. Still recent.
He took a step closer to examine them.
And suddenly-
A sound tore through from somewhere near. The ground trembled beneath his feet, and a thunderous explosion ripped across the horizon, shattering the stillness like glass.