Rating: MA 15+
The rain fell on Tokyo like static noise—endless, monotonous, erasing the distinction between sky and concrete. Through the smudged window of the Sakura Heights Orphanage, thirteen-year-old Sabaku Ō pressed his forehead against the cold glass, watching droplets race downward in chaotic patterns. His reflection stared back—dark eyes hollow with something beyond mere sadness. Emptiness, perhaps. The kind that makes bones feel too heavy.
"Sabaku, dinner's ready," called Mrs. Yamamoto from downstairs, her voice carrying that particular tone of institutional kindness—warm enough to satisfy obligation, cold enough to maintain distance.
He didn't respond. His gaze had already drifted to the photograph taped beside his bed: the Great Pyramid of Giza at sunset, its limestone façade burning gold against an impossible sky. He'd torn it from a National Geographic magazine three years ago, back when he still believed beauty could fill the hollow spaces inside him.
It couldn't.
But the desert... the desert whispered promises through glossy magazine pages. In his dreams, he walked through endless dunes where the wind carried voices older than language itself. Where the sun didn't just shine—it remembered. And in those dreams, he wasn't nobody. He wasn't the orphan child with no family name worth keeping, no future worth imagining.
"If only I could breathe the same air they did," he whispered to the rain-soaked glass, his breath fogging the window. "Maybe I wouldn't feel so empty."
The words dissolved into condensation. Below, Tokyo stretched out in its utilitarian gray—buildings like filing cabinets, streets like conveyor belts, people like processed units moving from point A to point B. He'd memorized every documentary, every book, every scattered article about ancient Egypt. The Book of the Dead. The weighing of hearts. The journey through the Duat. He knew more about civilizations dead for millennia than he did about the living world around him.
Perhaps that was the problem.
The door burst open. "Sabaku! Now!" Mrs. Yamamoto's patience had thinned to translucence.
He descended the stairs mechanically, each step a small rebellion against the weight of existence. The dining hall smelled of institutional curry and bleach—a combination that had long since stopped registering as unpleasant, simply becoming the scent of here, of now, of the life he neither chose nor escaped.
Twelve other children sat at the long table, their conversations a white noise of normalcy. They spoke of school, of video games, of television shows. Surface-level existence. Sabaku ate in silence, his mind wandering back to the pyramid photograph, to the way sunlight allegedly felt when filtered through desert air—dry and honest, unlike Tokyo's humid half-truths.
"Still daydreaming about sand?" Kaoto, a fifteen-year-old with a cruel smile, leaned across the table. "What's so great about dead people and lizards?"
Sabaku's chopsticks paused midair. He could explain—about the mathematics of pyramid construction, about the boundaries and ways of the afterlife mythology, about the way entire civilizations had been built on the foundation of believing something mattered beyond the immediate moment. But Kaoto wouldn't understand. Nobody here understood.
"Nothing," Sabaku said quietly. "Just... nothing."
After dinner, he retreated to his corner of the sleeping quarters—a space marked by invisible boundaries respected by unspoken agreement. The other children had long since learned that Sabaku wasn't unfriendly so much as unreachable, like an island visible from shore but separated by waters too cold to cross.
He opened his worn notebook, pages filled with sketches of hieroglyphs, calculations about ancient astronomy, fragments of mythology translated and retranslated until the words lost their academic distance and became something personal. Something desperate.
If I can't live there, he wrote in careful characters, then let me live as them.
The lights-out bell rang at nine. Darkness settled over the orphanage like a held breath.
Sabaku lay awake, listening to the rain, to the distant hum of the city, to the synchronized breathing of children who somehow found peace in this gray existence. He closed his eyes and tried to summon the desert—tried to feel sand between his fingers, tried to taste dry wind, tried to hear ancient prayers carried across impossible distances.
Instead, he heard something else.
Footsteps. Multiple pairs. Moving with purpose through the lower floors.
The first gunshot shattered the night like glass.
Sabaku's eyes snapped open. Around him, children stirred in confusion—that strange liminal space between sleep and waking where the mind refuses to process danger. Mrs. Yamamoto's scream cut through the building, high and terrible and abruptly silenced.
"What—" Kaoto started to say.
The door exploded inward. Three figures in dark clothing, faces obscured by masks, weapons gleaming in the emergency lighting. Time fractured into slow-motion horror. Someone was shouting. Children were screaming. The sharp percussion of gunfire echoed through spaces meant for lullabies.
Sabaku rolled off his bed, instinct driving him toward the window. Behind him, chaos erupted—red spreading across institutional white sheets, small bodies falling with awful finality. The acrid smell of gunpowder mixed with copper sweetness.
His fingers found the window latch. Jammed. Of course it was jammed—safety regulations, fire codes, the same systems meant to protect becoming cages in crisis.
A hand grabbed his shoulder, spinning him around. One of the masked figures raised a gun, and Sabaku saw his reflection in the dark lens of the barrel—eyes wide, face pale, utterly unremarkable even in the moment of his death.
