The morning didn’t offer any kind of cinematic revelation. It just brought the heat.

  Kaelen had dragged himself through the dark for hours, propelled entirely by the jagged, irradiated pulse of the god-rock against his ribs. When the twin suns finally broke over the eastern ridges, they didn't illuminate a path. They hit the Asatay crags like a physical blow, baking the limestone and washing out the horizon in a blinding, chemical yellow glare.

  There was no soft morning dew here. No gentle transition from night to day. The wasteland simply switched from a freezing black void into a suffocating, shadowless oven.

  He had put miles of brutal, vertical elevation between himself and the canyon. The sanctuary was long gone, buried behind a dozen identical ridges of shale and scrub, but the overwhelming quiet of the graveyard had hitched a ride in his skull.

  Kaelen tried to wet his cracked lips, but his tongue felt like a piece of dry felt dragging against the roof of his mouth. He was moving past normal thirst into a profound, cellular dehydration. The lack of water wasn't just a physical ache anymore; it was a high-pitched, localized whine right behind his eardrums that completely drowned out the scraping of his own boots on the rocks.

  His boot caught the edge of a half-buried root. He pitched forward, barely catching his weight on a slab of sun-baked sandstone.

  He stayed there for a long time, hunched over, staring at his own hands braced against the rock. They were trembling violently. It wasn't adrenaline fading. It was the sheer, brutal metabolic tax of hauling a piece of a dead deity across a desert on zero calories. The heavy wool of Theron’s cloak was chafing the skin off his collarbones, trapping his own foul-smelling sweat against his body, but he was too exhausted to take it off.

  Get your ass up. The thought drifted through the static in his brain. It sounded exactly like old Theron, grumbling at him during winter tracking drills. The scrub doesn't care if you're tired, boy. It just eats what stops moving.

  Kaelen forced his knees to straighten. His joints popped with an ugly, dry sound.

  "Moving," he rasped. The word scraped his throat raw. "I'm moving."

  He marched until the suns hit their absolute zenith. The ambient heat grew into a crushing, atmospheric weight that felt like an iron cap screwed tightly onto his skull. The air ahead of him began to warp and boil, turning the flat expanses of the salt flats into a dancing, liquid mirror that made his eyes ache.

  His brain started to slip its gears.

  It started with peripheral glitches. He would catch a flicker of movement against the glare—the flutter of a familiar grey hem, the glint of sunlight off a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles. His heart would violently slam against his ribs and he would whip around, clutching his staff, only to find a twisted clump of dead juniper or a bizarrely stacked cairn of rocks.

  Just heat haze, he told himself, blinking sweat out of his stinging eyes. Just the dehydration cooking his frontal lobe.

  But the silence in his ears was thickening. It wasn't empty anymore. It was getting crowded with the suffocating pressure of an unfinished argument. A massive, looming backlog of unsaid things. Apologies he hadn't managed to stutter out. Warnings he had failed to give.

  Without realizing he was doing it, his filthy fingers kept diving into his tunic pocket to brush against the smooth white river stone he had dug out of Brielle’s grave. He kept reaching back to check the leather strap of Joric’s stolen map case. Constantly inventorying the dead.

  They're in the dirt, a cold, rational sliver of his mind pointed out. You buried them. You left them in a canyon.

  Did you? the heat-haze whispered back, sounding a lot like his own voice echoing in an empty room. Maybe they hitched a ride. You're carrying their stuff. Maybe you just can't shake them.

  Kaelen’s knees simply gave out. He dropped into the chalky dust and violently dry-heaved. His stomach violently contracted, trying to vomit up water and food that didn't exist, producing nothing but a thin string of acidic bile that burned his lips.

  "Stop it," he croaked, spitting into the dust. His voice sounded pathetic. Small and rusted out.

  He needed to anchor his brain to a physical task. The Remnants survived the isolation of the canyon through strict, unyielding routine. Routine was a cage you built to keep the madness out.

  "Camp," he muttered to the baking dirt. "Make camp. Perimeter. Fire. Water."

  He dragged himself upright and scanned the bluffs until he spotted a heavy overhang. It was a shallow, wind-carved depression in the side of a massive sandstone pillar. It offered a few yards of deep, heavy shade and smelled faintly of ancient bat guano and dry powder. It wasn't much, but it was defensible. It blocked the wind.

