The storm left no mark.
No drifts, no debris, no sound except his own breath scraping dry in his chest. The desert looked the same as before—but wrong. The horizon rippled, as if two worlds were arguing over which one he stood in.
Silas touched the tower's leg. It felt cool, then warm, then something that couldn't be temperature at all. His hand came away faintly glowing with static, threads of light coiling around his knuckles before fading.
When he blinked, the tower changed.
One moment it was a rusted carcass, leaning and dead. The next, it stood upright, humming with current, red warning lights pulsing like veins. Wind shifted, reality hiccupped. The living tower bled into the dead one, then back again. Both true. Both impossible.
"Choose your weather," he whispered, remembering the chorus that had lived inside the square.
He took a step.
The air thickened—dust hanging motionless, light bending into strange geometry. His boot struck earth and sound split into two versions of itself: one dull, one ringing pure. He stepped again and the ringing world came clearer. The Archive was awake here, an animal sniffing the air after a long sleep.
Silas swallowed. "Let's see what remembering costs."
He reached for the deck of cards, instinct before thought. The cardboard edges buzzed against his fingers, a static like whispering paper. He fanned them out in the half-light; each back flickered between printed spades and thin glowing sigils. The world was translating even his small superstitions.
When he cut the deck, every card turned face-up at once—thirteen suits, a hundred meanings, all reflecting the tower's red pulse.
He bent and pressed his palm to the ground. The vibration under it wasn't tremor; it was signal. The Archive was running beneath the sand, alive in the lines people had once drawn between cities, now bones of light under the dirt.
He walked toward the tower's base. Each step seemed to make the world choose again. Dead. Alive. Dead. Alive.
By the time he reached the ladder, the two versions had blended into a single impossible shape: the ruin still standing, the standing structure already ruin.
He touched the metal. "I'm not here to break you," he said. "I'm here to listen."
The square in his pocket pulsed once, hard enough to hurt. He drew it out. Its surface reflected both worlds—the rust and the light—then swallowed the reflection altogether. He pressed it flat against the tower.
The hum jumped to a pitch that set his teeth vibrating. The sand lifted in circles, patterns too quick to follow. Voices unfolded in layers:
You shouldn't have come back.You're not supposed to see this.Keep going.
Three tones, one meaning: awareness has consequences.
He gritted his teeth. "You don't get to decide what's real anymore."
The chorus flared, half warning, half applause. Sparks crawled across the tower's ribs and into the square. The light poured through his fingers—then stopped, sudden as it started.
When he looked down, the square was blank metal again, cool as river stone. The world had steadied. Only one tower now, bent and silent. The Archive asleep—or pretending.
Silas pocketed the square and looked east. The air shimmered faintly, the color of breath on glass. He could still see, faintly, a second horizon laid over the first: one real, one waiting.
He turned toward it.
"A man's trail don't end where he stops walking," he said under his breath. "It ends where he stops seeing."
He began to walk. Behind him, the tower gave a single, final pulse—like a lantern lit for the next traveler to find.