Is this it? he thought distantly. Is this all there was?
The gun fired. The bullet caught him in the gut, and the world tilted sideways. He was falling—through the floor, through time, through the thin membrane separating what-is from what-could-be. His body hit the ground, but the impact felt distant, like it was happening to someone else.
Blood pooled beneath him, warm and wrong. The masked figures were moving to the next room, their mission apparently broader than just this one sleeping quarters. Someone had wanted the orphanage destroyed. Someone had wanted them erased.
Sabaku's vision blurred, the ceiling tiles swimming in and out of focus. Pain radiated from his gut in waves, each breath a thing that yielded diminishing returns. He was dying. He understood this with strange clarity.
And in that moment, as consciousness began its final retreat, he whispered through blood-slicked lips: "If I can't live there... then let me live as them."
The photograph of the pyramid lay within his dying gaze, golden sunset mocking the fluorescent lights now flickering with failing electricity. He reached toward it with trembling fingers, never quite touching, and the distance between felt infinite.
Somewhere, sirens wailed. Too late. Always too late.
His eyes closed on Tokyo rain and institutional walls and the gray emptiness that had defined his thirteen years.
Heat.
Sabaku's first sensation was heat—not the oppressive humidity of Tokyo summers, but something drier, more honest. Heat that pressed against skin like judgment.
His second sensation was pain. His body ached with bruises too numerous to count, muscles crying out from abuse both recent and chronic. He tried to move and found his limbs heavy, uncooperative.
His third sensation was confusion.
I died, he thought with certainty. I felt the bullet. I felt the blood leaving.
But he was thinking. Dead people didn't think. Did they?
Sabaku forced his eyes open and immediately regretted it. Sunlight—brutal, unfiltered, impossibly bright—seared his retinas. He threw an arm across his face, blinking away tears, waiting for his vision to adjust.
When it did, his breath caught.
Sand. Endless, rolling dunes of sand stretching to a horizon that shimmered with heat distortion. The sky above burned blue-white, clouds thin as forgotten memories. And the sun—the sun hung closer than it should, larger than it should, like an eye that had grown tired of pretending distance.
"What..." His voice emerged broken and foreign. Wrong pitch. Wrong timbre.
He looked down at his hands and froze. Small hands. A child's hands. Bloodied, bruised, wrapped in strips of linen stained brown with old injuries. His arms were thin, malnourished, skin tanned deep bronze from merciless exposure.
Panic rising, he scrambled to his feet—and immediately stumbled. His body was shorter, lighter, moving with proportions his mind didn't recognize. He caught himself in the sand, particles burning hot against his palms.
This isn't possible. This isn't—
A fragment of polished bronze lay half-buried nearby. With shaking hands, he lifted it, angling the surface to catch his reflection.
White hair. Not gray, not blonde—pure white, like bleached bone. Tanned skin bearing scars he'd never earned. And beneath his neck, a thin scarf curved like a crescent moon.
The face staring back was not his own.
"No." He dropped the bronze, backing away. "No, no, no—"
Behind him, voices rose. He spun around and saw them: a city. Massive. Impossible. Buildings carved from sandstone and limestone, pyramids rising in tiered layers, columns supporting structures that defied his understanding of ancient architecture. Market stalls. Crowds. And everything—everything—wrong.
The people wore linens and bronze, their skin painted with cosmetics in patterns he'd only seen in museum displays. Hieroglyphs adorned every surface, but these weren't ancient weathered carvings—they were fresh, functional, living language. And the sounds...
He concentrated, trying to parse the cacophony. The language was Egyptian. Old Egyptian. The tongue he'd studied from textbooks and audio recordings, never expecting to hear it spoken with casual fluency by crowds negotiating prices for bread and beer.
"By the gods, another rat from the temple." A granny's voice, harsh with disgust.
Sabaku turned. A merchant stared at him with open contempt, shooing him away like vermin. "Go back to Ra's Left Hand, street filth. We don't feed cursed children here."
"I'm not—" Sabaku started in Japanese, then stopped. The words had emerged in fluent Egyptian. His mouth had moved independently of his intention, shaped syllables he'd only ever approximated in stuttering academic exercises.
The merchant spat at his feet and turned away.
Sabaku stumbled backward into the flow of foot traffic. Bodies pushed past him, none sparing a second glance. He was invisible here too—but differently. Not the invisibility of indifference, but the active invisibility of revulsion. These people looked through him with practiced skill, the way one might avoid acknowledging a corpse.
He wandered through streets that felt simultaneously alien and achingly familiar. Every building matched descriptions from his studies, but seeing them lived-in, functional, occupied by people treating miracles as mundane—it twisted something in his perception. This was the Egypt he'd dreamed of. But it was wrong. All wrong.
The sun blazed overhead, and he realized it hurt to look at—but more than that, it felt aware. Like something watching. Waiting.
Hours passed in dissociative fog. He found himself in what appeared to be a massive plaza before the largest pyramid he'd ever imagined. The structure rose in impossible geometry, steps leading to a temple complex at its summit where smoke rose in ritual patterns.
