Each time Astel wakes up and crawls out of his cave, he sees a different terrain before him. There isn't much wind in this desert, but the sand somehow still shifts. It seems to move at random speeds, with entire dunes vanishing within a dozen minutes, then sitting unchanged for what feels like days—or whatever the equivalent of days is here.
This one detail still confuses Astel. It's the one thing he simply can't get used to. Honestly, he doesn't even know how long it's been since he came to this desert.
At first, he tracked the days using his internal clock—essentially his intuition, which was just a fancy way of saying he was guessing. Later, he started counting days by his sleep cycles. That too was inconsistent, but at least it was slightly better than outright guessing.
By his reckoning, this is day 49 since he found the small cave.
He hasn't resolved his inner turmoil yet, and his trauma never really went away. But through routine and an unexciting daily life, he's found a way to ignore the issues plaguing his mind. He no longer goes to sleep crying—at least not every night.
But there's one thing he simply cannot ignore.
The voices. They never left. They never changed—except for that one time with the Scavenger... a haunting experience.
The voices are still as unclear as ever. They never slow down, never get louder, and never stop.
Astel has been slowly going crazy, even if he doesn't quite realize it.
There is, however, one thing that's kept him sane until now—the mountains.
After waking up and drinking water from a roughly made chitinous cup, he crawled out of his cave. He stretched and looked around, inspecting today's terrain, eventually settling his gaze on the distant mountain range.
"Don't they seem closer today than they were yesterday?" he said aloud, as if talking to someone. His voice was rough from not speaking in a long time.
"I wonder if I'd make it there if I left today—not that I really want to, when I have this little paradise."
He laughed hysterically. But soon, his grin dimmed and turned into a frown.
"I wonder why I wanted to reach them so much. It can't be much safer than here, right?"
He slowly looked down toward the entrance to his small cave, where a rock with a weird blue-green smiley face drawn on it lay.
"What do you think?" he asked, staring directly at the rock. The silent, almost creepy smile stared back at him.
"I thought as much," he said, turning back to face the endless desert.
Astel has been exploring the area around his cave almost every day, hoping to find something interesting—maybe something larger than an insect to eat. Today, he spotted something in the distance. It was almost unnoticeable, but Astel had grown used to life in the desert, and his body had adapted accordingly.
It looked too uniform to be a rock, and the color was off—bleached out, sure, but it wasn't the blue-tinted white he was used to.
He decided to explore that place first before heading in any other direction. After all, the odd thing could disappear by the time he came back. With how fast the desert shifts, he wouldn't be surprised if it vanished before he even reached it.
He didn't necessarily need to hunt for food today. He'd gotten lucky the past few days and found not one, but three anthills, so he was well-stocked for a while.
He set out immediately.
The weirdly shaped outline drew closer as he ran toward it at top speed. As its silhouette became clearer, its shape turned more real, and slowly, Astel started to recognize it.
At first, he wasn't sure. But with each stride, he doubted his first instinct less and less.
The odd shape in front of him was unmistakably a house—and not just any house.
'This shape, this color... it's my house. Or what used to be my house,' he thought.
The only way to be sure was to inspect it up close. He was less than a hundred meters away now.
'This really is my home. Even the hole in the roof and the collapsed wall are exactly as I remember.'
These weren't fond memories. In fact, this house invoked a source of deep trauma for Astel. It reminded him once again of his mother's death... and his own inadequacy. His weakness.
He gradually slowed—first to a light jog, then a walk—before coming to a stop in front of his old home, the entire thing now in view.
He just stood there, unmoving for minutes, until the silence and still scene were interrupted by a falling tear. Astel's eyes welled up. He didn't want to cry again, but he couldn't stop. The tears wouldn't stop.
After a few moments—what felt like a short eternity—he simply couldn't hold them back any longer. He collapsed onto the ground, his face showing a single emotion: sadness.
He didn't hold back anymore—not that he could, even if he wanted to. He just let the tears flow, watching them fall toward the sand. Some evaporated midair, while the few that reached the ground were absorbed, creating small hardened pebbles of sand.
He sat there, in front of his old house, for a while.
Eventually, he calmed down. He wiped his tears, got up and slowly made his way toward the front door—or at least the frame where the door used to be. The house was half-buried in sand, its walls bleached by the weird light of the sunless sky.
