The desert of Delpharya was no mere accumulation of silica and heat; it was a biological and spiritual entity, a colossal organism that breathed through storms and dreamed through mirages. It had to be. Without this awareness, everything that occurred among those dunes would have made no sense; it would have been dismissed as pure madness, a physical impossibility that should have shattered the mind of anyone who laid eyes upon it.
In that place, the logic of physics had been replaced by the grammar of Sound and Silence. No living being, born under the sky of an ordered world, should ever have witnessed the horrors that took shape during the hottest hours. In other worlds, monsters crawl in the darkness, fearing the light; here, horrors were born even from the blinding glare of high noon, when the heat became a lens that distorted not only the air but the very fabric of reality. They were monsters without logic, horrors made of flesh and sand that perhaps even the Gods of Sound feared to see awakened. They were the secrets that the sun sought to burn away with its zenithal gaze, never quite succeeding.
And perhaps it was at that very instant, as the boy and Kaelis prepared to abandon the relative safety of that titanic boulder, that the true terror began to open its millennial eyelids beneath the sea of golden grains.
They stood on the extreme edge of a precipice that defied description. Before them, the descent opened like a wound in the side of the world, a vertical and smooth rock face plunging into a basin of grainy shadow. The ground could be seen down there, at a distance so exorbitant it challenged ocular perception and sent the sense of balance into a tailspin. The floor of the ruins appeared as a tiny embroidery of gray, oxidized stones immersed in yellow, but the distance was such that the ground looked like a cynical mirage, a projection born from the fear of that logicless oblivion surrounding them.
The boy felt the blood drain from his face, leaving him as pale as the marble of the ruins below. His fear of heights was no secret, nor did he try to hide it; it was an uncontrollable vibration that shook his knees and made his breath short, like a strangled whistle dying in his throat. The wind, which at that altitude blew with a constant and icy force despite the sun's heat, seemed to push him toward the void, inviting him to join the dust.
But there was Kaelis. That man, wrapped in the darkness of his cloak, emanated a stability that did not belong to this plane of reality. It was as if the laws of gravity held a reverential respect for his figure. Thanks to the trust that Kaelis had managed to instill in him, drop by drop, during their troubled journey, that fear eased slightly.
It did not vanish, but it transformed into a manageable tension. With the conviction that he could make it specifically through the guidance of the one who seemed to know every secret of that cursed land, the boy decided to entrust himself to him to perform a feat that, a moment before, had seemed like choreographed suicide. Kaelis turned slowly, his hood revealing nothing of his face but the shadow of an ancient authority.
"Trust me," he said simply. His voice arrived steady, an anchor in the wind that prevented the young man's mind from drifting away.
Kaelis carried a worn backpack, a dark leather bag that until then had seemed to contain only meager provisions and the Staff of Veyra. But in that moment, with methodical and solemn gestures, he extracted something profoundly alien.
It was a strange contraption, especially to the boy's eyes. A mechanical sphere the size of a human skull, light brownish in color, similar to seasoned wood but with a metallic luster beneath that showed through the scuffs.
From the joints of the sphere, a thick, whitish vapor continually escaped, smelling of ozone and ancient resin. The casing was chipped, marked by rust spots and abrasions that spoke of centuries of neglect or journeys through corrosive climates. It looked incredibly old, like a relic recovered from an ocean floor, but the boy was mesmerized by it.
Coming from a modern era characterized by almost sci-fi technologies, he had assumed until then that Delpharya was a sort of fantasy Middle Ages—a world of swords, songs, and magical stones. That object altered every conviction. It was technology, but not as he knew it. It was a paradox of gears and steam that seemed to defy the chronology of progress.
"What is... what is that thing?" the boy asked, instinctively stepping back as the vapor brushed his ankles, warm and damp. "It looks like a bomb. Or a miniature steam engine. Where does it come from?"
Kaelis observed the sphere in his gloved hands with a kind of detached melancholy. "It is called an Etheric Compression Sphere. It is a relic from an age when men did not merely listen to the world but sought to imprison its voice in metal. It is not a bomb, though the energy it contains is unstable. It is our only way to descend without becoming part of the mosaic below."