Children played nearby—but their games were violent, mimetic warfare. They mock-fought with wooden weapons, practicing cruelties with disturbing precision. When one fell, the others didn't help him up. They kicked him until he stopped moving.
Sabaku backed away, nausea rising. What is this place?
"You're the new one." A child approached, maybe ten years old, eyes hard with premature aging. He carried a crude knife made from sharpened bone. "From the last offering?"
"I don't... I don't understand." Sabaku's voice trembled.
The child laughed—a sound devoid of joy. "Ra's Left Hand accepts all children. We worship through suffering. The more we endure, the closer we come to the god. Pain purifies." He raised his arm, showing burn scars in ritual patterns. "These are my prayers."
Horror crystallized in Sabaku's gut. This wasn't the Egypt of his dreams. This was something grotesque, a distortion of faith twisted into systematic brutality.
"I have to go," he whispered, backing away.
"There's nowhere to go," the child called after him. "The desert kills everyone who runs. Better to die in service than in sand."
Sabaku ran anyway. Through streets that blurred into sameness, past faces that registered his panic with bored recognition—this was clearly not the first child to flee. The city sprawled larger than should be possible, maze-like in its complexity.
He found himself at the edge. Where city met desert. Where civilization's precarious foothold dissolved into infinite nothing.
The sun was setting now, and the sky... the sky was wrong. Not the gentle watercolor transition of Tokyo sunsets, but something violent—deep reds bleeding into purples that bruised the horizon, clouds twisting into shapes that suggested malevolence. And the sun itself seemed reluctant to set, clinging to the sky with visible effort.
This isn't the past, realization crystallized coldly. This can't be the past.
A sound rose from the desert. Deep. Resonant. Like stone grinding against stone, like bones settling in ancient tombs. The sand itself began to shift, dunes reorganizing with purpose.
People in the city screamed. Not panic screams—these were screams of recognition. Of inevitability.
"They're here!" someone shouted. "The Duneborn are here!"
Sabaku turned back toward the city and saw them emerging. Creatures that shouldn't exist. Biomechanical nightmares fusing flesh with architecture—massive forms composed of human bones, mechanical joints, and sand that flowed like living tissue. They moved with horrible grace, each step shaking the ground.
One towered above the city walls, its skull composed of thousands of smaller skulls fused together, jaw dropping open to emit sounds that bypassed ears and resonated directly in bone marrow. Its body was a cathedral of suffering, every surface etched with screaming faces.
The city's defenders rushed forward—warriors in bronze wielding weapons that sparked with impossible energy. But it wasn't enough. The Duneborn tore through defenses like paper, each swipe reducing soldiers to red mist and scattered components.
Buildings collapsed. Fire erupted from sources that weren't fire—energy weapons, Sabaku realized with distant shock. This civilization had technology far beyond ancient Egypt. Beyond modern Tokyo.
A Duneborn turned toward the plaza where Sabaku stood frozen. Its attention focused, thousands of empty eye sockets converging into singular purpose. It raised what might have been an arm—a limb composed of interlocking spinal columns—and brought it down.
Sabaku dove aside. The impact crater appeared where he'd stood, sand fusing into glass from the heat of impact.
He scrambled to his feet and ran toward the only direction available: the open desert.
Behind him, Khemet-Ra burned. The city that should have been his dream collapsed into nightmare reality. Screams chased him across sand that grabbed at his feet, each step sinking slightly, the desert itself hostile.
Overtime night fell and Sabaku surviving on abandoned food and dried up water that was still drinkable while thinking of everything that happened throughout the day while surviving on mere scraps, noticed the figure coming his direction again, still rampaging through the desert and the buildings around him with horrifying precision.
Sabaku ran until his legs gave out. He collapsed into sand still hot from the day's sun, stomach heaving, body trembling from exhaustion and shock and the complete dissolution of everything he thought he understood about reality.
His hand closed around something half-buried in the sand. A pendant. Bronze, inscribed with hieroglyphs he translated automatically: May Aru walk in peace through all the years.
Aru. The name resonated strangely, like recognition from someone else's memory.
He clutched the pendant as the adrenaline finally crashed, leaving only bone-deep exhaustion. Above, the stars wheeled in patterns he didn't recognize. Constellations wrong for Earth's sky. Or Earth's time.
"So this is what I wished for," he whispered to the uncaring desert, tears cutting tracks through dust on his stolen face. "A world already dying."
The wind picked up, carrying voices—or perhaps just sounds that the desperate mind shaped into meaning. But for a moment, he thought he heard his own name. Both of them. Sabaku and Aru, intertwined like echoes in a tomb.
He closed his eyes, hoping to wake in Tokyo rain and institutional walls and gray emptiness.
Instead, he felt sand between his fingers—dry, burning, infinite. And knew with terrible certainty: This was real. This was now. This was reincarnation at It's finest.
TO BE CONTINUED...