The sun was a hateful, bleeding eye in the sky.
Its crimson glare painted the world in tones of death and ruin. The sand beneath him was not golden, not warm, not kind—it was red. Rusted red, soaked with age-old violence, like the battlefield after a massacre long forgotten. Around him stretched an endless desert of scorched bones, broken weapons, and silent reminders of extinction.
Noir opened his eyes for the first time.
They were a cold, empty gray—the color of ashes after the fire has long since died. His breathing was shallow. Pain coiled in his skull like a writhing serpent, twisting behind his temples. Hunger gnawed at him, not just from his belly, but from somewhere deeper—somewhere ancient. His skin was dust-covered, his fingers trembling as he pushed himself upright amidst a pile of blackened ribcages.
He didn't know his name.
Not yet.
He didn't know how he got here.
All he knew was pain… and an instinct screaming at him to survive.
The landscape mocked him. Jagged rock formations twisted into unnatural shapes. Carcasses of beasts larger than buildings were half-buried in the sand, their armor-like scales split open as if torn by something more monstrous than themselves. The sky never changed. Always red. Always watching.
He wandered.
With no direction. No goal. Just one foot in front of the other.
Sometimes he found scraps—dried flesh clinging to bones, strange fruits growing from cursed trees. He ate what he could, vomited most of it. He drank from toxic puddles when thirst outweighed fear. The headache remained. A brutal, stabbing throb like someone had carved symbols into the inside of his skull.
Then, after what felt like days—or perhaps weeks—his legs gave out.
He collapsed onto the blood-colored dunes, his breath shallow, his mind spiraling into the dark.
And then… she came.
Not with footsteps. Not with sound. Just—there.
A woman. Slender, wrapped in flowing black garments that billowed despite the dead air. Her eyes were hidden beneath a hood. She said nothing. She simply knelt and offered him something—bread. Warm. Soft. Real. He devoured it like an animal. Water followed. Clean. Cool. Healing.
He tried to speak, but his voice came out a whisper. His throat was raw.
She smiled faintly.
"My name is Rasa," she said.
Then, like smoke in wind, she vanished.
Noir awoke the next morning, tucked beside a rock outcropping he didn't remember crawling to. A stitched cloth was draped over him. His wounds had been wrapped. His cracked lips no longer bled. And beside him lay more bread, a gourd of water, and a tiny strip of dried meat.
Every night since… the same pattern.
No matter where he wandered during the day, no matter how far he crawled, Rasa always found him as the sun dipped beyond the edge of the desert. She would appear from nowhere. Feed him. Tend to him. Speak little, though her presence soothed his fraying mind.
By day, he survived the Dead Zone's horrors—barely. By night, he lived.
At first, he thought it was a dream. That maybe he had died, and Rasa was the final illusion before oblivion.
But the food was real. The warmth was real. The healing… was real.
And so was she.
Noir began to remember things—not full memories, just flashes. The feel of holding a weapon. The dance of battle. The echo of screams, some of them his. A throne—massive, cracked. His name whispered on the wind: Noir.
He repeated it to himself, again and again, until it felt less foreign.
"Noir…" he whispered to the night. "That's… me."
He began to speak again. At first, only to himself. Then, to Rasa.
She would sit beside him, calm, quiet. He would tell her about the things he saw during the day—the monstrous creatures that roamed the desert, the strange markings in the rocks, the corpses he stepped over. Rasa would listen. Sometimes she'd nod. Sometimes she'd smile.
And he began to feel something else—something terrifying.
Warmth.
Not the sun's brutal heat. Not the fire of hunger.
This was warmth in his chest, a slow, steady burn whenever she was near. He began to look forward to her visits, to the quiet sound of her voice, to the rare way she tilted her head when he tried to make her laugh.
He stopped fearing the night.
Because she was always there.
Noir didn't know who he was. Didn't know what he was. But he knew that her name—Rasa—was the only thing in this wasteland that made sense. The only thing that gave his suffering meaning.
And maybe… that was enough.
Until one night, as she sat beside him feeding him a strange stew, he looked at her longer than usual. Her fingers, her quiet lips, the shimmer of her eyes behind her hood. And something swelled in his chest—bigger than hunger. Stronger than survival.
Desire.
Not lust. Not longing.
A pure, aching need to keep her beside him. To hear her laugh. To know her.
When she vanished into the night that time, Noir didn't fall asleep. He lay beneath the stars, wide-eyed, heart thundering.
"…Tomorrow," he whispered, curling his fingers into the red sand. "Tomorrow, I'll tell her how I feel."
The crimson desert was silent.
But deep beneath it, something ancient stirred.
Something that remembered him.