Morning came without sound. The dunes looked softer beneath the pale dawn, their glassy ridges catching light and scattering it across the silent plain. Even the wind moved quietly here, leaving behind only shifting trails that vanished as soon as they were made.
Taren sat beside the expedition's crates, still hearing the ghost of the voice from the night before. You came too soon. It wasn't something he'd imagined; it had weight. The words hadn't entered his ears—they had pressed through him, like warmth and sorrow bound together.
Seren Vale knelt nearby, adjusting the straps of her wind goggles. "You didn't sleep," she said without looking at him.
Taren gave a humorless smile. "Didn't seem right to."
"Because of your whisper?"
He nodded.
Seren's tone softened, though her eyes stayed hard. "You'll get used to it. Out here, even ghosts have echoes."
By midmorning, Aron Kael had finished assembling his creation. The Resonant Compass lay gleaming on a folding table: a disc of brass and crystal filaments, its surface etched with spirals that shimmered faintly in the desert light. At its center hung a suspended black sphere, perfectly balanced within a magnetic field.
Aron dusted his hands and beamed like a proud parent. "There. Tuned to catch harmonics even the Guild's towers can't. It'll show us where the silence bends."
"Silence bends?" Seren asked.
"Everything bends when you listen hard enough," he replied, and tapped the device. The air above it trembled. Motes of gold rose in a slow spiral, like dust caught in sunlight. The compass began to hum, low and patient.
Taren leaned closer. "What is it saying?"
Aron grinned. "That it's awake."
The compass pulsed, almost as if in agreement. Seren folded her arms. "Alive instruments. What could possibly go wrong?"
"Nothing, if you stop glaring at it like it owes you money," Aron muttered.
Taren smiled faintly but didn't speak. The vibration against his fingertips was strangely familiar—like touching the echo of a heartbeat.
When they finally moved out, the dunes stretched before them like an endless sea. The compass hung from a sling around Taren's neck, the faint glow of its rings leading the way. The others followed in silence, the only sound the soft crunch of their boots on the crystalline sand.
After hours of walking, the compass's light shifted from gold to blue. The black sphere at its center began to rotate, aligning itself with invisible forces. Aron jogged up beside Taren. "It's finding something. Watch."
The filaments inside rose and twisted, projecting thin threads of light into the air. The pattern spread outward, weaving a shifting lattice above their heads—a living map made of vibration and air. The dunes appeared as pale lines; the wind currents shimmered like veins.
Seren circled it slowly, her reflection fracturing across its geometry. "You're mapping… sound?"
Taren shook his head. "Not sound. Memory."
The compass pulsed once, and all the light converged on a single point in the north. The pattern hovered there like a distant star.
Seren lowered her goggles. "Then that's where we're going."
They reached the next ridge by afternoon. The air ahead shimmered strangely, heat and light folding over one another like ripples in glass. Aron stopped, squinting. "Flux field," he said. "Residual Pattern energy. We cross now or risk being trapped when it peaks."
They entered the valley. Within moments, the horizon dissolved.
The wind rose in a roarless gale, throwing up walls of glittering dust. Light and shadow merged until even their own shapes blurred. The compass screamed—a low harmonic tearing through the silence.
"Taren!" Seren shouted, but her voice vanished into the storm.
He stumbled forward, clutching the compass. The dunes flickered like shattered mirrors, each reflection showing something different. Shapes moved between the flashes—humanoid, indistinct, repeating his own motions a heartbeat late.
Echoes. The desert was alive with memory.
He turned a full circle, sand burning his skin, and for a moment he saw himself—another Taren, blurred and translucent, reaching out with the same terrified expression.
Then came the voice again, cutting through the light: You carry the map already.
The storm broke in a single heartbeat.
He fell to his knees. The desert was still again, the light sharp and cruel. Seren's hand gripped his shoulder. Her face was streaked with glass-dust, her eyes fierce. "You nearly walked off a cliff. Stay with us."
Taren's chest heaved. "Did you see them?"
"See who?"
"The reflections."
She frowned. "Mirages."
"They looked like us," he whispered.
Aron crouched beside them, examining the compass. Its outer rings still glowed faintly. "She's stable," he said, as if the device were a living companion. "Didn't even crack."
Seren looked from him to Taren. "Mirages or not, we stick together. Next time the wind turns, we anchor lines."
Taren nodded, though his gaze stayed fixed on the horizon. The silence pressed close again, heavier than before.
Later, as they unpacked their gear near a rock outcropping, a folded envelope slipped from Taren's satchel. Seren caught it before it touched the sand. "Private correspondence?" she teased, though her tone was curious.
"It's nothing," he said too quickly.
The wax seal bore the emblem of the Still-Heart: a circle bisected by a vertical line. Seren's face darkened. "Your mother's faction."
Taren reached for it. "She's not my mother here."
"You could've told me."
"And you'd have left me behind."
She studied him for a long moment, then handed the letter back. "Every map hides its maker," she said quietly.
When she walked away, Taren stared at the seal for a long time. He could almost feel the silence around it humming, the same way the compass did. He put it away without opening it.
That night, under a sky of fractured stars, Aron hummed while tinkering with the compass. Seren sat apart, sharpening her knife. The dunes glowed faintly with trapped light.
Taren lay awake, watching the constellations shift subtly overhead. "How did you design it?" he asked at last.
"The compass?" Aron didn't look up.
"Yes."
"By mistake. I built an amplifier to translate harmonic waves. It ended up translating meaning instead."
"Meaning?"
"Emotion, thought, memory—whatever the Pattern feels." Aron smirked. "You could say it listens to what listens to it."
Taren exhaled. "And what does it hear now?"
Aron hesitated. "Coordinates. Ones that don't exist."
Taren didn't sleep. Sometime past midnight, a faint hum stirred the air again. The compass had reassembled itself. Its face glowed with cold blue light. He crawled closer.
Symbols rippled across its surface—spirals, lines, runes. Then words appeared, luminous and steady: LATITUDE ZERO. DEPTH UNKNOWN.
Before he could blink, the text vanished, replaced by a single sigil: two circles linked by a broken line.
His blood froze. It was the Still-Heart emblem—the same mark stamped into his mother's letter.
He touched the compass, and a surge of heat shot up his arm.
The Still-Heart is listening.
He dropped it. The compass dimmed.
When Seren found him outside the tent at dawn, he was staring at the horizon, pale and hollow-eyed. "You're shaking," she said.
"She's connected," he murmured. "My mother. To this silence. To the coordinates."
Seren looked toward the dunes, where the first sunlight turned the sand to molten gold. "Then maybe that's why you were chosen. Family frequencies run deep."
He laughed bitterly. "I didn't want this."
"Neither did Anaya, from what I've read."
They watched the sunrise together. The compass, half-buried in the sand, began to glow again—faintly, insistently—pointing north.
Seren adjusted her pack straps. "We follow it until it stops. Then we decide whether the silence wants to be found."
Taren picked up the compass, its warmth seeping into his palms. Somewhere deep beneath the glass desert, the world's heart was still beating—slowly, strangely, waiting.
He looked to Seren, then to the horizon. "Then let's go find what's listening."