The boy shook his head, confusion struggling with wonder.
"Technology? In this place? I thought everything here moved through the magic of frequencies, through the songs you described. That looks like something I could have found in an industrial archaeology museum in my world. You told me this place was ancient, but this... this changes everything."
"Do you believe progress is a straight line, boy?" Kaelis's voice grew deeper, almost didactic, as he manipulated a small lever on the side of the sphere. "In Delpharya, civilization is a cycle. We have had eras of metal, eras of pure thought, and eras of absolute silence. This sphere is an echo of a time when men sought to dominate the desert with machines. It still works because the principle it is based on—the resonance of steam—is universal."
The boy looked at the rust on the surface, the cracks that seemed on the verge of widening. "It looks like it's about to fall apart. Are you sure it will hold us? If it breaks halfway... it's miles of void, Kaelis. Miles."
"Trust," Kaelis repeated with a calmness bordering on apathy. "It is not the sturdiness of the metal that keeps us up, but the coherence of the field it emits. This smoke is not simple boiled water. It is vibration made dense, matter in a state of transition."
The boy nodded, though a seed of doubt began to sprout in the fertile soil of his mind. Has he told me everything? he wondered, watching the inscrutable profile of his mentor. It was impossible. Kaelis was a labyrinth of secrets; every answer provided seemed only a way to hide a larger question. The boy felt it was impossible that he had told him everything he knew. He truly wanted to know everything: who Kaelis was, why he was helping him, and what the true purpose of this journey toward the abyss was. Yet, the doubt was not strong enough to make him let go. Without Kaelis, he was only a shadow destined to be dispersed by the heat.
Kaelis pressed a button on the top of the sphere. The metallic ticking inside suddenly accelerated, becoming a vibrating hum that seemed to make the boy's bones shake.
Suddenly, the sphere emitted a violent huff, and a cloud of white smoke, thick as cotton wool and warm as an embrace, exploded around them, enveloping them completely.
Within seconds, the two were encased in a perfect bubble of white vapor. Inside, the outside world—the burning sky, the infinite dunes—became a blurred, milky smudge. The boy reached out and touched the wall of the cloud: it was solid, warm to the touch, and slightly elastic, like a heated rubber membrane. It wasn't smoke; it was a mutated molecular structure, a sphere of stabilized kinetic energy acting as a protective shell.
Without any jolt, the bubble detached from the edge of the boulder.
The boy closed his eyes for an instant, nails digging into his palms, expecting the agonizing sensation of freefall, the pit in his stomach. But nothing came. The sphere descended with the fluidity of a perfectly oiled hydraulic elevator, ignoring the brutal gravity of Delpharya. Through the semi-transparent surface of the cloud, they saw the wall of the titanic boulder slide by like a conveyor belt: an infinite cliff of scorched rock, streaked with minerals and saline encrustations.
The journey lasted hours. In that cramped, muffled space, time seemed to lose its linearity. Kaelis sat in silence, the sphere between his feet continuing its reassuring and alien hum. The boy, however, could not stay still; his mind raced faster than the sphere. Embarrassment and fear created an invisible barrier between the two, making every breath heavy.
"So..." the boy ventured, trying to break the tension. "What will we find down there? You spoke of ruins, but they look like entire buried cities."
Kaelis raised his head slightly, the darkness of his hood turned toward him. "We will find the remains of what we were before the Great Silence. We will find the Temple of Frequency, where sound was used to build, not to destroy. But be careful, boy: ruins are never truly empty. The desert has a long and often vengeful memory."
"You always say 'we,' 'we were,'" the boy observed with a hint of suspicion. "But you don't seem to belong to any time I can understand. And I... I don't even know if this world is real or if I've simply gone mad after what happened under the tree."
"Reality is a matter of agreement," Kaelis replied in a monotone. "You are here because your being was in disharmony with your world. Delpharya is not a dream; it is a frequency that is harder to sustain. The fact that you feel embarrassment, fear, and doubt is proof that you are still anchored to yourself. It is a good thing. For now."
The boy did not answer. He wondered if Kaelis ever felt lonely, or if that detachment was his true nature. He felt the man was not revealing the full picture: perhaps he was not a travel companion, but an experiment. Or worse, a key.
