The desert before them was not merely a place; it was a state of existence. It stretched out like an infinite sea, a golden ocean shifting beneath a low, scorching sun—no longer the violent intrusion of dawn, but its promise of an unbearable heat.
Each dune seemed to breathe on its own, bending and rising like impetuous, silent waves, while the wind, now thin and sharp as glass, tore the sand away, drawing ephemeral arabesques that changed constantly, erasing every trace of what had existed just a moment before.
Kaelis moved ahead, his dark figure a sharp contrast against the dazzling background. His black cloak, heavy and coarse, brushed against the sand as if it were part of the wind itself, or perhaps, as if the wind itself followed him. His steps were steady, methodical, every gesture measured with a precision that brook no uncertainty. It was as if he had traversed this land not a thousand, but ten thousand times before, knowing every collapse, every shadow, and every optical illusion the desert held.
The boy followed him, but he could not maintain the same regularity. His stomach was tight in a vice; his breath was labored, not just from the physical exertion, but from a deeper sense of vulnerability. It was a primordial dread—the fear of the cosmic unknown—wrapping around him like an invisible shroud. He felt as though he were walking not just on sand, but on a razor-thin veil separating reality from an abyss of memory and silence.
The silence was total, yet it weighed down like a slab of lead. There was no sound from the outside world: no rustle of shrubs, no insects, no birds in the empty sky.
There was only the relentless sound of the two travelers' footsteps. But every small sound the boy made—the rustle of the rough fabric of his cloak, the slight creak of his own knees, the dry rasp of his breathing—seemed to amplify infinitely, as if the desert itself were listening, judging, and recording every minor uncertainty. The sand beneath his feet gave way irregularly, instilling the sensation that the ground was not solid, but a dense and hostile fluid trying to swallow him, to merge him with that echo of eternity and solitude permeating the air.
Kaelis stopped abruptly, breaking the hypnotic rhythm of the walk. He did not turn around. He stood like a statue of obsidian.
"Don't turn around," he said. His voice was cold and grave, yet it carried a note of urgency so sharp it commanded an authority that allowed for no retorts or questions. "Whatever you perceive, whatever you hear moving beyond the limit of your vision… do not look back. Never."
The boy couldn't speak, but he forced himself to nod, trying to suppress the shiver running down his spine—a shiver born not of cold, but of terror. It wasn't a simple human fear; it was the sensation of being under the eye of an invisible, titanic presence, something scrutinizing him, weighing his every hesitation, recording his every step as part of a larger, incomprehensible calculation.
He moved forward, desperately trying to focus only on Kaelis's figure, on the black cloak moving with spectral grace among the dunes, and on the steady pace of the footsteps guiding him through that golden ocean of death.
The walk became an ordeal of mental endurance. The sun continued its ascent, now directly overhead, hammering the desert with unprecedented violence. After hours that felt like centuries, the light began to change imperceptibly. It wasn't sunset, nor a typical twilight: it was as if a dark veil, made not of clouds but of some ethereal substance, were descending upon the world. It began to swallow the contours and colors, turning every shape into an indistinct shadow, every sound into an even deeper, more menacing silence. It was the hour of the Veiling, a moment in Delpharya when the boundary between what is and what was thinned dangerously.
The wind brought with it a new scent: rusted metal and sand soaked in millennia-old tears. And within the folds of his cloak, or perhaps directly in his mind, the boy perceived a thin, ancient whisper—almost a mournful chant. It was a broken, fragmented female voice that seemed to speak words lost for ages: names of trees, of seas, of cities that the sand had reduced to legend.
"Do not listen to them," Kaelis said, without turning, his voice heavy and tense, as if by uttering those words he were holding back the very horror the desert was steeped in.
"This place is not empty. It feeds on the frailties of men. Every grain of sand here is not quartz, but memory. They are the voices of those who lost themselves and their Fundamental Tone, and who were devoured by the wind and oblivion."
The boy felt goosebumps rise; every hair on his arms stood up. Looking at his own feet, he had the terrifying impression that his shadow did not follow him precisely. It moved with a lag, slow, as if it had its own hostile will and were struggling to detach itself from him. They continued to walk, but the invisible weight of memories and whispers grew rapidly. The voices became more insistent—no longer individual laments, but a broken choir, a growing voice. At times they were painful, other times angry, still others imploring and pathetic. Some sounded uncannily like those of lost friends and family from his previous life; others were accusations the boy felt coming directly from his own heart, like guilts he didn't know he had, which the desert was now revealing to him. Each step was a growing burden, each breath a challenge not to succumb to that choir of ghosts.
The boy tried to speak, but the voice caught in his throat, a knot of fear and sand. "Kaelis… why… why are they following us? What do they want from me?" he asked, trembling, the question emerging as an act of defiance against an invisible, implacable order.
Kaelis stopped again and finally turned slightly, just enough to show the void beneath his hood. His eyes—or where they should have been—were two black mirrors without reflections, absorbing the light. For a very brief moment, the boy perceived a subtle, hinted compassion—not human, but a kind of metallic pity—which immediately dissolved back into his habitual coldness.
