The iron of the execution rack was a cold kiss against Cyrus's back, a stark contrast to the grit of Black Sand that the wind whipped against his exposed skin. Below, in the Crucible Plaza, a sea of onlookers swayed, their faces hidden behind the identical ceramic snouts of respiratory masks. They were a silent jury, their judgment already passed.
A voice, devoid of all humanity, crackled to life from unseen speakers, scraping the obsidian walls of the Furnace Citadel. "Betrayer Cyrus," it announced, each syllable a perfectly synthesized hammer blow. "For your crimes against the Citadel and the sanctity of the Sand, your flesh will be rendered. Your body, an offering. Your soul, purified into Duskhide."
The Obsidian Governor. A ghost in the machine, a tyrant made of code and steel. Cyrus strained against his bonds, the movement pulling at the flesh of his right arm. It wasn't his arm anymore. Not really.
An Executioner, clad in polished chrome that reflected the gray sky, stepped forward. He was less a man and more a component of the device behind Cyrus. The Purifier. It hummed with a low, hungry energy.
The Executioner pointed a polished gauntlet at Cyrus's right hand, which was chained palm-up for the crowd to see. "Behold the divine gift!" he bellowed, his own voice distorted by his helmet's grille. "The Black Sand, our energy, our lifeblood!" He then tapped Cyrus's grotesque hand. "But it demands respect. It demands control."
Cyrus didn't need to look. He could feel it. The skin of his right hand had given way to a black, geometric lattice. Veins of obsidian crawled past his wrist, cold and dead to the touch. The crystallization was accelerating. Without the Stabilizer, he was on a countdown to becoming a mindless, sand-blasted statue.
"And this traitor," the Executioner continued, holding up a small, flickering datachip, "attempted to steal the one thing that keeps us from this fate. The Stabilizer formula. He sought to hoard salvation for himself!"
Lies. All of it. He hadn't stolen it to hoard it. He'd stolen it because he'd found the Governor's private logs. Found the truth of Project Duskhide.
"Initiate purification," the Governor's voice commanded.
The hum of the Purifier intensified, the air growing hot and thick with the smell of ozone. A series of mechanical arms, tipped with glowing filaments, descended toward him. They were designed to superheat the Black Sand particles in his body, a process the Governor called purification but Cyrus knew was just agonizing annihilation.
Well, this is a fine way to get canceled.
A surge of power pulsed through the rack, a current designed to lock his muscles. But it didn't just touch his flesh. It touched the complex network of wires and processors woven into his left arm—his mechanic's arm, a masterpiece of his own design.
And it was still connected to the Citadel's grid.
An idea—a desperate, insane spark—ignited in his mind. He couldn't fight the machine, but maybe he could speak its language. He focused, pushing his will through the neural interface in his shoulder. He didn't just receive the energy surge; he grabbed it, twisted it, and sent a feedback loop of pure, unfiltered chaos back down the line.
`Command Override: Overload sequence 7-Gamma.`
The Purifier stuttered. The glowing filaments flickered. The Executioner looked up, confused.
And Cyrus's mechanical arm began to glow, a violent cherry-red. Alarms blared, no longer synthesized and calm, but panicked, shrieking. He felt the tech in his arm screaming, its internal regulators frying. It was a one-way trip.
He wrenched his body to the side, just as the main power conduit to his arm buckled. With a deafening crack, the conduit snapped, whipping through the air like a live wire and striking one of the massive Black Sand reserve tanks flanking the plaza.
For a moment, there was absolute silence.
Then, the world ended in a blast of white light and black sand. The concussive force tore him from the rack, shackles and all, and threw him across the plaza. His ears rang, his vision a blur of screaming static. The air, once merely gritty, was now a solid, suffocating wall of Black Sand. The storm was out.
He slammed into the base of a terminal, the impact rattling his teeth. Through the swirling black chaos, he saw the terminal screen flicker to life, cracked but functional. Emergency power. And displayed on it was the last file the Governor had been reviewing.