After a time that seemed to stretch into an entire day, the descent slowed drastically. The light at the base of the boulder was different; less violent than at the top, more laden with dust and long shadows dancing among stone pillars that emerged from the sand like the teeth of a buried giant.
The sphere touched the ground with a final puff of vapor, a sigh of mechanical exhaustion. The cloud dissolved instantly, leaving them exposed to the still, heavy air at the bottom of the basin. The ground was not made of sand alone: here, among the dunes, slabs of black basalt and remnants of faded mosaics emerged, their designs appearing to move when viewed from the corner of the eye, as if the pigments still held an echo of life.
Kaelis picked up the sphere, which now appeared lifeless and cold, and placed it in his bag with almost religious care. He looked around, his hood moving slowly to scan the horizon of stone and silence.
"We have reached the base," he said. "But do not make the mistake of believing the ground is safer than the summit. Here, the desert does not merely watch. Here, the desert acts."
The boy stepped down from the natural platform created by the sand deposit at the foot of the boulder. He felt the ground beneath his feet: it was incredibly cold, despite the sun still beating down hard. A shiver ran through him, starting from the soles of his feet and climbing up his spine. Before them, the ruins stretched as far as the eye could see—a labyrinth of broken arches, leaning towers, and roads that led nowhere.
The true journey, the one into the pulsing heart of the mystery of Delpharya, had just begun. And as he followed Kaelis's straight back and sure gait among the shadows of the millennial stones, the boy realized he was no longer afraid of heights. Now, what terrified him was the depth of what he was about to discover, and the suspicion that the truth might be more lethal than the fall itself.
The wind carried a metallic whisper, a sound that should not have been in a dead desert. Kaelis stopped for a second, his hand on the Staff of Veyra.
"Listen," he murmured.
The boy strained his ears, but heard only the beat of his own heart, accelerated, seemingly marking a rhythm he did not recognize. A rhythm that tasted of dust and forgotten machines.
The silence among the ruins was not an absence of noise; it was a dense, viscous substance, a heavy veil weighing on the boy's shoulders like a cloak of molten lead. Every step he took among those broken megaliths echoed in his mind like the tolling of a bell in an empty cathedral, a sound that seemed to propagate not through the air, but through the fabric of time itself, echoing in a past that refused to die. The stones, black and shiny as obsidian but rough to the touch like the skin of a prehistoric predator, seemed to absorb the implacable light of the Italya desert, refusing to reflect it, devouring it with an insatiable appetite. It was as if every sunbeam that hit them was swallowed, transformed into fuel for the secrets they guarded in their millennial veins—marks that perhaps were not simple erosions, but scars.
The boy felt that weight not just on his shoulders, but inside his chest. An oppression that made every breath shorter, every thought slower. The desperate need to break that spell of desolation, to replace that oppressive silence with a truth—any truth—burned in his throat like sand kicked up by the desert wind. The questions, held at bay for days of traveling through endless dunes, now pressed with the force of a flooding river. He looked at the figure of Kaelis walking ahead of him with that almost irritatingly fluid and imperturbable confidence. The dark cloak, made of a fabric unlike anything known, brushed the sun-scorched sand without ever catching, without ever getting dirty, as if he walked half a centimeter above reality itself. He was a figure of enigma and power, and in that moment, the boy hated that distance more than anything else.
He took his heart in both hands—a heart beating wildly against the cage of his ribs. He inhaled the dry air, laden with millennial dust and a subtle smell of ozone and burnt stone. He had to do it. He had to force through the wall of reserve, of half-truths and eloquent silences that Kaelis had built between them.
"Kaelis..." His voice came out initially as a whisper, immediately dispersed by the vastness, but then it grew firmer, forged by desperation. "You have to tell me. Now. Here. What exactly were these ruins? What do they represent for this world, other than rubble to feed nurses' tales? What is their true story? I... I can no longer proceed like a blind man guided by a ghost through a gallery of tombs. Every stone here screams a story, and I am deaf. And I can't stand it anymore."
Kaelis stopped.
