Felix woke with his mouth full of grit. Bitter, jagged grains clung to his tongue, grinding between his teeth as he coughed them out. He rolled onto his side, every muscle screaming, his body coated in a fine dust that glittered faintly in the pale light.
It wasn't sand. Not really. Each grain caught the sun like a shard of crushed crystal, sharp enough to sting where it pressed against his skin. He pushed himself upright, squinting against the blinding shimmer. The world stretched out in every direction—an endless desert of fractured light, dunes glittering like a broken mirror scattered across the earth.
Behind him, at the far edge of the slope, the Mist Stalkers still prowled. Dozens of them, their pale shapes pacing and snarling at the boundary where dirt met this strange expanse. None stepped forward. Not one.
That was both a comfort and a warning.
Felix winced as a sting lanced across his palms and the back of his skull. He lifted his hands—and blinked at the thin lines of blood trickling down his skin. His gaze darted to where they'd been resting. Dark droplets spotted the pale sand.
Curious, he pinched a small mound between his fingers, rolling it gently. The grains cut at once, biting like ground glass. With a hiss, he let it spill away.
"—Ack! Damn it. This shit's sharp." He spat, grinding his teeth against the sting.
Pushing upright, Felix slapped at his coat, trying to shed the glittering grit clinging to him. Each movement scratched faintly, as if the desert itself meant to flay him. He wiped his hands down the sides of his shorts, streaking them with a fresh smear of blood. A humorless chuckle broke from his throat.
"Didn't like these much anyway."
The weight at his chest tugged faintly. Felix pulled the drifter's pendant free, watching the chain sway until it stilled—pointing deeper into the endless crystalline dunes. His jaw tightened.
"Figures."
He cast one last look back at the treeline, where the forest loomed like a red-tinted nightmare behind its veil of mist. With a sharp grin, he raised a final middle finger in farewell.
"Rot in hell."
Then he turned, boots crunching against the glittering ground, and set off into the blinding horizon.
As he walked, Felix lifted his eyes to the heavens. Night had claimed the desert, yet the darkness was anything but empty. The sky shimmered with a vast aurora, ribbons of violet and deep purple stretching like silk across the stars. Here and there streaks of blue flared and vanished, rippling as though the heavens themselves were alive and breathing.
A faint grin tugged at the corner of his mouth. After everything—the suffocating fog, the endless trees, the gnashing jaws of Stalkers—it was strange, almost merciful, to see something beautiful.
"At least this place has some pretty sights," he muttered, his voice sounding small against the vast quiet.
The climb up a dune dragged at his legs, each step sinking into the glittering grains, but at the crest he paused, breath catching in his chest. The expanse unfurled before him like an alien ocean. Dunes rolled endlessly into the horizon, their crystalline surfaces catching the auroral glow, each wave of sand gleaming as though the stars had spilled themselves upon the earth.
But the desert was not empty. Far across the shimmering plains, titanic ruins jutted from the depths. Great slabs of stone, carved and weathered, leaned at impossible angles as if the earth had swallowed them mid-collapse. Half-buried arches pierced the dunes like broken crowns, stairways climbed toward nothing, and shattered colonnades stood defiant against time, their shadows stretching long and alien under the shifting sky.
And beyond it all, on the horizon—so distant it blurred into haze—stood a solitary spire. A tower, dark and immense, its outline faint yet undeniable even from here.
A low whistle slipped through Felix's teeth.
"It must be massive," he murmured. "If I can see it from here…"
After admiring the view for a short while, Felix carefully slid down the dune, bracing his weight so the sharp grains didn't bite into his skin. Every shift of his boots sent glittering dust cascading in thin rivulets down the slope, catching the aurora's glow like falling stars. At the bottom, he straightened and glanced ahead, eyes narrowing on a dark shape breaking the monotony of the dunes. Stone—ruins. They weren't towering or grand like the silhouettes he'd seen further off, but close enough to be useful.
"Guess that'll do for camp," he muttered.
The walk stretched longer than he expected. What looked like an hour's trek became closer to two. The desert seemed to play tricks on distance; the dunes rolled endlessly, their slopes dragging him down only to force another climb. His legs ached, his throat grew dry, but eventually the ruin drew close, rising from the crystalline sand like the bones of some forgotten beast.
It wasn't much. Just a single arch, half-buried at its base, its stones weathered and fractured from gods knew how many centuries of wind and grit. Faded carvings clung to the surface—spirals, glyphs, symbols worn to the edge of nothing.
A toppled pillar lay nearby, half-swallowed by glittering sand, as though the desert was intent on burying the past completely.
Felix ran a hand along the arch's surface, the stone surprisingly cool against his fingertips despite the dry heat lingering in the air. A good height. High enough to get him off the strange ground. He clambered up the leaning side, boots scraping against the grooves of ancient stone until he reached the curve near the top. Settling there, he let his legs dangle for a moment, the desert stretching endlessly in every direction beneath the violet sky.
"Not the comfiest bed I've had," he muttered, "but it'll do."
He unshouldered his bow and quiver, setting them within arm's reach. For a while he simply sat there, watching the dunes shift faintly in the night wind, glittering like broken glass beneath the aurora. The ruins around him stood silent and hollow, but their presence was strangely comforting—a reminder that something else had once lived here. Something had built. Something had fallen.
Felix lay back against the cool curve of the arch, eyes fixed on the faint spire far in the distance. He let his breathing slow, his body finally surrendering to exhaustion. Sleep pulled at him, uneasy but insistent.