"Because you have no choice, boy," Kaelis replied, his voice like the sentence of a judge. "And neither do I. Here, we are all part of the Memory, whether we have lived it or inherited it. You must proceed; accept their noise. Do not seek answers here; they are not meant to be understood, only to be felt."
Slowly, Kaelis drew an object wrapped in a worn, yellowed cloth: an ancient staff, not of wood, but of a dark, cold metal. It was engraved with runes that seemed to move under the diffused light, like snakes crawling slowly to find their place. At the top, a black, opaque stone pulsed with an incredibly slow rhythm, like a heart beating in a vacuum.
"This is the Staff of Veyra," Kaelis said, the name spoken with the respect due to an object both sacred and dangerous. "A gift and a curse from a forgotten era. With it, I can contain the voices, channel the Dissonance, and create a bubble of silence… at least for a while. But know that every time I use it, the price will always be high, for we are forcing the cosmic harmony of the desert."
The boy did not dare ask what the price was. Kaelis thrust the staff into the sand.
The black stone at the top pulsed faster, and an invisible shockwave shook the air around them. The voices were immediately stifled, muffled, as if a thick veil had been drawn between them and the choir of the deceased. The silence that followed was not the natural quiet they had interrupted; it was a void, a total absence of sound and life—a silence so deep it seemed to threaten to devour everything, including light and breath.
"Forward," Kaelis ordered. There was nothing in his voice that left room for a reply. His gaze—or what the boy imagined to be his gaze under the hood—was fixed on the horizon, on the next trial.
They resumed their journey, but within the boy, a corrosive doubt began to grow, more dangerous than the voices. Who was this man truly, the one guiding him? A master, a prisoner of fate, or a predator waiting for the right moment to claim that "high price" he spoke of? He had no time to formulate the question, for the reality of the desert changed again, as sudden as a flash of lightning.
Before them, a gigantic and anomalous dune rose like a wall of solid rock, its crest sharp as a blade. And at the summit, motionless against the gray sky of the hour of the Veiling, a figure waited for them.
It was not human—or at least, not entirely according to his experience. Shrouded in layers of dark, dusty cloth that fluttered like shadows, with a face hidden by a smooth, white bone helmet, it held a curved and unnaturally thin blade that shimmered with a cold, unnatural internal light. The boy felt terror tighten his chest—a terror that knew the name of Death. The blade, the primordial rhythm of the desert, the figure of the Guardian itself: everything was part of something incomprehensible, ancient, and terribly powerful.
"A Guardian," Kaelis whispered, and even in his unshakable voice, there was a note of gravity, his fingers clenched around the Staff he had pulled from the sand with a sharp motion. "One of the ancient warriors, left to guard the boundaries of what must not be revealed. I did not wish to encounter him so soon on this path."
The Guardian descended the dune without making a sound; its descent was an unnatural glide, as if it were unbound by the laws of gravity and matter. The blade in its hand emitted a high-pitched sound, not audible to the ears but to the flesh: an echo that pierced through the air and the body, penetrating the boy's skin and his nerves. The young man's heart beat furiously, while Kaelis remained motionless, impassive, as if the scene were part of his destiny—something that could not shake him, only be observed.
"Listen," Kaelis said, his voice steady but low. "Strength is not enough here, and magic is useless. You must listen to what you fear might emerge inside you. The Guardian does not attack your body. He attacks your coherence."
The Guardian raised the bone blade toward the sky. And the wind, which had previously been a whisper, rose into a whirlwind of sand and indistinct screams. The vortex enveloped the three of them in a warm darkness, a storm that seemed to come not from the desert, but from hell itself. The boy fell to the ground, suffocated by the fury of the wind and the sonic pressure, unable to withstand the weight of the desert and the rhythm drilling into his mind. He curled up, protecting his head, feeling that if he did not resist, the wind would sweep him away, leaving only another grain of memory in the desert.
When he reopened his eyes, with sand in his vision and mouth, the world had turned strangely calm. He was lying on the warm sand; the dunes before him were once again endless but quiet, his body aching and burned not just by the sun, but by the energy he had been forced to contain.
Kaelis was there, leaning against a low, dark rock he hadn't noticed before. His hands were composed, almost in prayer, his eyes closed, but his posture radiated absolute vigilance—a contained tension. The Guardian had disappeared—not defeated or fled, but simply absorbed back into the stillness of the desert. The boy approached, trembling.
"Where is he? What… what happened? Where are we?" he asked, his voice broken by fear and exhaustion, every word an effort.
"I knew where it would lead us sooner or later," Kaelis replied, without a shadow of surprise or fear, his calm icy and impenetrable. He hadn't moved. "This place has no name, but it is the point where the ruins I told you about begin to surface. This place guards more mysteries than living beings can inhabit. Your questions will have no clear answers here, boy. You will have to be satisfied with those given to you by necessity. We have rid ourselves of the Guardian, but not his message."