It was not a sudden halt, but a slow fading of movement, like a pendulum reaching the apex of its swing before reversing direction, or like a statue that, after a brief wandering, finds its original position again, destined for eternity. He stood motionless before a colossal arch, broken in half, rising toward the blue and ruthless sky of Italya like a stone cry, a last, desperate attempt at communication petrified by time. His shoulders, usually so straight, seemed to slump by a millimeter, as if the weight the boy spoke of had finally touched him too. For a long instant, there was only the hiss of the wind through the fissures of the ruins—a sound that resembled the desert's breath. Then, Kaelis sighed. It was not a sigh of annoyance, but of a deep, ancient weariness. The sound seemed to lift not only the dust from their cloaks, but the dust of centuries, making it dance in a sunbeam.
He turned slightly, offering the boy his sharp profile against the dark mass of the arch. The desert light sculpted his features, making him look even more like the statues surrounding them.
"What you see, boy," he began, and his voice was low, modulated not to disturb the sleep of what was there, "are not simple ruins. They are the only tangible memories, the only teeth remaining in a skeletal jaw, of a time so distant that perhaps even the gods—the ones men pray to now—have chosen to forget it. Or perhaps..." A pause laden with meaning. "Perhaps they forgot it precisely because the mere memory, the mere echo of what happened among these stones, makes the very foundations of their power tremble, their very reason for being. These are not the ruins of a city, of a kingdom. These are the vestiges of the First Civilization. The Dawn. And the Sunset."
Kaelis approached a storied wall emerging from a pile of debris. The engravings were almost erased, but not entirely. They depicted shapes that could have been men, or perhaps something more, intertwined with complex geometric symbols and flows resembling rivers or energies. He brushed the engravings with his black-gloved hand. His touch was light, reverential, almost a caress to an old dying companion, the salute of a soldier to a monument for the fallen whose names were the wind.
"It was they," he resumed, his gaze lost in the grooves of the stone, "who rose from the mists of the newborn world and declared themselves not merely inhabitants, but architects. The First People. Not a people among many, the first in a sequence. The First. The Original. It was here, in this land you now call desert, that the first concepts defining and delimiting existence were born. Before them, the world was... pure potential. Formless but pregnant chaos. They gave it name and structure."
His voice took on an epic, narrative tone, as if reciting a forgotten litany.
"Here the first warriors were born. Not brutes with clubs, but men and women who learned that strength is not uncontrolled brutality, but a necessary balance between defense and sacrifice—the sword that protects the hearth. Here the first soldiers marched not to conquer, but to give order to the surrounding chaos, tracing boundaries not of property, but of safety. Here the first farmers did not tear food from the earth but whispered to it, learning its rhythms, and the earth, in response, flourished in abundance never seen again. Here the first magi did not cast spells stolen from dark entities but traced the lines of what is possible, weaving the fabric of reality with the thread of the Primordial Essence. And here... here the first Kings did not wear crowns forged of gold or gems, but of absolute responsibility. The crown was a circle of cold steel, the weight of duty toward every single life under their sky."
The boy listened, completely mesmerized. Kaelis's words were not just sounds; they were seeds taking root in his mind and blossoming into vivid, incredibly vivid images. He saw cities that were not of stone, but of a substance like fused gold and glass, shining under a younger sun where now there was only yellow sand and black rocks. He heard the hum of millennial markets, not of shouting but of a harmonious murmur, the smell of unknown spices and freshly baked bread. He heard the song of poets whose verses described the stars by name—names that had been erased from history, reduced to dust finer than the kind he trod upon. He felt, or believed he felt, a subtle energy in the air, a hum at the edge of perception, promising unity with all that was.
"The First People," Kaelis continued, pulling his hand away from the stone and walking slowly along the perimeter of what, from the layout of the foundations, must once have been a monumental plaza—perhaps the heart of a metropolis, "were characterized by an incredible, almost terrifying affinity with the Primordial Essence. Do not call it magic. The magic of modern times is a clumsy, limited, ritualistic thing. A drop painstakingly extracted from a dried-up ocean. That was the wave itself. It was a constant, endless energy, an invisible and powerful river that flowed not alongside reality, but was its lifeblood, its blood. Its beginning is still a presumed mystery; some ancient texts—the ones we didn't burn out of fear—suggest it was the heartbeat of the newly born world, the residue of existence's first cry."