`PROJECT: DUSKHIDE. Subject Viability Trials.`
A list of names scrolled past. Prisoners. Followed by a status.
`…Fusion Failure.`
`…Unstable Crystallization.`
`…Subject Terminated.`
They weren't just executing prisoners. They were force-feeding them raw Sand, trying to create… something.
A hand clamped down on his arm. Not his crystallized one, his good one. He flinched, ready to bring his smoking mechanical fist around.
"Idiot," a voice hissed, sharp and close to his ear.
He twisted, and found a woman's face, half-covered by a tattered scarf. Her eyes were wide, fierce, and her hand… the hand gripping his arm was like his own. Covered in the same dark, crystalline growth.
She jerked her head toward the edge of the plaza, where the obsidian tiles gave way to a sheer drop. Below, a chasm of roiling, radioactive sand churned—the boundary to the wastes.
"You want to live?" she said, her voice cutting through the roar of the sandstorm. "Jump into the Driftgrave. With me. Now."
The fall was a symphony of windburn and regret. Cyrus plummeted into the Driftgrave, a chasm of radioactive air that clawed at his lungs. The roar of the sandstorm he'd unleashed above faded to a distant howl, replaced by the sickening whistle of his own descent. He landed with a bone-jarring thud, not on hard rock, but on something that gave way with a wet crunch.
The air here was different. Thicker. It smelled of decay, ozone, and something else… a sweet, cloying scent like rotting fruit. He pushed himself up, his mechanical arm groaning in protest. He'd landed in a nest of colossal, fossilized ribs that arched overhead like the nave of some blasphemous cathedral. Glowing lichen clung to the bones, casting the cavern in an eerie, phosphorescent green light. This was a boneyard. A grave.
"Get up. They don't stay dead down here."
The woman, Naima, was already on her feet, her tattered scarf doing little to hide the crystalline patterns that crept up her neck. She moved with a predator's grace, her eyes scanning the shadows between the giant ribs.
"Welcome to the Driftgrave," she said, without a trace of welcome in her voice. "Home of the lost causes and the beautifully broken."
She led him deeper into the cavern system, their footsteps echoing in the vast silence. They passed husks of mutated creatures, things that defied biology, their forms twisted by raw Sand exposure. It was a gallery of failed evolutions. Eventually, they emerged into a larger cavern, this one teeming with life.
Dozens of people—Wanderers, he assumed—were gathered around a central pool of murky, glowing water. They were a tapestry of humanity in decay. Some had crystalline limbs like Naima, others had skin that shimmered with a permanent, sickly iridescence. They looked at Cyrus with a mixture of suspicion and pity, their eyes drawn to the clean, sharp lines of his Citadel-forged mechanical arm. He was an alien here. An antique from a world they had rejected.
An old man, his face a roadmap of wrinkles and black crystal veins, approached. He leaned on a staff made from a polished spine. "Naima. You bring a Citadel rat into our home? After what they did to your brother?"
"This one's different, Elder Zayd," Naima countered, her voice sharp. "He blew up a refinery. Caused a bit of a scene. I thought he might be our kind of stupid."
Cyrus didn't have time to be offended. His attention was fixed on a Wanderer scooping the murky water from the pool into a tin cup. Black specks swirled within it—raw, unprocessed Duskdust. The man drank it down like water.
Cyrus lurched forward. "What are you doing? You can't just drink that! Without a Stabilizer, the crystallization will overwhelm you in days." He knew the science. He'd read the reports. The gruesome, clinical reports.
The Wanderers just stared at him. Elder Zayd let out a dry, rasping laugh. "The Citadel's pet mechanic preaches the Governor's gospel. The Stabilizer. Yes, we know of the 'cure'."
Naima stepped in front of Cyrus, her eyes burning with a cold fire. She looked from his terrified face down to his mechanical arm. "This is your cure?" She tapped the polished metal of his prosthesis. "A cage of steel and wires, so you can pretend you're still in control? This arm is the real shackle, Cyrus. It anchors you to their lies."