He walked through his house. The first room he saw was the living room, where he used to play with toys, pretending to be a hero saving citizens from giant monsters while his mom watched.
He stopped, reminisced about the good old times, and slowly turned away. Aside from nostalgic memories, the destroyed living room held no value now. It was a miracle he could still recognize it, given the state it was in.
He then walked through a narrow hallway, almost completely filled with sand. The fact that the house was so tilted and buried didn't help.
There were rooms he simply couldn't visit unless the sand shifted again.
But there were still two rooms he could check: his sister's room, which luckily wasn't buried at all, and his own room on the second floor. He could reach his room from the outside—but he'd have to make another hole in the wall, and he wasn't sure he could do that. Not because he wasn't strong enough—though that was possible—but mostly because... he simply didn't want to.
Reaching the end of the narrow hallway, half plunged in shadow and half lit by rays of light creeping in through cracks and holes, he stood in front of his sister's room. The door was still attached and closed.
He took a deep breath and slowly exhaled, preparing himself for the worst. He opened the door.
As it creaked open, he could almost see the room in pristine condition, just as he remembered. For a heartbeat, he thought he saw his sister.
But almost immediately, reality set in. The room was nothing like he remembered. In fact, there was no room at all.
After fully opening the door, all he saw was the endless expanse of sand. There was nothing. Not even a trace of his sister.
He sighed, disappointed.
Astel had hoped to find some clue—anything to tell him whether his sister had been home when the invasion happened. But with literally nothing left, he gave up, closed the door, and turned toward the stairs.
The quickly shifting sand moved out of the way, freeing the stairs, as if creating a path for him. He let out a deep breath and walked upstairs.
Weirdly, the second story looked untouched. Sure, there were tiny streams of light peeking through, but no large visible holes like in the rest of the broken house.
The second story only had three rooms: a guest room, a bathroom, and his own room. Though he didn't care for the guest room or the tiny washroom.
He reached his door and opened it, not expecting much.
To his surprise, his room was still full of stuff. It was a mess. A hole in the roof let bright light pour in, illuminating the space.
All his stuff was still there—his clothes scattered across the room. He looked around, experiencing an influx of childhood memories. Each object he set eyes on brought back a specific memory—and with it, a specific emotion.
He felt... empowered.
The voices in his head seemed to fade slightly, becoming weaker, less annoying.
He walked around, picking things up and putting them back in place. He knew it was pointless, yet he didn't stop. He was tidying his room, as if by instinct.
After putting the last piece of sun-bleached, tattered, sand-covered clothing into his small wardrobe, he finally realized something: up until now, he had spent every day fully naked. He'd gotten so used to it that it hadn't even crossed his mind that clothes existed.
He thought for a bit, then picked out a few pieces of slightly undersized clothes from his wardrobe. He chose the ones that still somewhat fit, not caring how they looked together. Not that it mattered—his wardrobe was full of low-quality clothes, their colors almost completely faded to gray or sand-colored hues.
He didn't even notice, but he'd grown. Even though he believed it had only been two months in the desert, most of his clothes didn't fit anymore.
After some thought, he ripped apart smaller articles of clothing and tied them together to create a roughly crafted mantle with a hood and a mask to cover his face.
Before getting dressed, he approached a mirror—mostly broken, but still usable. When he looked at his reflection, he was shocked.
His hair now appeared platinum blond. It was long, reaching down to his upper back, rough and full of sand. His body was thin, with little fat—barely any muscle on his lithe frame. He was taller than he remembered too. He definitely didn't look his age.
'I don't suppose there's a single 15-year-old who looks like me', he thought, inspecting his body closely, as if looking at a foreign object.
'Aside from my face, I look like I'm at least 19.' How odd.
He didn't know how to feel about his new look. He looked like a completely different person.
After staring at himself for a while, he finally managed to turn away from the reflection. He walked toward the bed, where his clothes were waiting. He awkwardly put the tattered robes on, feeling strange with the added weight. He tested them for mobility, took a brief glance in the mirror, and then grabbed a shard of the mirror to take with him.
Slinging his small improvised bag diagonally from shoulder to side, Astel finally had clothes, a hood, a mask—and a new resolve.
He took the first of many steps back toward his cave.