He stopped before a solitary pillar, severed a few meters from the ground like a finger pointed in eternal reproach toward the sky. "But they... they were different. They did not merely draw from that river. They swam in it. They were capable of speaking to this force, of feeling it vibrate in the air like a string of a cosmic instrument, of touching it as if it were liquid silk or tempered steel, of manipulating it not with complex gestures and words of power, but with a thought, a blink, a sigh. Their art, their science, their very daily life was an expression of this symphony. They created the greatest, most luminous kingdom this world has ever known, an empire whose capital stood at the center of Italya. They prospered for eras that cannot be counted by calendars. Living in a harmony with the world that was almost... divine."
Then, Kaelis's tone changed. A note of iron entered his voice, followed by a deep shadow, an ancient pain that did not seem to belong to one man, but to an entire species.
"But perfection, boy, is a beacon. And a beacon, besides guiding, attracts storms. It attracts the darkness that crawls in the abysses between stars, in the dark beyond the edge of the world. Their light was so intense that it became a target."
The silence that fell was not like the one before. It was laden with foreboding. Kaelis looked at the horizon, as if fearing to see the shadow he was about to speak of lengthen.
"At a certain point, in the blinding peak of their glory, the First Cataclysm occurred. Not an invasion, not a plague. Something... external. A monster never seen before, for which no names existed, because names are a form of understanding, and this thing was beyond all understanding. A horror springing from an abyss that does not belong to this plane of existence—the most terrifying ever conceived—managed to find a crack, a weakness perhaps created by the very harmony of the First People, a sort of friction against the roughness of original chaos."
His voice became a raspy whisper, forced through clenched teeth. "It did not seek lands or treasures. It did not want slaves or power in the sense we understand. It sought dissolution. The annihilation of every structure, every law, every Tone in the universe. It sought the eternal silence that precedes the heartbeat of the world. It wanted to undo the fabric the First People had so skillfully woven, and with it, the entire tapestry of reality."
The boy felt a shiver run down his spine despite the heat.
"There was a war," Kaelis continued, and every word seemed to weigh a ton. "Not a war between armies, though armies fought and died by the millions. It was a war between concepts. Between Order and Absolute Nothingness. Between Symphony and Silence. The entity, which some fragments call 'The Devourer of Echoes' or 'The Mouth in the Void,' was immune to common weapons. It could be countered only with the pure power of the Primordial Essence, bent and concentrated into forms of pure offense. The conflict bent space: mountains were moved like pawns, oceans evaporated in an instant to be hurled like projectiles, day and night alternated randomly in the maddened sky. It bent time: entire generations of warriors lived and died in battles that, for the outside world, lasted a single, very long breath."
Kaelis looked away from the ruins, as if he could no longer bear to look at the theater of that tragedy. "In the end, after incalculable losses, after sacrificing entire cities as living batteries, after bending the laws of existence to the breaking point... the Empire won. They managed to tear the entity apart, to break its core of anti-existence, to kill that monster. But at a price. A price that cannot be quantified in human lives, because it went beyond life itself."
He turned to the boy, and his eyes, in that moment, were black wells of cosmic sadness. "It is not known exactly what happened in the final moment of victory. Perhaps the last act of force, the last blow struck against the monster, was so violently contrary to the laws of reality that it irreparably broke the First People's connection with the Primordial Essence. As if they had used their own heart as a weapon, tearing it apart. Or perhaps the monster, dying, emitted one last, desperate gasp that poisoned the source itself. The result was that the Empire, in the moment of its triumph, ceased to exist. It did not fall. It dissolved. Harmony became pure imbalance. Mutual understanding vanished, replaced by suspicion. The survivors—heroes a moment before—looked at each other and saw strangers, then rivals, then enemies. The wars that followed were not between nations, but between brothers and sisters, between masters and pupils, fought with the remnants of the power that had once built paradises. Everything that had been constructed over infinite eras was lost, destroyed, or worse, forgotten. Swallowed by an active oblivion, as if the mind of the world had decided to remove the trauma."