  He fell into the familiar rituals, letting muscle memory hijack his failing nervous system. Clear the loose rocks. Sweep the dirt flat. Arrange the fire ring. Gather the dead sagebrush.

  He worked with a frantic, jerky intensity. If he stopped moving his hands, the static would come back. If he sat still for even ten seconds, he would vividly remember the exact texture of the cold dirt sticking to Elara’s dead face.

  He laid out a perfect, functional circle of blackened stones for the fire pit.

  Then, completely absentmindedly, he reached out and dragged a large, flat piece of slate over to the left side of the pit. That was Joric’s seat. Joric had terrible lumbar pain; he always needed a flat rock to sit on so he could angle his back and read his scrolls without groaning.

  Kaelen turned around, scavenged a smaller, smooth, rounded boulder, and dragged it to the right side of the fire ring. Brielle’s spot. She always wanted to be right up against the flames, but if she sat too close to the windward side, the sage smoke would trigger her asthma.

  He wiped his filthy hands on his trousers and took a step back to inspect the campsite.

  It looked right. The heavy, panicked feeling in his chest subsided just a fraction.

  He pulled his flint and struck a spark into the dry sage. It caught with a loud crackle, sending a thick plume of white smoke up against the roof of the overhang. The sharp, peppery smell of burning scrub filled the shallow cave, utterly masking the reek of Kaelen’s unwashed body and the metallic scent of his own dried blood.

  He slumped down in his designated spot at the center. He unbuckled his canvas sack and pulled out the small, waxed-paper parcel of ancient emergency rations he had scavenged from the ruins.

  He unwrapped a piece of heavily salted, totally desiccated jerky. He snapped the tough meat in half.

  He leaned forward and placed one half directly on the center of the flat slate rock.

  "You have to eat something," Kaelen said. His voice echoed weirdly in the small enclosure. "I know you hate the trail rations, Joric. You always said they tasted like boiled boots. But we have to cover twenty miles tomorrow."

  The piece of slate didn't respond. But in the flickering, unsteady orange light of the sage fire, the shadows stretching across the cave wall were doing strange things. If Kaelen just relaxed his eyes... if he just let his vision go slightly out of focus... the shadow cast by the rock looked exactly like a hunched shoulder. He could almost catch the copper glint of firelight reflecting off a wire-rimmed lens.

  "I've got the map, too," Kaelen kept talking. He needed to fill the dead air. The silence was a physical pressure against his eardrums. He fumbled with the leather cylinder, pulling Joric’s heavy parchment map out and spreading it across the dirt between his own boots and the piece of slate. "I grabbed it from your study. Hope you don't care."

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  His filthy, shaking index finger traced the heavy ink line leading East.

  "Look," Kaelen said, tapping the parchment. "We cut through the Ashlands. Then we hit the old Iron border. Then..." He dragged his finger to the large, terrifyingly blank expanse on the far right edge of the paper. "Then we hit the Shattered Highlands."

  He paused. He tilted his head slightly, his eyes tracking nothing in the dark.

  The wind howled past the mouth of the overhang. A low, hollow sound.

  To Kaelen’s heat-cooked brain, it wasn't wind. It was a heavy, condescending sigh.

  "I know it's a quarantine zone," Kaelen argued back, scowling at the empty flat rock. "I know the codices say the Highlands are physically broken. But I saw it, Joric. When I grabbed the god-rock. I saw the actual roots of the continent."

  He leaned forward, his eyes wide, bloodshot, and completely manic.

  "They were black. They were literally rotting away into this grey sludge. There are things crawling on the Worldroot and eating it alive. Your precious books didn't mention that part, did they?"

  The shadow on the rock wall didn't move. It just loomed there. Judgmental. Utterly unimpressed.

  "You always did this," Kaelen snapped, tearing off a piece of his own hardtack bread and aggressively grinding it between his back teeth. "Analysis paralysis. Theron said it all the time. You'd sit there and study a cliff face for six hours to calculate the perfect route instead of just throwing a rope and climbing the damn thing."

  He swallowed the dry bread. It felt like swallowing broken glass.

