The sand had stopped screaming.
It was not peace. Only exhaustion. A surrender in silence, as though the desert itself had given up trying to speak. I had walked so long that I no longer remembered why. The breathless dunes. The black-rooted gate. The vision of a city that was never there. My thoughts peeled away in layers, dry as my lips.
And then the earth opened.
It was not an event.
It was a decision.
A perfect circle, not of stone but of refusal, yawned open at my feet — like something that had always been there, simply waiting for me to lose enough of myself to see it. It made no sound. The air around it grew thinner. Colder.
I did not fall.
I stepped down.
And the desert let me go.
---
The shaft narrowed as I descended. Its walls were slick with something warm, something not-quite-blood. Veins glowed weakly beneath the surface, a heartbeat echoing through them — slow, uncertain. Metal was fused into the tissue like broken armor melted into flesh. The deeper I went, the more the Scythe of Death began to hum again, like it recognized something old.
Or someone.
At last, I stopped descending. No impact. No ground. Just... arrival.
A hallway stretched before me, carved into impossible angles. Geometry strained under something not meant to be named. The air buzzed like the inside of a dead bell.
The statues lining the corridor were not statues.
They were remnants.
Fragments of beings that had once tried to become gods — or worse. Some looked like priests sculpted from silence. Others had their hands fused in permanent prayer, their mouths erased. A few still bled.
There was no dust.
Even dust was afraid to settle here.
I walked.
Not because I wanted to — but because to stand still in this place felt like invitation. Behind me, something slithered. Not fast. Not close. But it knew me. And it had waited far longer than I had lived.
---
Far ahead, at the end of that corridor of the undone, stood a door.
It was breathing.
It pulsed with wet, steady inhales, like lungs buried inside bone. It was made of roots and ivory, nerves and glass. At its center, carved into the surface, was an eye. Closed. Expectant.
As I stepped closer, the floor trembled. But only beneath me.
The Scythe shook violently now. Its runes reignited, not with light — but with memory. Names rushed through my skull. Places I'd never seen. Screams in voices I'd never heard but somehow missed.
I placed my hand on the door.
The eye opened.
It did not see.
It entered.
> "You carry extinction like a child clutches hope," it said. "But you don't even know what you were meant to destroy."
The voice wasn't sound.
It was a pressure inside my spine, forcing my bones to remember what the mind could not.
> "You escaped silence only to crawl into deafness. Do you think you were chosen? Or were you simply survivable?"
The door dissolved like ash, leaving no passage — only reflection.
I stood before myself.
But it wasn't a mirror.
It was another "me."
Eyes hollow. Cheeks gaunt. My foreshadow. My echo. In his hands was a scythe larger than mine, deeper. Forged not for death — but for erasure.
Behind him loomed it.
A figure too tall. Wrapped in shrouds of shifting language. Symbols bled from its skin like wounds. Where a face should've been, there was only a blur — as if the world refused to remember what it looked like.
Then I heard it breathe.
And I understood: this was not a tomb.
It was a womb.
A waiting place.
For what — or for whom — I still didn't know.
---
I blinked.
The vision collapsed.
I was on my knees.
The hallway gone. The door sealed.
The sand — above me once again — swirled like smoke in the windless sky.
Had I ever descended?
Or had something risen inside me?
I looked to the Scythe. It was glowing now — dim, yet alive.
And I was not the same.
If you carry the power to end what was never meant to exist… do you become a savior, or merely the final mistake?