He made a broad, weary gesture toward the black ruins under the cruel sun. "These remnants you see today, boy, these broken teeth of a giant... they are not a monument. They are a headstone. And the epitaph says only one thing: that once we were gods, before we became dust. Before we became... us."
Kaelis paused, his gaze lost in the void for an instant too long. Then, as if forcing himself back to the present, to the trembling boy before him, he added with a voice that meant to be conclusive, almost bitter: "So, do you feel satisf—"
He could not finish the sentence.
It was not a rumble. It was not a tremor.
The ground beneath their feet did not just vibrate: it exploded in a dull, deep, visceral scream that seemed to rasp away not only the air but the very substance of the present moment. It was the sound of stone tearing, of history rebelling against silence. A gigantic earthquake, sudden and brutal as a dagger in the world's kidneys, unleashed without warning. There was no time to react, to think.
The earth tore open. Not a simple crack, but a series of gigantic wounds, as if enormous invisible claws were ripping the earth's crust. Slabs of black basalt, large as plazas, were lifted vertically, rotating on themselves with a slow, horrific roar, exposing entrails of lighter rock and ancient dust. The monumental plaza they stood on fragmented into a dozen unstable platforms swaying over a suddenly opened abyss. The boy staggered, his arms flailing in search of an impossible balance. He saw Kaelis take an instinctive leap back, his elegance replaced by a feline, deadly readiness.
And then, from the main chasm—the one that had opened at the geometric point between them—accompanied by a noise the boy would never forget (a slimy, metallic, and organic sound, like tons of wet entrails rubbed against glassy rock) the horror emerged.
The force of the eruption, the release of pressure from an unimaginable abyss, was such that it threw the boy and Kaelis away like straws. The boy felt the contact with the ground vanish—a terrifying void in his stomach—and then he was projected backward into the air. As he spun in the void, time seemed to dilate into a series of frames of pure terror. His breath was taken away not by the impact, but by the sight. His heart hammered against his ribs with a force he feared would break them.
And his eyes, wide with nightmare, recorded images that his mind, in its human simplicity, wanted to erase instantly, but which instead were seared into it.
From the earth's wound emerged a gigantic monster of mastodontic proportions that seemed to never end. It was a colossal serpentine creature, but "serpentine" was a deception of perception—a human term for something that had no right to a zoological name. It was a weave, a tangle of cylindrical segments black as the deepest coal, opaque, appearing to absorb light and with it, hope. These segments were not fixed; they coiled, knotted, and strangled each other in a perpetual, twisted motion that seemed less like voluntary movement and more like an agonizing contortion, as if the creature itself were in perpetual, tormenting birth from itself. Its "skin" was not skin: it was an irregular, pitted surface, bristling with organic spines of various sizes—some small as a dagger, others large as a tree. These spines pulsed rhythmically with a dull, sinister light, like external arteries pumping not blood, but something darker.
Beneath that abyssal surface, in the fissures between segments, one could glimpse veins—luminous cracks of bright crimson red and malignant electric purple. They were like the fissures of a volcano seen from within, indicating a monstrous internal heat or energy ready to explode, to sterilize the world.
Then, the head. Or what the boy interpreted as the head. It was a biological blasphemy, an insult to any concept of symmetry or purpose. Dominated not by one, not by ten, but by a chaotic cluster, a mad bush of eyes. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of blood-red irises, devoid of pupil or white, just balls of liquid hate and alien awareness. They had grown haphazardly over the entire front surface of the "skull"—some large as shields, others small as coins—all fixed, all always open, all seeing.
At the center of that ocular tangle, where one would have expected a mouth, an horrendous structure opened instead. A spiral maw, composed of concentric rings of serrated teeth—black bone or chitin—rotating in opposite directions: a cosmic meat grinder. From this opening hung flicking filaments, long and thin, of a bright blood red, like torn nerves or tiny tentacles, contorting in the air as if sniffing, tasting the very fear the boy emanated.
A roar, or what passed for a roar, erupted from the creature. It was not a sound of air, but of torn space, of undone matter. It made the boy's bones vibrate inside his flesh; it made his gums bleed. He was witnessing the end of the world personified. Not the end of a city or a kingdom, but the antithesis of reason. It was Chaos returning to reclaim its reign, the monster coming to take back its banquet of terror.
