The night came heavy and restless.
The fires around the frontier settlement burned low, their smoke coiling into the cold air. Moss sat beside Bran's pen, watching the bird's feathers puff in unease. Even the chocobo could sense it, something deep, something wrong.
The ground hadn't moved again since the convoy limped back, but the silence that followed felt worse than any rumbling earth. Too still. Too patient.
When he finally crawled into his cot, exhaustion pulled him under almost instantly.
Then, everything shifted.
He wasn't in his tent anymore.
The air shimmered in an earthen haze, thick and heavy like dust suspended in sunlight. The world pulsed in muted amber and ochre tones, and the sound, deep, steady, ancient, seemed to come from the ground itself.
He looked down at his hands. They weren't his own. Massive, coarse, and cracked, his arms were made of stone shot through with glowing seams of molten gold. When he moved, the ground shuddered beneath him.
Before him stood a gathering of robed figures. Small, fragile things compared to the vastness of his form. Their torches burned with greenish flame, and their chants rolled across the hollow plain like wind through a canyon.
The Wardens.
Their voices weren't words, not truly, more vibration than sound, layered and resonant, carrying reverence and fear in equal measure. He could feel their intent in the stone around him, in the soil itself. They were not speaking to him. They were pleading.
And he realized with a cold, sinking dread, they were pleading to him.
He felt the slow thrum of the earth's pulse, immense and steady. Each beat was a mountain's breath, a heartbeat older than memory. His vision swayed, and the molten lines along his arms flared brighter with each chant, responding to their rhythm.
The Wardens raised their hands. A single word rose from them, a low, guttural sound that wasn't made for human tongues. It shook the dust from the air and pressed against his chest like a physical weight.
He didn't understand it, but it resonated through him all the same.
Then the world fractured.
The haze broke apart into blinding light and noise. The sensation of weight and stone and heat collapsed inward until,
Moss gasped awake.
The tent ceiling loomed above, his pulse hammering in his ears. Lyra was kneeling beside him, palm pressed to his forehead, her expression etched with worry.
"Hey, easy," she said softly. "You weren't answering us."
Dole stood near the flap, arms crossed. "You were out cold, man. We've been trying to wake you. Thought maybe you decided to sleep through breakfast."
Moss sat up slowly, the world spinning for a moment. His skin was clammy, his heartbeat still echoing faintly with that same deep rhythm.
"I… think I was dreaming," he said quietly.
"Bad one?" Lyra asked.
He hesitated. "Not sure."
Outside, the camp was already stirring. The hum of morning activity drifted in, new scouting plans, supply talk, and quiet fear of the creature in the west.
But Moss's thoughts were buried deeper, somewhere beneath the plains, in that place of molten light and living stone.
He could still feel it, something vast, patient, and aware, stirring far below the surface.
Whatever it was he'd seen, it wasn't just a dream.