Before he could process the words, she moved. In her hand was a syringe, a primitive thing of glass and sharpened bone, filled with the same glowing liquid from the pool. He tried to pull back, but two other Wanderers grabbed his arms.
"Trust me," Naima hissed, her face inches from his. "Sometimes you have to burn down the man you are to become the one you're meant to be."
She plunged the needle into the flesh of his right arm, just below the creeping line of obsidian crystal.
Pain was an understatement. It was a supernova in his veins. He felt the raw Duskdust—the unfiltered essence of the Black Sand—ignite his bloodstream. Golden light, visible even through his skin, raced up his arm, a river of fire consuming him from the inside out. He screamed, a raw, ragged sound that was swallowed by the cavern.
The crystals on his arm exploded outward. Black shards, sharp as obsidian glass, erupted from his skin, growing, twisting into a grotesque, beautiful armor that now encased his entire right arm to the shoulder. The pain receded, replaced by a hum, a thrumming power that connected him to the very sand beneath his feet. He could feel every grain, every particle in the cavern, as if it were an extension of his own nervous system.
But the power came with a receipt. As the golden light faded from his vision, he blinked, and the world swam. His left eye. Everything was a blurry, distorted mess. It was like watching the world through a shattered lens.
"My... my vision," he stammered, clutching his head.
"A small price," Naima said, watching him with an unnerving calm. "The body is adjusting. The gene is rewriting the code. The Governor's code."
Suddenly, a high-pitched alarm echoed from the tunnel they'd entered. Red lights flashed from a crude early-warning system wired to the cavern ceiling.
"Hounds!" a Wanderer yelled.
Two shapes, low and sleek, bounded into the cavern. Mechanical hounds, the Governor's trackers. Their bodies were chrome and black steel, their optical sensors glowing with malevolent red light. They were built for one purpose: to hunt and terminate.
The Wanderers scattered, grabbing makeshift weapons. The hounds locked onto the most obvious piece of Citadel tech in the room: Cyrus. One of them lunged, its metallic jaws open to snap his spine.
Instinct took over. There was no thought, no plan. Cyrus threw his newly monstrous right hand up. The ground in front of him erupted. Sand, dirt, and grit flew into the air and solidified, slamming together to form a dense, swirling shield.
*CLANG!*
The hound crashed into the sand wall, its charge stopped dead. The impact sent shudders up Cyrus's arm, but the shield held. He felt it—the power to command the dust, the earth. The hound, stunned, shook its head.
Cyrus clenched his fist. The sand shield collapsed, but instead of falling to the ground, the cloud of particles swirled and shot forward, enveloping the hound like a swarm of angry hornets. The polished chrome began to pit, then flake away. The hound twitched, its internal mechanisms grinding as the sand invaded every joint and circuit. Within seconds, it dissolved, collapsing into a pile of metallic dust and twitching wires.
One down. The other hound hesitated, its threat-assessment protocols likely screaming in confusion. Cyrus was an anomaly it couldn't compute.
Before it could decide, a new figure walked calmly into the cavern from the tunnel, flanked by two chrome-plated Enforcers. He wore the immaculate gray uniform of a Citadel diplomat. He ignored the pile of dust that was once a hound and smiled, a practiced, empty gesture.
"An impressive display, Deserter Cyrus," the envoy said, his voice smooth as oil. "The Governor is willing to be… magnanimous." He turned his attention to Elder Zayd. "A full pardon for the fugitive. And in return, the Citadel will grant your tribe a permanent, unending supply of Stabilizer. Enough for every man, woman, and child. An end to your suffering."
The cavern fell silent. The Wanderers looked at their Elder, their faces a mixture of hope and fear. A permanent supply. It was a king's ransom. It was life.
Zayd looked from the envoy to Naima, then to Cyrus and his disintegrating eye. He looked at the children hiding behind their mothers, their skin already showing the tell-tale crystalline traceries. The weight of his people's future settled on his stooped shoulders.