As gravity finally claimed its toll and the boy began his downward arc toward one of the raised rock spikes, he saw Kaelis. The man was a few meters away, also suspended, but his posture was different. It was not the boy's uncontrolled spinning. Kaelis seemed to pose in the air, his cloak floating around him as if he were underwater, his body oriented toward the creature with concentrated tension. His face, still covered, did not seem marked by terror, but by a fierce, furious determination. And in that moment of dilated time, the boy, with supernatural clarity, saw Kaelis's lips move and heard the hiss, sharp as a blade of ice, cutting through the abyss's roar:
"Shit... not right now!"
It was a burst of authentic, angry frustration—the reaction of a man whose meticulous plan had been ruined by a cataclysmic unforeseen event.
Then, the boy hit the rock. The impact was hard but not fatal; he landed on a sloped surface and rolled, scratching his arms and face, his shoulder hitting a spur violently. The pain was blinding, but secondary to the sight of the monster rising, dominating the sky, its multiple eyes seemingly searching for him specifically. An abyssal, primordial fear—the fear of prey before the ultimate predator—paralyzed him. He could not move; he could not think. He was about to become nothing, erased by that spiral mouth.
It was then that Kaelis's voice reached him again. Not a hiss, not a curse. A command. Powerful, clear, resonating with an authority that admitted no discussion, seeming to vibrate at the same frequency as the ancient ruins. It was a voice that promised salvation through immediate obedience.
"BOY, CLOSE YOUR EYES! NOW!"
Instinct, stronger than terror, took over. He squeezed his eyelids shut with all the strength he had, clenching them so hard he saw flashes of pain and light. The visual world vanished, but the auditory world intensified into an infernal crescendo. He heard the monster's roar, the crackle of rocks continuing to break, the hiss of the abyss's wind.
And then, above it all, he heard Kaelis.
He wasn't shouting spells. He was speaking, but with a modified, guttural voice that seemed to come from deep within the earth. He heard the sound of metal on metal—a precise shink, like a blade being unsheathed from a scabbard of the wrong size. Then a sharp blow, like a hammer hitting a sacred anvil. And then the words. Just two. Short. Ancient. In a language that made the boy's ears bleed just to listen to it—a language made of consonants hard as rock and vowels that were gasps of void:
"ᛊᛏᛖᛊᛟ ᛞᛁᛟ."
Suddenly, despite his eyes being clamped shut, he was blinded. A white light—pure, superhuman—pierced through his eyelids as if they didn't exist. Simultaneously, he felt a violent internal tear in the center of his chest. It was not physical pain, but existential. It was as if the space around him, his very position in the universe, were being folded, crumpled, and thrown away. The monster's roar, the crash of rocks, the hiss of the wind—everything vanished not gradually, but in a breath, cut away. Replaced by an unnatural, thick, muffled silence. And by a sudden cold.
When he reopened his eyes—an action that required monumental effort, as if his eyelids each weighed a ton—the world he knew was gone.
The smell of sulfur, burnt dust, and ozone had been swept away. Instead, the air was fresh, damp, laden with earthy and reassuring scents: seasoned oak, freshly poured beer, damp stone, the aroma of meat stew and herbs coming from a distant kitchen. The bone-chilling heat of the desert was replaced by a humid cool that made the hair stand up on his bare arms.
He felt himself leaning against a hard surface, but not rock. It was smooth, polished by use. His head was resting against a rough wooden wall, which he felt through his hair. He was sitting on a solid wooden bench, his legs heavy as lead columns, his body shaken by involuntary, subtle tremors—physical residues of the terror. Before him, a dark oak table marked by grooves, rings from mugs, and initials carved by bored knives. On the table, a terracotta mug slightly steaming, emitting a vapor that smelled of hot cider and spices. And the sound... the sound was the reassuring, constant crackle of a wood fire burning in a fireplace somewhere in the room, accompanied by the low murmur of a few conversations, the occasional clink of a mug.
And across from him, on the other side of the table, sitting with surreal calm, was Kaelis.
