The sun had no color here. It loomed above, pale and distorted, like a blind eye watching without seeing. The air tasted like scorched metal. My footsteps sank into dust so ancient it no longer remembered being earth. This was the Dead Desert — and the gods did not speak here.
I crossed the last bleeding boundary of the city of Mordeus. Its fanatical screams and iron hymns had faded behind me, swallowed by the heat. I thought the silence would bring peace. It didn't. It brought something worse. Something hollow.
The sand wasn't made of grains. It was ash. Bone-dust. Fragments of forgotten prayers and broken oaths. It shifted unnaturally beneath my boots, as if it moved not from the wind but from something buried below. Something dreaming.
I hadn't seen another soul in days. Not even a scavenger. Not even a bird. Only heat mirages and the distant illusion of towers that dissolved when I approached. I was beginning to suspect the desert itself was aware of me. That it watched. That it judged.
The Foice — the Scythe of Death — pulsed faintly on my back. Even it seemed quieter here, dulled, like something sacred had been severed from it. It didn't hum with power like before. The runes etched along its blade were dim, like the eyes of a dying god.
I tried to pray. Whispered to the skies, to any deity who might hear.
Nothing.
The silence wasn't absence.
It was rejection.
This place was beyond divine reach. A wound in the skin of the world. Perhaps a graveyard of gods. Perhaps worse — a place where the divine was never born at all.
Each night, I dug into the sand with my bare hands. Looking for water. For meaning. For signs. But all I found were splinters of black glass and the echoes of dreams I did not remember having.
Once, I thought I saw a city in the distance — vast obsidian spires rising like teeth from the dunes. I ran. I screamed into the wind. But it vanished. Just like all the others. Just like my faith.
How long had I been walking?
Time unraveled here. The sun refused to set. The sky never shifted. My shadow grew thinner. My thoughts… grew heavier.
I began to see things. At first, reflections. Then outlines. Then figures.
They stood far away, cloaked in white rags, their faces obscured, unmoving.
I approached. Always.
They were never there.
But their absence left impressions in the sand — impressions that did not fade.
Sometimes, I heard voices beneath the ground. They didn't speak language. They vibrated, low and guttural, like grief without form. I placed my ear to the dunes once.
I bled from the nose for hours.
Then, on the thirteenth day, I saw it.
A gate.
Massive, circular, formed not of stone but of petrified roots — roots twisted together like veins ripped from a sleeping god. Symbols pulsed faintly across it, and the very air seemed to bend near its surface.
It didn't open.
It didn't need to.
I fell to my knees before it, not out of reverence — but exhaustion. Madness. A need for answers.
I asked aloud:
"What is this place?"
My voice cracked.
Still, no reply.
But something… shifted.
The sand behind me trembled. And I heard something move. Something colossal, ancient — not approaching, not retreating, but rising. As if it had always been here, waiting beneath the surface for someone foolish enough to ask.
I stood slowly.
Turned.
Nothing.
Just the wind. Just the endless dunes.
Just my heartbeat echoing like war drums in my skull.
And then it spoke — not in words, but in pressure. In silence so complete it crushed every bone of thought in my body.
I dropped the scythe.
I fell.
I screamed without sound.
When I awoke, I was further in.
No longer near the gate.
No longer near anything.
The wind had stopped.
The sun was now a black disc.
And I knew, somehow, that I was deeper into the desert than anyone had ever walked.
And still, no gods spoke.
Not even death.
Only one thought remained in me, hanging like a splinter in the mind of a dying man:
What lives in a land even the gods have abandoned?