That night, as the tribe debated the Governor's offer, Cyrus sat alone, trying to make sense of his new reality. His arm was a weapon. His eye was failing. He was a monster who could command the sand.
A hand touched his shoulder. Naima. She held a finger to her lips and jerked her head toward a dark, narrow fissure at the back of the cavern. The debate in the main cavern was growing heated. Zayd was weakening.
"He's going to take the deal," she whispered, her voice tight. "We have to go. Now."
They slipped away into the darkness, crawling through tight tunnels that smelled of damp earth and ancient secrets. Behind them, they heard the shouts as their absence was discovered, followed by the familiar, terrifying baying of a new pack of mechanical hounds.
As they burst out onto a high ledge overlooking the vast, dark expanse of the lower Driftgrave, Naima finally stopped, breathing heavily. The sounds of pursuit were getting closer.
"You don't get it, do you?" she said, turning to face him, the wind whipping her hair. "Why I couldn't let him accept."
"He offered them a cure!" Cyrus shot back, the words tasting like ash. "A chance to live!"
Naima laughed, a bitter, broken sound. "A cure? You, the Citadel's top mechanic, and you never once questioned it? You never ran a deep analysis on what the Stabilizer actually does?"
She grabbed the front of his shirt, her crystalline knuckles pressing against his chest.
"It's not a cure, you idiot. It's poison with a better marketing team. It doesn't stop the crystallization. It organizes it. It accelerates the fusion, makes the body dependent on the next dose, and hardwires the host's DNA for perfect assimilation. The Governor isn't trying to save us. He's ripening us."
"Ripening us? For what? A harvest?" The words were ripped from Cyrus's throat by the wind, a frantic shout against the howl of the pursuing hounds. They were close now, their metallic claws scrabbling on the rock somewhere below in the dark.
"You're a quick learner," Naima yelled back, not breaking her stride. She scrambled over a ridge of jagged, glassy rock, her movements sure-footed despite the chaos. "Now hurry up before you become the first crop."
They were running blind, propelled only by Naima's desperate certainty. She led him down a fissure that narrowed until they had to turn sideways, the rock scraping their backs and chests. The baying of the hounds grew muffled, then distant. The air changed again. The biting wind died, and the thick, sweet smell of ozone and decay returned, stronger than ever. A faint, rhythmic hum vibrated through the stone, a deep thrumming that Cyrus felt in his teeth.
He stumbled out of the fissure into a space that defied logic.
It was a cavern, but not of rock. The walls were made of pure, black crystal, faceted like a poorly cut gem the size of a citadel. Veins of phosphorescent light pulsed within them, casting the entire grotto in a shifting, underwater glow. The air was heavy with floating motes of Dust, so thick they glittered in the strange light. This was the source. The heart of the Black Sand. A Crystal Cave.
"The meteorite crater," Cyrus breathed, his one good eye wide. The blurriness in his left eye made the pulsing light sources swim and merge, creating a disorienting, dreamlike vista.
"The wound," Naima corrected, her voice hushed with reverence. She moved toward the center of the cavern, where a single, massive stele of the same black crystal jutted from the floor. Its surface was unnaturally smooth, and unlike the walls, it didn't glow. It seemed to absorb the light around it, a void in the shape of a monolith. Ancient, geometric patterns were carved into its face, patterns that felt familiar to Cyrus, echoing the crystalline lattice on his own arm.
"Wanderer legend says the First Ones sang to the stones, and the stones answered," Naima whispered, placing her palm flat against the cold surface of the stele. "They say the truth is written in the wound, for those who know the song."
"And you know the song?" Cyrus was skeptical, but the hum was getting louder, resonating with the shard in his arm.