  "Well, I'm climbing it," he told the limestone. "I'm walking East. You can either sit there and rot with your books, or you can come."

  He jerked his head to the right.

  The small, rounded boulder sat there. Empty. But just at the very edge of his peripheral vision, he caught a flicker of movement. The twitch of a small hand inching closer to the fire ring. A tangled mop of unbrushed brown hair.

  Brielle.

  She wasn't looking at the map. She was staring out past the overhang, out into the deep, absolute black of the wasteland night.

  "Hey, it's okay," Kaelen said. The defensive anger vanished from his voice instantly, replaced by a desperate, cracking softness. He dug his hand into his pocket and pulled out the smooth white river stone. He leaned over and set it gently on top of the boulder.

  "I grabbed your cloud piece, Brie. Look. I didn't leave it behind."

  It's too dark out here, Kaelen, her voice drifted through his mind. A perfect, terrifyingly accurate audio hallucination. The things in the dark are going to find us.

  "Not tonight," Kaelen promised, his throat tightening so painfully he could barely squeeze the words out. He patted the cheap wood of his walking staff. "I set the perimeter traps. I've got the watch. And look..." He pointed up at the narrow strip of sky visible beyond the rock ceiling. "The stars are clear. The Ancestors are watching."

  Where is Mama? the voice asked in the quiet.

  Kaelen’s jaw locked. The lie clogged in his throat like wet cement. He couldn't force himself to tell her that her mother's spine had been shattered by a warhammer. He couldn't tell her that he had shoveled dirt over both of their faces.

  "She's..." Kaelen choked. Tears suddenly cut hot, stinging tracks through the thick layer of dust on his cheeks. "She's just resting right now, Brie. She's tired. We all should be sleeping."

  He picked up the second half of the dried jerky and reached across the dirt, setting it carefully on the rounded stone right next to the white pebble.

  "Eat that. You have to keep your strength up."

  He slumped back against the sandstone wall, pulling his knees up tight against his chest, wrapping his arms around his shins. He stared at the two rocks. At the ancient map. At the pathetic little offerings of salted meat.

  For a span of maybe five minutes, the delusion held solid. The sage crackled and popped. The ambient heat of the flames warmed his boots. He wasn't the last surviving Remnant carrying a radioactive tumor across a hostile desert. He was just sitting around a campfire with his family. They were arguing about routes. They were sharing a terrible dinner. It was tedious, normal, and profoundly safe.

  It was total, clinical insanity.

  Beneath the delirium, buried under the exhaustion and the terror, the rational core of his brain was screaming. He knew he was talking to displaced limestone. He knew the voice of Joric was just his own internalized guilt doing a voice impression. He knew Brielle was dead.

  But the sheer, crushing gravity of being utterly, completely alone on the face of the earth was going to kill him if he acknowledged it. So he threw wood on the fire. He fed the rocks. He maintained the delusion because stopping the conversation meant letting the silence win.

  "I should have been at the archway," he confessed to the empty cave. The words sounded ugly and wet. "I should have been pulling watch. I could have triggered the landslide trap. I could have bought you time to get into the vaults."

  He stared intensely at Joric’s stone.

  "You would have figured it out. If I had just given you five minutes, you would have had an evacuation protocol. But I was out in the brush trying to trap a rabbit. I was proud of catching a stupid rabbit while they were burning you alive."

  The guilt wasn't an abstract concept. It was a physical mass sitting on his diaphragm, preventing his lungs from expanding. He wanted the hallucination to work harder. He wanted Joric to scream at him. He wanted Elara to hit him with her walking stick. He wanted Brielle to cry and call him useless.

  He needed them to punish him, because if they were punishing him, it meant they were actually in the room.

  "Say something back!" Kaelen screamed at the dirt. His voice shattered into a raw, feral shriek that bounced violently off the canyon walls. "Tell me I failed! Call me a coward! Just say something!"

  The wind shifted outside. A heavy, freezing gust ripped through the mouth of the overhang, violently kicking up the loose ash in the fire pit and flattening the sage flames.

  The fire choked and died.

  For ten agonizing seconds, the cave plunged into absolute, suffocating darkness.

  The delusion instantly collapsed.