The last thing he saw before drifting off was the endless shimmer of the crystalline desert under the alien sky, and the ruins around him standing like quiet sentinels in the night.
He stirred to the rasp of metal on wood—the slow, deliberate rhythm of a file dragged across a joint. The sound was steady, purposeful, a craftsman's heartbeat. His eyes cracked open to the dim glow of lanterns swaying gently overhead. Shadows clung to the stone walls of his workshop like soot, shifting only when the flame flickered, breaking across shelves crowded with half-finished creations. Tools gleamed faintly where the light kissed their edges, scattered in familiar disarray across the scarred workbench.
With a low groan, he lifted his head and pushed himself upright, vertebrae popping one by one. He stretched each of his six arms in turn, the movements slow, almost ritualistic—shoulders rolling, joints flexing, fingers curling into fists before loosening again. Relief whispered through him, a small satisfaction in the simple act of being whole.
Only then did his gaze settle on the puppet. Humanoid in form, it sat propped against the table's surface, its unfinished frame catching the lantern's glow. Brass fittings gleamed along the wooden structure of its limbs, delicate yet unyielding. The face was little more than a mask of pale grain, smooth where the features should have been, hollow where the eyes would rest.
He smiled faintly.
"I… must have dozed off again," he murmured, voice low and resonant, touched with a gentleness that seemed almost at odds with the jagged tools surrounding him.
Patience lingered in every syllable.
A quiet chuckle escaped him, soft and unhurried, swallowed quickly by the heavy silence of the room.
Then, with a soft whirr and a metallic chirp, a bird landed on the bench. Its talons clicked faintly against the wood—steel against scarred surface. It was no ordinary bird. Brass cogs and tiny springs turned within its chest, each motion accompanied by a faint, precise tick. Its lacquered body was black and sleek, a clockwork falcon in miniature, glass eyes catching the lanternlight and reflecting it back like twin moons.
He reached out as if greeting an old friend. "Hello, my friend," he said, the gentleness in his voice folding into a fond grin. "Did you come to check on me?"
The falcon clicked and gave a mechanical chirp, wings fluttering in a crisp, careful motion. It raised its head in a small, deferential bow.
"Yes. Yes, I'm awake." His hands flexed around the tools again, settling back into routine. "How far along have they moved?" he asked, casual, as if reading a clock.
The bird lowered its head. Its stance tightened; whatever answer it offered was carried in the droop of a wing and the slow, sorrowful swivel of its glass eye. The movement was small but unmistakably heavy with bad news.
He sighed, the sound flat with weariness. "…Guess it's about time to leave this old place." The admission sat on his tongue like stone. He rose, dusting off his coat, and the falcon hopped to his shoulder, its talons cold and precise.
He pushed open the heavy door and stepped out onto the balcony. The air there was dry and sterile, as though the world beyond had been scrubbed clean of scent. He rested his many fingers on the marble-smooth railing, feeling its coolness press up through his palm.
Below, not far across the glittering expanse, lay the city. It was not a city of brick and timber but of crystal and pale stone—Gothic spires of glassy material fused to carved marble, buttresses clawing at a sky gone wrong. Bridges of translucent stone threaded the towers together like veins, and windows caught the dim light in a thousand stabbing reflections.
At first the movement in the streets read like life—figures surging, banners snapping in air that had no wind. Then he saw the truth: they were butchering one another. Armored men and women, some crowned with curling horns, others bearing white, feathered wings, collided in a massacre that painted the crystalline streets red. Steel met steel, the ring of combat muffled by distance but present, a terrible percussion. Screams threaded through the clangor. Death moved like a tide through the avenues.
Above it all the heavens tore open. The aurora that had danced earlier was gone; the sky split in ragged seams, black rot seeping from the wounds as though some swollen sore had ruptured the dome itself. A foul ooze crawled along the torn edges, making the light sickly. Towers trembled. Streets buckled. The world below heaved as if reality itself were coming unstitched.
He let out a low, bone-deep sigh—not of awe, not of panic, but of a resignation so old it sounded like a habit. His hand glided along the railing, fingers memorizing the sterile smoothness as if committing it to muscle memory. He looked past the slaughter, past the tearing sky, to something harder, something he could not and would not deny.
"…Let's go see Bel." The words were soft, small, resolute.
The falcon on his shoulder croaked, an urgent staccato of gears and springs, wings snapping open as the world around them convulsed—the city dissolving into shards of color, the scream of steel, the split heavens yawning wider—
Felix woke with a violent gasp.
He convulsed upright on the cold curve of the half-buried arch, lungs burning as if he'd been under water. Cold sweat slicked his skin and grit clung in the folds of his neck.
Instinct made his fingers close on the pendant at his chest, feeling the familiar weight. Around him the crystalline desert lay silent beneath the violet aurora; dunes rolled away into a glittering horizon. The arch's stone pressed into his back; the ruins were as he'd left them.
But the echo of that tower—the scentless air, the falcon's mechanical cry, the city sheared open and bleeding—scraped at the inside of his skull. The single phrase lingered there like a splinter.
Let's go see Bel.
Felix swallowed hard, heart still hammering in his ribs, the night's quiet pressing in all around him.
His gaze drifted toward the far horizon, where a solitary tower speared the sky, stark and unyielding against the endless dunes. Something about it felt wrong—too still, too present, as though it were watching him rather than simply standing there. A chill coursed down his spine, the night air suddenly heavier on his skin.
"What… what was that?" he whispered, the words rasping out before he even realized he'd spoken.
The silence that followed was absolute, broken only by the whisper of the wind as it wound through the glittering dunes—lonely, endless, and eternal.