Naima closed her eyes. She didn't sing. She hummed, a low, guttural tone that matched the frequency vibrating through the cave. Then, she shifted the pitch, a subtle slide up the scale. Her hand, covered in its own black crystal, began to glow, the light mirroring the veins in the cavern walls. She was a gene-hacker. She wasn't just singing a tune; she was sending a signal, a query written in sonic resonance.
The stele responded.
The geometric patterns on its surface began to glow, a stark white against the black. They shifted, rearranged themselves, flowing like liquid mercury before locking into place. It was writing. Alien, yet horribly, intuitively understandable.
`CIVILIZATION EVOLUTION INDEX: 41%`
`ASSIMILATION PROTOCOL: ENGAGED`
`STATUS: HARVEST PREPARATION INITIATED`
Cyrus felt the blood drain from his face. Harvest. She was right. The Governor wasn't a tyrant; he was a farmer. And they were the crops. The Stabilizer wasn't a cure; it was fertilizer.
That's when the far wall of the cavern exploded inward.
Two Enforcers in polished chrome armor stormed in, flanked by a new model of mech he'd never seen before. It was a quadrupedal hunter, larger than the hounds, with a rotating plasma cannon mounted on its chassis. Its optical sensor, a single, glowing red slit, swiveled and locked onto them.
"Nowhere left to run, Deserter," one of the Enforcers barked, his voice tinny through his helmet speaker. "Surrender the woman and the Governor might let you live as a test subject."
"Generous offer," Cyrus muttered, backing away. "But I think I'll pass."
Naima was already scrambling for cover behind the stele. The mech's cannon whined as it charged. There was no time. No escape. They were trapped.
A cold, terrifying calm washed over Cyrus. He looked at his right arm, the monstrous gauntlet of black crystal and shattered flesh. He looked at the glittering, Dust-choked air of the cavern. He felt the hum of raw, untamed power all around him.
Naima had forced a dose into him. It had given him a taste. A glimpse.
What would happen if he just opened the floodgates?
*Burn down the man you are to become the one you're meant to be.*
He didn't have another choice. With a ragged yell, he did the unthinkable. He didn't just accept the power. He reached for it. He opened his mind, his will, his very soul to the thrumming energy of the cave and *pulled*.
If the first injection was a supernova, this was the birth of a universe.
The Dust in the air answered him. It swirled, coalesced, and streamed toward him, a vortex of shimmering black particles that slammed into his right arm. The crystal armor on his arm groaned, then shattered, not falling away, but reforming. It grew, became denser, sharper. The black lattice spread across his shoulder and down his chest, a web of living crystal digging into his skin. The pain was absolute, a cleansing fire that burned away every last trace of the Citadel mechanic he once was.
He felt something crack. Not a bone. Deeper. Something in his sternum.
The Enforcers watched, frozen for a second by the sheer spectacle. The mech, however, had no capacity for awe. It fired.
A bolt of blue-white plasma screamed across the cavern.
Cyrus threw his hand forward. The swirling vortex of Dust around him solidified. It didn't just form a shield. The particles ground against each other, sharpening, compressing under his will until they formed a long, impossibly sharp blade of pure, solidified Black Sand that extended from his fist. It was not a solid object, but a contained storm, the edge a constant, grinding chaos.
He swung.
The sand blade met the plasma bolt. There was no explosion. The blade simply… unmade it. The energy dissipated, absorbed and scattered by the chaotic matrix of the sand.
The mech fired again. Cyrus lunged forward, no longer thinking, just moving. He was faster than he'd ever been. He sidestepped the second bolt, the heat of it searing his cheek, and brought the sand blade down in a vicious arc.
The blade sliced through the mech's armored leg as if it were soft clay. There was a screech of protesting metal, and the leg fell away, severed. The machine stumbled, its targeting systems going haywire.
"What in the sand-blasted hells…?" one Enforcer stammered.
Cyrus didn't give them time to recover. He clenched his fist, and the blade dissolved back into a swirling cloud. He thrust his open palm toward the crippled mech. The cloud shot forward, engulfing the machine. It was the same move he'd used on the hound, but a hundred times more potent. The mech convulsed, its chrome plating dissolving like sugar in water. In seconds, it was a heap of scrap.