The sun, once again a red-hot nail driven into the sky, was a pointed weapon. Every ray fell like a blade upon the boy's skin. The sand was now littered with anomalous objects: the remains of an abandoned carriage, horses reduced to piles of bleached bones, a broken wheel. The silence was heavy with all these deaths, a mute witness to something ancient and fearsome.
The boy sat beside Kaelis in silence, trying to listen only to the breath of the wind and the steady rustle of sand sliding off the crests. Suddenly, Kaelis wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of his glove and muttered, with an unusual note of weariness: "This damned desert… it can only be crossed on foot. No horses or wagons can bear the weight of what it guards. Every mechanical means is disintegrated by the Dissonance of the place."
The boy did not reply. A slight tremor ran along his arms. In the air, something vibrated—not a sound, but a shadow seeking space among the suspended grains, a heartless throb resonating in his chest, a legacy of the Guardian.
When the true night finally fell—dark, cold, and vast as the cosmic void—and the two decided to stop for rest, something changed radically. First, it was just a distant distortion, an illusion of the heat that was no longer there, a tremor in the field of vision. Then, the tremor transformed into an explosive, obsessive, primordial rhythm.
The boy felt his chest vibrate, as if that beat had entered his bones and settled there, trying to synchronize his heart. It wasn't an external sound. It was a sound coming from inside the earth, from inside his body.
Kaelis stiffened; his posture became suddenly tense and fragile. "No… it can't be. Not at this hour. Not here. It's too soon. The March…" he murmured, the Staff falling from his hand and rolling onto the sand.
From the crest of the nearest dune, hundreds of figures emerged. Deformed bodies—men, women, children distorted by time and sand—advancing with a limping step, following a ritualistic rhythm, slow but inexorable. They were not undead, but human beings who had lost their individual will, transformed into a single body moved by the collective memory of the desert. The boy shuddered as never before; terror paralyzed him, shaking him to the roots of his soul—a terror that had the metallic taste of ultimate truth.
In that madness of distorted forms, an animal rose in the midst of those monsters: a gigantic elephant, not a normal elephant, but a beast worn by time and sand. Its slow step merged into the hurried and unstable gait of the figures accompanying it. Adorned with black and white cloths and cloaks, its shining tusks reflected the sunlight that blinded the two travelers. On the back of that beast—an animal itself deformed and colossal—an ancient man sat motionless, wrapped in red and yellow veils like flames and the sun. His face was hidden by a chipped gold mask; his eyes, if there were any, glowed with an inner fire. His mere presence bent the desert and the boy's soul. Every step of the March was a heartbeat, every cry from parched throats an echo of forbidden memory, every gesture an order engraved in the blood of the earth.
The rhythm, finally, crystallized into a precise and lethal sequence:
The sky was painted in every color that could exist in the world; the clouds seemed to dance the most ancient and mad sacrificial dance; the earth trembled as if responding to and accompanying the sky in its dance; the sand rose in a single, gigantic cloud of dust. The dunes moved like a sea in a storm, obeying the call of the figure on the beast's back. The boy fell, overwhelmed not just by terror, but by a painful ecstasy—by memories that were not his own, which the March was forcing into his head. He saw kingdoms rise and fall, cities burn, peoples kneeling before idols of sound and shadow. He felt the weight of every life spent and lost.
He was afraid, too much fear, he couldn't bear it; he closed his eyes, seeking comfort in the darkness.
When he reopened his eyes, the desert had returned to calm. The silence was absolute, heavy. Kaelis, on his knees, his face in shadow, pale even beneath the darkness of his hood, looked at him with eyes now open and vigilant. His expression was a mix of exhaustion and resignation.
"Do you know what it was?" Kaelis asked, his voice nearly a hoarse whisper.
"No," the boy replied, still trembling, his mouth caked with sand. "I don't know what it was… but something inside me… knows it. That rhythm, Kaelis. That rhythm… it's part of me now. It has… marked me."
Kaelis nodded slowly. A gesture that was a confirmation of an inescapable destiny. "So it must be. What we saw is the March of the Lost Rhythms, the obsession of the desert. It was not intended for us. But anyone who comes too close to this boundary… changes. But life goes on. The beat has settled within you. Now, walk."
They stood up, their solitary figures set against the infinite night sky. The desert enveloped them once more in silence, but inside the boy, the forbidden beat remained—a stubborn rhythm: Badabum… cha… cha… It was like a seed that would not die, an echo destined to follow his every step, to become part of his frequency. Kaelis, impassive, led him without explanation, ready to intervene only when necessary, cold and detached as always, his sole purpose being to lead the boy to his destiny.
The forbidden beat continued to throb, and the boy learned that the rhythm would remain a part of him—a burden and perhaps a power—as they advanced into the infinite desert, toward what no one should ever see, toward the ruins that promised answers and the destruction of every certainty.