Kai took a slow breath. The air was dry as parchment, and every inhale rasped in his lungs. The whispering had returned—just under the wind. It didn't come from any one direction. It circled. Words he didn't know twisted through his thoughts like smoke, brushing at half-forgotten things: lullabies he'd never heard, griefs he hadn't lived, names he'd never known but somehow missed. He turned in place slowly, lips parted. "Do you hear that?"
"They all do," Yara said, pausing. "Eventually."
Then the wind rose, sudden and violent.
A scream ripped across the dunes—not a voice, but the sand itself, tearing from the earth in a spiraling column that clawed at the sky. Kai ducked and covered his head, but the gust wasn't random—it was targeted, purposeful. It peeled back the layers of the desert like fingers lifting a veil.
What it revealed made the world still.
Embedded in the shifting sand was a door.