The two Enforcers finally broke their paralysis. They raised their pulse rifles, but it was too late. Cyrus was on them. He reformed the blade and moved between them in a blur. A flash of black. A wet, severing sound.
He stopped, his back to them, his monstrous arm held out to the side. For a moment, nothing happened. Then, the top halves of the Enforcers' bodies slid neatly off the bottom halves, crashing to the cavern floor with a wet, metallic clang.
Silence.
The only sound was his own ragged breathing. He looked at his arm. The blade was gone, retracted into the swirling motes around his hand. The adrenaline faded, and the pain returned, a white-hot agony centered on his chest. He looked down.
A jagged, black line, like a crack in obsidian, had appeared on his chest, starting from his sternum and branching out toward his heart. It pulsed with a faint, sickly light. A permanent scar. A brand.
He collapsed to his knees, his good hand clutching the crack. Every beat of his heart sent a fresh wave of fire through it. The cost. There was always a cost.
"Cyrus!" Naima was at his side, her face pale. She tried to touch the crack, but her hand recoiled as if burned. "What did you do?"
"I… upgraded," he gasped, a grimace twisting his lips into a smile.
A low, mechanical groan echoed from deeper in the cavern. It wasn't the sound of pursuit. It was the sound of heavy machinery. A rhythmic, industrial clang.
"We're not done yet," Naima said, pulling him to his feet. "That came from deeper in. Near the crater's core."
Leaning on each other, they limped forward, following the sound and a strange, artificial light that spilled from a tunnel at the far end of the grotto. The air grew colder, scrubbed clean of the organic decay and replaced with the sterile scent of filtered air and lubricant.
They emerged onto a wide, excavated ledge overlooking the very bottom of the meteorite crater.
The sight stole the breath from Cyrus's lungs.
Down below was a massive, makeshift loading dock, lit by harsh industrial floodlights. And docked there was a ship unlike any he had ever seen. It was sleek, matte black, and angular, bearing the unmistakable insignia of the Void Guild. The smugglers. The neutral party.
Guild workers in sealed environmental suits were using grav-lifts to load cargo into the ship's open bay. The cargo… was people.
Or they had been.
They were frozen in agonized poses, their bodies entirely encased in the same black crystal as the cave walls. Dozens of them. Hundreds. Men, women, children. Petrified human specimens. A silent, screaming gallery of the Governor's harvest.
A figure in a long, dark coat stood by the open cargo door, observing the loading process, his back to them. He radiated an aura of calm authority.
"The Guild is in on it," Cyrus whispered, his voice cracking. "They're not smugglers. They're… reapers."
As if sensing their presence, the figure turned.
The world tilted on its axis.
The man had a weathered face, a neatly trimmed gray beard, and kind eyes. One of those eyes, however, was a whirring mechanical lens of brass and crystal.
It was his mentor. Elara. The man who had taught him everything about mechanics. The man who had pushed him to become the best. The man who was supposedly killed in a refinery accident five years ago.
Elara's face broke into a warm, familiar smile. It was the same smile he'd given Cyrus when he had successfully rebuilt his first engine.
"Ah, Cyrus," he said, his voice calm and paternal, carrying easily across the expanse. He spread his arms wide in a welcoming gesture.
"Welcome to the final selection trials. I always knew you'd make it this far, my finest student."
Before Cyrus could even form a word, Elara's mechanical eye glowed. It projected a holographic image into the air between them—a vast, three-dimensional star map. Hundreds of systems were marked. He zoomed in on one, then another. Each was labeled.
`System 734. Species: K'tharr. Status: Harvest Complete.`
`System 912. Species: Omicrons. Status: Harvest Complete.`
`System 1138. Species: …Humanity. Status: In Progress.`
One by one, the systems marked 'Complete' winked out, turning from green to red, like dying stars on a celestial graveyard.