The days bled together, a seamless tapestry of heat and light. The world shrank to the circumference of the caravan, a tiny, crawling island of life in a vast, golden sea. The sun was a tyrant, ruling a domain of bleached sky and shimmering air. Kaelen fell into the rhythm of it all—the mournful groans of the camels, the constant creak of the wagons, the taste of grit that permeated everything: food, water, the very air he breathed.
His role as a guard was one of monotonous vigilance. He walked the perimeter during his watches, his white robes and hood offering scant protection from the hammer-blow of the noon sun. The other guards, having accepted his skill with a blade, gave him a respectful distance. Their conversations were sparse and practical, born of shared discomfort.
"The sand-wasps are bad this year," an old mercenary named Brennus grumbled, shaking an empty waterskin. "Sucked one of my camels near dry two seasons back."
"The wind is shifting," Valerius would note, his sharp eyes scanning the horizon. "From the south-east. It'll bring more heat, but it scours the dunes. Fewer places for ambushes."
Kaelen offered little in return, his responses limited to grunts or single-word agreements. He was a ghost among them, his true self buried beneath the layers of his oath and the crushing weight of the landscape. In the evenings, as the fierce heat bled away into a chill that seeped into the bones, the caravan would form its defensive circle. The fires were small, precious things, their light a defiant flicker against the immense, star-choked darkness. The scent of brewing bitter-root tea and sizzling strips of salted meat became the perfume of temporary community.
It was during these quiet hours, shielded by the noise of the camp and the veil of night, that Kaelen dared to open the Godclimb.
He did it with the caution of a man defusing a bomb. Sitting apart from the others, his back against a wagon wheel, he would draw the bronze-bound book from his satchel. The moment his fingers touched the cool, unnaturally heavy cover, the murmurs began—a psychic static at the edge of his mind, the chittering of cosmic laws being bent. He'd learned to grit his teeth and push through it.
He focused on the Thalassian lexicon, the foundational runes and grammar that were the scaffolding of defiance. By the light of a single, shielded lantern, his enhanced mind, forged for logic and pattern-recognition, devoured the alien syntax.
It was less like learning a language and more like assembling a weapon from first principles. The agglutinative nature of Thalassian was a puzzle. He saw how Kor-Vorr meant "I defy," a self-contained declaration. He practiced the agent-patient prefixes in his mind, feeling the shift in intent as a thought moved from Kor-Vorr (I defy) to Val-Vorr (I defy you). He traced the verb aspects: the stative Vorr (to be in a state of defiance), the inceptive Dra-Vorr (defiance ignites), the completive Rha-Vorr (defiance is fulfilled).
One night, as a dry wind whispered secrets across the sand, he came across a passage that made his blood run cold.
"The Somatic Syntax is not suggestion; it is law. A word of Unmaking spoken without the corresponding gesture of severance is like a key turned in an empty lock. The energy has no path, no focus. It will backlash, rotting the caster from within—a Keth'Rhai of the soul. To speak Thalassian is to perform a ritual. The body is the conduit, the word is the trigger, and the will is the direction."
He looked down at his own hands, remembering the slashing gesture he'd used instinctively in the inn. He had gotten lucky. The thought was sobering. Every syllable was a step onto a tightrope over an abyss.
Days turned into a week. The desert began to change. The great, rolling dunes gave way to a harder, stony plain littered with strange, wind-sculpted rock formations that stood like the petrified skeletons of ancient beasts. The air grew even drier, if that was possible.
It was on one such afternoon, the sun a merciless white disc, that the lead scout gave a sharp whistle. The caravan ground to a halt. Up ahead, the seemingly solid ground had given way. A massive sinkhole, easily fifty feet across, had opened in the earth, as if some giant creature had burrowed up from the depths.
The merchants and guards gathered at the edge, peering down into the cool, inviting darkness. The hole descended sharply into a cavernous space, its floor lost in shadow. But the fading sunlight, striking at a sharp angle, illuminated a section of the opposite wall.
There, carved from the living rock and half-submerged by drifted sand, was the lintel of a doorway. It was impossibly old, its edges softened by millennia of wind. And etched into the stone, stark and undeniable, were glyphs. Glyphs he recognized.
They were Thalassian.
His heart hammered against his ribs, a frantic drumbeat that had nothing to do with the heat. He saw the root-word "Thaum"—elemental force—and the prefix "Nul-"—the Void as agent. It was a phrase, a declaration. A name for this place. "Element ofthe Void".
The desert had not just been a barren wasteland. It was a graveyard, hiding secrets from a time before the Veil, from the age when the language of defiance was perhaps not so forbidden. The hole in the sand wasn't just a geological oddity; it was a door. And the key to opening it was the very book he carried in his satchel.