The boy opened his mouth, but no sound came out. His throat was tight, dry. His mind was a tangle of contradictory impulses: the hyper-luminous memory of the monster, the sensation of flying, the tear in his chest, and now... this bourgeois, domestic, impossible peace. For the first time, Kaelis was without his hood. The dark coat was buttoned, but the hood was down, draped over his shoulders.
His face was finally, completely visible.
It was not the face of a demon or an angel. It was a human face, but of a quality that seemed to defy age. Noble, chiseled features with a high forehead, pronounced cheekbones, and a strong jaw. The skin was pale but not sickly, marked by fine lines at the corners of his eyes and mouth that spoke not of decrepit age, but of weariness accumulated in industrial quantities, of vigils under different stars. His hair was thick, jet black, but streaked with strands of pure silver—not gray—starting from the temples and blending with the rest, giving him an air both majestic and vulnerable. But it was the eyes that pinned the boy. They were dark gray, almost the color of steel at twilight. In them swam the depth of the desert they had just left, the glow of the ruins, the shadow of the monster. They contained eras. And in that moment, looking at the lost boy, they expressed an infinite patience, cloaked in a slight, ironic sadness.
Kaelis was drinking calmly from his mug, his gaze fixed on the dark amber liquid as if he were reading the future in the dregs. His demeanor was so normalizing, so in contrast with the hell they had just escaped, that the boy felt a dizzying sense of disorientation. Was he going mad? Was it all a hallucination from the hit to the head?
Kaelis placed the mug on the table with a precise tock. Then he looked up and locked eyes. His voice, when he spoke, was again that calm, measured, slightly raspy voice the boy knew. There was no trace of the urgency shouted in the desert, of the guttural timbre of the spell.
"No," he said simply, reading the bewilderment, confusion, and doubt that must have been grotesquely painted on the boy's face.
A pause. The crackle of the fire seemed to amplify.
"What happened down there, among the ruins, was not a dream. It was not a hallucination caused by heat or hunger." His voice was flat, factual. "It was real. All of it. The earthquake. The creature. The journey. This place is real too. Just... different."
The boy finally found his voice, a raspy whisper: "Where... where are we? How... that monster... that light..."
Kaelis shook his head slowly, a gesture that seemed to say "not now" or "it isn't simple." He took another sip of his drink, then gestured with his chin toward the mug in front of the boy. "Drink. It's spiced apple cider. It will calm your nerves. And it will warm your blood; you need it."
The boy mechanically obeyed. His hands were shaking so hard he risked spilling everything. The hot, sweet liquid burned his tongue and throat, but the sensation was earthly, concrete. It anchored him, slightly, to this new, impossible reality.
As the heat spread through his chest, Kaelis began to speak again in a low voice, as if sharing a secret in a crowded inn which, looking around, the boy noticed was nearly empty.
"That creature," Kaelis said, his gaze hardening, "was a dissonance. Creatures of the abyss, the fruit of creation's error. The ruins are not just stones, boy. They are wounds. And sometimes, wounds... become infected."
He paused, letting the words hang in the damp air. "What I did was not some cheap sorcerer's magic. It was an emergency remedy. A forced bypass. We traveled, but not through space. Through the Tone."
The boy stared at him, unable to comprehend.
Kaelis sighed, a weary sound. "I will explain. But not here. Not now. Now, you must eat, recover. And you must look around. Because we have arrived, but we are not necessarily safe. And this place..." he looked at the low door of the inn, the dirty glass windows through which filtered the weak rays of a sun that was not Italya's, "...this place has its stories, and its shadows. And one of those shadows might have felt the... disturbance we caused by passing through."
The boy followed his gaze toward the door. The fear of the serpentine monster began to cool, to crystallize into a different type of terror: subtler, more insidious. The silence among the ruins had been replaced by the murmur of the inn, but the weight—the cloak of lead—was still there. Only now, it had a human face, marked by time, drinking cider and talking of echoes and Tones. And the question that now burned in the boy's throat was no longer just about the past.
It was about the present. It was about what Kaelis truly was. And it was about what, exactly, had followed them—or awaited them—in that so-seemingly peaceful inn.