The bark looked dead enough to be safe. That was the only reason Dusk was considering it. He'd been staring at the strip of dark gray, brittle skin on the tree trunk since the end of yesterday—staring at it the way someone stares at a door they don't want to open but know they eventually must.
His eyes drifted past it, toward the carcass beside the tree where he'd landed earlier. The mound of bones was solid enough to stand on and rotten enough not to matter. A ribcage jutted out like the curved railing of a broken staircase, pale against the dark-colored ground. It gave him height and—more importantly—kept his feet off the soil.
Touching soil in this place was a mistake. A slow, draining, irreversible mistake.
Dusk crouched low on the carcass mound, testing the balance of the structure beneath him. Bones shifted with a dry, scraping chorus, but they didn't collapse. He'd learned quickly that even dead things here could be useful if you stepped lightly and didn't give them a reason to betray you.
The bark wasn't going to peel with fingers alone. His hands were too weak, trembling from hunger and the lingering afterburn of telekinesis. He hated using that ability. Hated the sensation of his own life-force unraveling inside him every time he reached for it. But he needed something—anything—to chew. Even a distraction from the hollow ache stretching beneath his ribs.
He inhaled sharply, pain shot through his skull as he activated his trait, then he leapt.
His boots hit the carcass beside the tree with a muted thud. Bones groaned under him, a long, low complaint. His hand shot out to grab the trunk, steadying himself as a pulse of dizziness wormed through his skull. The kind of lightheadedness that came from existing too long in a place that didn't want him alive.
The tree leaned at an angle, its branches stiff and lifeless, like a corpse trying to remember what movement used to feel like. They didn't shift. They didn't reach. They didn't cling. They were dead, and dead things stayed where they were put.
Good. He preferred enemies he could see.
He braced himself, lifted his hand, and reached inward.
Telekinesis.
The invisible string inside his chest tightened instantly again, pulling at something raw and vital. His vision dimmed at the edges. Pain rippled down his spine like a slow, deliberate stroke of a burning knife.
He clenched his teeth.
The bark cracked.
The dry snap cut through the quiet like a bone breaking in a sealed room. Beneath the sand—not him—something reacted. A subtle roll in the ground, a pressure pushing up from underneath. But Dusk didn't notice. The bark tore free in brittle chunks, dropping toward the bone mound. The carcass structure under him shifted faintly in response, vertebrae grinding softly from the force of the landing.
He ignored the noise. All he cared about was the strip of bark in his hand.
It looked like something that would taste awful. Perfect. Everything that didn't kill him tasted awful.
He bit into it.
It turned to dust on his tongue. Bitter, dry, useless. But chewing gave his brain the illusion of food, and illusions were sometimes the difference between living another hour or giving up entirely.
He spat out the shards that stuck between his teeth, wiped his mouth on his sleeve, and climbed higher onto the carcass mound. Height wasn't safety here—but it was clarity.
He needed to see the silhouette again.
He'd spotted it a while ago—just a fragment of shape through fog, something black on the distant horizon. Now, in the washed-out morning light, he could compare it to what he'd imagined.
It was larger. Darker. Sharper.
A tower. Or something shaped like one.
It rose straight from the land, impossibly tall, cutting a clean line through the fog that blurred everything else. A monolith carved from shadow. Unmoving. Unbroken. A fixed point in a world that enjoyed erasing points of reference.
He wasn't seeing it for the first time, but it felt different now.
It felt real.
A pressure settled beneath his ribs—not fear, not quite. Deeper. Older. A cold tension threading through his nerves. Not danger. Something truer. The kind of dread that didn't warn you of what was coming, but reminded you of what was inevitable.
He didn't want to go to that tower. His body knew it before he admitted it. But wanting had nothing to do with survival. And survival here was thin enough that he couldn't afford preferences.
The tower was the only structure he'd seen in this entire wasteland. The only thing that looked like it might contain answers. Or food. Or refuge. Or at the very least, a different kind of death.
He tore his gaze away long enough to study the land around him. The dead forest loomed behind, rows of stiff, lifeless trees standing like markers for graves no one bothered to dig. They didn't move. They didn't whisper. They didn't stalk.
They just existed. And somehow, that was worse.
He dropped down the far side of the bone mound, boots landing on a spine that groaned loudly under his weight.
The sand shifted immediately.
He froze.
No movement. No breath.
The underground presence eased—not leaving, just quieting. Like a predator settling into stillness when its attention wanders.
He stepped onto a nest of vertebrae, placing weight slowly, then onto a fossilized limb joint. He kept to bone where he could—anything to avoid the soil's slow death grip. The air was cold enough to sting but heavy enough to make breathing feel optional. Every inhalation tasted like metal rubbed into old cloth.
He didn't look back. Nothing behind him mattered. Nothing behind him would help.
Ahead, the tower silhouette darkened as he walked. Not because it changed—because he was finally near enough to understand how small he was.
He walked slower as the dune sloped downward, stepping only where bone poked through the ground.
The fog parted.
Something glinted darkly half-buried in the sand.
At first he thought it was another carcass fragment—a skull, maybe, cracked and aged by time. But the surface wasn't bone. It absorbed light instead of reflecting it. Black. Matte. Wrong in every angle.
The jaw was too angular. The teeth too long. The sockets too deep.
Two horn-like structures curled from the sides, broken at their tips. And between the ordinary pair of sockets, a third hollow stared upward—an empty eye that had never blinked.
A demon skull. Or something demons would have nightmares about.
It lay half-sunken in the sand, as if it had clawed its way here before failing.
Dusk crouched, careful with every breath and shift of weight. Something lived beneath this place… somewhere. And he had no intention of drawing its attention.
He brushed sand from the skull's brow. The material wasn't bone. It felt like hardened charcoal that had once been fire—dull, porous, charged with a memory he didn't want to understand. Dust slid off the horns and drifted into the air without settling.
The skull tilted a fraction.
A hairline fracture along its jaw opened, just enough to catch the world's breath.
Something inside that break exhaled.
A whisper slipped through:
"You shouldn't be here."
Dusk's breath died behind his teeth.
For a second the world narrowed to the triple sockets, the central void staring straight through him. His pulse thudded in his throat. His hands wanted to move. His feet refused.
Silence swelled.
His voice slipped out, clipped and barely there.
"…What?"