Rating: MA 15+
Sabaku woke to the taste of copper.
His mouth was filled with sand and something else—blood, he realized distantly, though whether his own or inherited from this body's memories, he couldn't tell. The distinction felt increasingly meaningless.
Dawn hadn't broken. The sky remained that impossible pre-light blue, stars fading but sun not yet risen, caught in the liminal space between night and day. He lay curled on his side in the sand, the pendant still clutched in one hand, its edges pressed deep enough into his palm to leave indentations.
Aru. The name whispered through his consciousness like wind through empty rooms.
He sat up slowly, every muscle protesting. His body—this body—carried exhaustion that went deeper than one night's flight. It was fatigue written into bone and sinew, the kind that came from months, perhaps years, of systematic deprivation.
Behind him, on the horizon, Khemet-Ra still burned. Or perhaps it had finished burning and now simply smoldered, columns of smoke rising into the pale sky like prayers that had forgotten their words. The Duneborn were gone, but their absence felt temporary, like held breath.
Sabaku stood on shaking legs and began walking. Away from the ruins. Deeper into the desert. There was no plan, no destination—only the animal instinct that staying still meant death.
The sun rose with violence.
One moment, the sky was soft blue. The next, red light exploded across the horizon as if the world itself were hemorrhaging. The sun didn't ease into existence—it tore through the fabric of night, too large, too close, radiating heat that felt personal. Accusatory.
Sabaku raised his hand to shield his eyes and saw something that stopped him cold.
His shadow. It fell wrong. Not quite aligned with the sun's angle, stretching too far in the wrong direction. And within its darkness, shapes moved. Silhouettes that weren't his own—smaller, crouched, hands raised as if warding off blows.
He blinked, and the shadow was normal again. Just a kids outline cast across sand.
I'm seeing things, he thought. Dehydration. Trauma. Perfectly reasonable explanations.
But the copper taste in his mouth intensified, and somewhere behind his eyes, pressure built like a storm gathering.
He walked. The desert stretched infinite in all directions, each dune identical to the last, monotony broken only by occasional outcroppings of stone worn smooth by wind older than memory. Heat rose in visible waves, distorting distance, making the horizon shimmer like water that didn't exist.
By what he guessed was midday—the sun directly overhead, burning like a brand—Sabaku's legs gave out. He collapsed against a stone outcropping, grateful for its meager shadow, and closed his eyes against the glare.
That's when the first vision hit.
Pain. Sharp and specific. Whip-crack against bare skin, leather splitting flesh with practiced precision.
"Denounce your weakness, Aru. Accept Ra's blessing through suffering."
A priest's voice, cold with righteous certainty. Sabaku—no, Aru—couldn't see the persons face, only the ceremonial mask adorned with solar symbols, eyes hidden behind golden crescents.
"I won't," the kid whispered, his voice—this body's original voice—thin with agony but stubborn. "Hurting people doesn't bring us closer to the gods. It only brings us closer to monsters."
Another crack. Another line of fire across his back. The chamber smelled of incense and blood, sandalwood failing to mask copper sweetness.
"Your mother spoke such blasphemies," the priest continued, circling. "Look where it brought her. Look where defiance leads."
In the corner of the chamber, barely visible in flickering torchlight: a persons body. Still. Silent. Eyes open but no longer seeing. Around her neck, the mark of strangulation—ritual rope, three loops, the same rope used in temple sacrifices.
"Mother—" Aru's voice broke.
"She is beyond your concern now. Accept the blessing, child. Let pain purify your dissent."
"Never." The word emerged as prayer and curse simultaneously. "I'll never—"
Sabaku's eyes snapped open, stomach heaving. The vision's afterimage burned behind his retinas—that chamber, that priest, that persons face frozen in death. But these weren't his memories. They couldn't be. He'd never experienced this, never known these people.
Yet his back ached with phantom pain, skin remembering wounds that had healed before he arrived.
"What..." He pressed his palms against his eyes, trying to ground himself in present reality. "What is happening to me?"
The pendant in his pocket felt suddenly heavier. He pulled it out, studying the inscription again: May Aru walk in peace through all the years.
A memorial. For a dead kid. A child whose body Sabaku now inhabited.
"Aru," he whispered to the merciless sun. "You're still here, aren't you? Somewhere inside this... this shared space."
The desert offered no answer. But the copper taste intensified, and Sabaku understood with dawning horror: he wasn't alone in this skull. Memories layered upon memories, consciousness bleeding into consciousness. He was Sabaku Ō, thirteen-year-old orphan from Tokyo. But he was also becoming Aru, seven-year-old torture victim, witness to systematic cruelty.
Two lives. One body. Neither complete.
He stood on trembling legs and continued walking. What else was there to do?
The afternoon brought new horrors.
At first, Sabaku thought it was another mirage—shimmering shapes on the horizon that suggested structures where no structures should exist. But as he crested a particularly tall dune, the vision resolved into terrible clarity.
Bodies. Dozens of them. Children's bodies, partially buried in the sand, arranged in concentric circles around a central altar of black stone. Each small corpse wore the same tattered temple linens, the same bronze pendant around their necks. Each bore ritual scars—precise patterns carved into flesh before death, wounds that had healed and been reopened repeatedly, flesh made canvas for theological expression.
Sabaku's stomach heaved. He fell to his knees and retched, bringing up nothing but bile and sand. When the spasms passed, he remained kneeling, unable to look away from the tableau of horror.
This was Ra's Left Hand. This was the cult's work.
