Boots hit sand. Four soldiers dragging a half-dead boy through the dust. They didn't speak much. Just the occasional grunt as they pulled him up over a collapsed wall or down a rusted ramp. His legs barely worked. Skin blistered. Breath thin. But he stayed conscious. Barely. They brought him in just before sunset. Not that it mattered out here. Sunset didn't mean safety. It meant a different kind of fear. The sky was bruised—purple bleeding into ash, like the world had taken a punch it hadn't recovered from. The heat hadn't left. It just sank deeper. Into steel. Into skin. Into memory. The outpost was barely a skeleton of shelter. Twisted steel walls. Scavenged plating. Sandbags that looked more ceremonial than functional. Two mounted guns pointed outward, their barrels rusted stiff. One solar lamp buzzed above the main courtyard, its glow twitching between life and death. It didn't feel safe. It felt forgotten.
Asher sat on a supply crate, body still in armor, shoulders slumped. The rifles were down, but the suspicion wasn't. Every breath creaked against the plates on his ribs. He didn't trust the air not to burn. And the others didn't trust him. They stared when they thought he wouldn't notice. Not with curiosity. With calculation. Like they were still deciding what he was. He didn't blame them. He didn't know the answer either. Footsteps scraped behind him. Heavy. Measured. The man from earlier stepped into view. Same hard eyes. Same no-nonsense jaw. He crouched, resting his forearms on his knees. No weapons in hand—but the danger never left his posture. "Nathan Thorne," he said. "I go by Thorne." His voice was sandpaper—rough, grounded. It didn't rise or fall. Just steady. "I'm in charge here. What's left of us, anyway." He didn't blink often. He didn't need to. He saw what mattered. "And you?" Asher blinked. His voice stuck at first, then scraped free. "…Asher." It tasted strange in his mouth. Foreign.
Thorne studied him. Not judging. Just recording. Posture. Wounds. Breathing rate. "No soldier should die for a map line," Thorne said after a beat. "But we do it anyway. So others don't have to." He said it like a man who'd seen it happen too many times. Who'd learned not to ask why anymore. His eyes dropped to Asher's armor. "You're Ninth Legion," he said. "White eagle over red haze. Infantry crest." Thorne exhaled through his nose. "Your unit was sent past the lower fault line. South Ridge. That Rift surge took out half the command net. We thought everyone was vaporized." His voice thinned. "No survivors. That was the report." Asher looked at the ground. What could he say? That he woke up buried in sand, throat full of ash, pulled forward by whispers? That something ancient had looked at him and decided to let him live? That he'd heard a voice say he wasn't meant to exist? No. That wouldn't help. "What's the last thing you remember?" Thorne asked. Not sharp. Just direct. Asher closed his eyes. "Heat. Screaming. A cave. Then... nothing. Then waking up." Thorne stared. The pause stretched. Then he nodded. Didn't press. Didn't need to.
That's when she moved. Beth. She stepped into the fading light like she belonged to it. A canteen in one hand, a medcloth in the other. Her braid lay over one shoulder. Her face was calm. Her eyes—colder than the desert. She didn't speak. She knelt beside him, started cleaning the burns on his hands. Silent. Slow. Intentional. Her touch was clinical, but careful. As if she already knew the shape of his wounds. And the Stone inside him... reacted. It pulsed. Or maybe it was just his heart. It was getting hard to tell the difference. Beth was beautiful. But that wasn't the problem. The problem was how she looked at him. Like she'd already seen the end of his story.
"You're lucky," she said quietly. Asher let out a dry breath. "Doesn't feel like it." Beth's lips curled—but the smile never touched her eyes. "Most don't crawl out of places like that." He looked down at his chestplate. The white eagle had almost faded. The red haze around it warped by heat or something worse. "Do you know anyone from my unit?" he asked. Beth didn't flinch. "I treated a few. Before deployment." She dipped the cloth again. "You were conscripted. Redvale outskirts." That made him pause. "You know a lot about me." "I'm a medic," she replied with that same practiced softness. "It's my job."
But it wasn't her profession that made his stomach tighten. It was the way she said it. Like she remembered more than she was saying. He didn't press. But the Stone throbbed in his spine, as if it, too, had noticed the gap between her words and her eyes. Off to the side, Thorne hadn't looked away. His arms were crossed now. The way his weight shifted meant he was thinking. "Keep your eyes on him," Thorne said. "Strange things crawl out of the Rift." His gaze narrowed. "Sometimes they wear familiar faces." The sentence hung. No one argued. Asher didn't flinch. He just sat there.
The sun dipped lower. The shadows grew longer. And something in the dirt behind the outpost cracked like a whisper—too quiet for anyone to hear. A pulse. From the earth. From under the outpost. The Void Stone stirred. Not with pain. With hunger.