  There was no hunched shoulder on the wall. There were no wire-rimmed glasses. There was no little girl shivering near the coals.

  The fire slowly guttered back to life, casting a weak, miserable glow over the dirt. Kaelen was just sitting alone in a filthy depression in the rock. Staring at two inanimate chunks of debris.

  And resting on top of those chunks of debris were two perfectly good pieces of meat, quietly gathering dust.

  The psychotic break snapped, dropping him back into reality with the force of a physical beating. The humiliation and horror of what he had just spent the last hour doing hit him like a bucket of freezing water.

  He wasn't keeping a vigil. He was sitting in a hole, wasting critical survival calories on rocks, and screaming at the wind like a madman.

  "No," he hyperventilated, scrambling frantically backward on his hands and feet until his spine slammed hard against the back of the cave. "No. No. No."

  He looked at his hands. They were cramped into rigid, claw-like shapes, trembling so violently he couldn't straighten his fingers.

  If he stayed in this cave. If he spent the night sitting next to these proxy stones... he was never going to walk out. He would stay here. He would arrange more rocks. He would talk to them until he died of dehydration, curling up next to an invisible little girl and waiting for the sun to cook him.

  It was a deeply, profoundly tempting thought. It would be so easy to just shut his eyes, let the madness completely take over the steering wheel, and starve to death in the company of ghosts.

  Then he felt the throb.

  Thump.

  The Whisper in his tunic pocket didn't care about his psychological collapse. It didn't offer comfort. It flooded his chest cavity with a searing, rhythmic heat that felt like a branding iron pressed directly against his sternum.

  EAST.

  It was a ruthless, biological directive. The god-fragment had a destination, and it didn't give a damn if the meat-sack carrying it was currently experiencing a psychotic break. The compulsion gripped his spine and literally forced him into a kneeling position.

  Kaelen stared at the two pieces of jerky resting on the rocks.

  His stomach gave a violent, cramping lurch. He was starving.

  His hand shook uncontrollably as he reached out and picked up the piece of meat from Joric’s slate.

  "I'm sorry," he whispered, his voice completely broken.

  He shoved it into his mouth. It was coated in fine grit and tasted strongly of salt and old leather. It was so dry it scraped all the way down his esophagus. It was the most degrading thing he had ever swallowed.

  He turned his head and looked at Brielle’s rounded rock. He stared at the white pebble and the small piece of meat. His hand hovered over it for a long time. Eating that piece felt like crossing a moral event horizon. It felt like actually killing her.

  She's dead, the brutal, animal part of his brain demanded. You need the calories to walk. Eat it or die here.

  Kaelen snatched the meat off the rock. He crammed it into his mouth and chewed frantically, swallowing it in huge, jagged chunks while thick, humiliating tears cut through the grime on his face and dripped onto his lap.

  He cannibalized his own pathetic ritual. He stole food from the ghosts he had just summoned.

  The spell of the campsite was permanently broken. This wasn't a sanctuary. He wasn't a Remnant anymore. He was a fugitive running from an apocalypse, eating garbage in a cave.

  He scrambled to his feet, driven by pure panic. He had to get out of the overhang. The shadows were too thick, the silence too loud.

  He blindly grabbed the map case and snatched the white river pebble off the boulder, shoving them into his pack. He didn't bother using water to put out the fire. He just furiously kicked dirt over the coals until the light was entirely smothered.

  The darkness of the wasteland rushed back in.

  He grabbed his canvas sack. He grabbed the ash-wood staff.

  He stumbled out of the overhang, immediately taking a blast of freezing night wind to the face. The moon was rising, casting long, skeletal shadows across the endless ridges of the Asatay crags.

  He had no idea where the trail was. He didn't even look for it. He just oriented his body East, leaned into the agonizing pull of the god-stone, and started marching.

  He walked blindly into the dark, tripping over hidden ravines, tearing his shins open on briars, falling and dragging himself back up. He walked until his lungs felt like they were bleeding and his leg muscles screamed in protest.

  He had to outrun his own brain. He had to keep putting miles behind him, because if he stopped moving for even a second, he knew he was going to turn around, walk back to that cave, and start talking to the rocks again.

  Chapter 4, where things get a little... greener.

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