"They were offerings," he whispered hoarsely. "Children offered to a god that doesn't answer."
Or perhaps one that did answer, but not in ways anyone should want.
Another vision crashed through him, this one briefer but more intense:
Aru, younger—perhaps five—standing in a line of children before the black altar. A priest with a curved blade, ceremonial copper gleaming in torchlight. Each child stepped forward in turn, received their first scar—the mark of initiation.
When Aru's turn came, he didn't cry out as the blade bit into his cheek, beneath his left eye. The crescent cut. The mark of Ra's Witness.
"You are chosen," the priest intoned. "You will see what others cannot bear to see. You will know the truth of divine suffering."
Blood ran down Aru's face, but his eyes remained defiant. Even then. Even that young.
"I don't want to see," he whispered. "I don't want any of this."
The priest smiled beneath his mask. "What you want is irrelevant. What the god demands is absolute."
Sabaku touched his own face, fingers finding the scar beneath his left eye. Aru's scar. A mark that carried history written in pain.
"You resisted," Sabaku said softly to the memory, to the ghost sharing his consciousness. "Even when it cost you everything, you resisted."
The bodies around the altar seemed to listen. Dead witnesses to failed rebellion.
He forced himself to stand, to turn away from the massacre site. But as he walked, he felt them—those children's final moments echoing through the sand itself. Fear. Confusion. That terrible moment when a child realizes the adults they trusted have betrayed them fundamentally.
Sabaku had felt that moment too. Different circumstances, different world. Same betrayal.
The sun continued its slow arc overhead, indifferent to the suffering beneath its gaze.
Evening brought something unexpected: rain.
Not the gentle rain of Tokyo—that civilized precipitation that fell with apologetic consistency. This was wrong. Desert rain that felt like violation, droplets so cold they burned, falling from a sky that had been cloudless moments before. The rain smelled of ozone and something chemical, artificial, as if the sky itself were sick.
Sabaku stood in the downpour, arms raised, mouth open. Water on his tongue tasted of metal and ash. But it was water, and his body craved it desperately.
The desert transformed. Sand darkened, dunes settling under the weight of moisture. And everywhere—everywhere—things began emerging.
Flowers. If they could be called flowers. They bloomed in accelerated time-lapse, pushing through sand with violent urgency. Petals of strange colors—blues too dark, reds too bright, yellows that hurt to look at directly. They opened like mouths, stamens moving with disturbing intentionality, tracking movement.
Sabaku backed away from the nearest bloom. It followed his motion, petals rotating to maintain orientation. Predatory.
"What kind of desert blooms in the rain?" he whispered.
The kind that had forgotten how to be natural, apparently. The kind where evolution had taken wrong turns, where biology had been corrupted by whatever catastrophe had created this world.
He walked faster, avoiding the flowers, but they grew denser with each minute. Soon he was navigating a field of them, their strange colors creating a psychedelic landscape that felt more like hallucination than reality.
Then he heard it: singing.
A child's voice, high and pure, carrying through the rain with impossible clarity. The melody was familiar—an ancient Egyptian lullaby, something Sabaku had encountered in his studies. But the words were wrong, twisted, the soothing verses replaced with something darker:
"Sleep, little offering, sleep beneath the sand,Ra's eye has closed, his judgment close at hand.Dream of the surface, of sun and sky so blue,But know the darkness claims all children like you."
Sabaku spun, trying to locate the source. The voice seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere, carried on wind and rain simultaneously.
"Who's there?" he called out. "Show yourself!"
The singing stopped. Silence rushed in, broken only by rain's steady percussion.
Then, between two dunes, a figure appeared. Small. Child-sized. Walking with strange, disjointed movements, as if joints bent at angles they shouldn't.
As it approached, details resolved through the rain:
A child. Perhaps eight years old. Wearing temple linens rotted through with age. Skin gray-white, desiccated, preserved by desert conditions. Eyes open but filmed over, pupils clouded white. And around his neck: a bronze pendant identical to the one Sabaku carried.
The dead kid stopped ten paces away. His mouth didn't move, but words emerged anyway, echoing inside Sabaku's skull:
"You wear his face. You carry his burden. But you are not him."
Sabaku's hands shook. "Who... what are you?"
"Memory given form. Suffering given voice. We are the forgotten offerings, the children Ra consumed and discarded. And you..." The corpse-kid tilted its head at an unnatural angle. "You are the thief wearing borrowed flesh."
"I didn't ask for this!" The words burst out, raw and desperate. "I didn't choose to—"
"Neither did we. Neither did Aru. But here we are, all of us, caught in the desert's memory. Tell me, thief—do you taste his blood yet? Do you feel his screams lodged in your throat like stones?"
As if summoned by the question, another vision slammed through Sabaku's consciousness:
Darkness. Complete and absolute. Aru bound with iron chains in a chamber deep beneath the temple, so far down that sound itself seemed to die. Water dripped somewhere distant, each drop an eternity apart.
Days passed. Or weeks. Time lost meaning in the darkness. His water ration: one cup per day, delivered by a priest who never spoke. His food: none. The body consumes itself in stages—first fat, then muscle, finally organ tissue. Aru felt each stage with terrible clarity.
But worse than physical hunger was the silence. The complete absence of human warmth. Even cruelty would have been company. Instead: nothing. Just darkness and the sound of his own breathing, growing shallower each day.
"Mother," he whispered to the void. "Mother, I kept my promise. I didn't surrender. I didn't become like them."
The void offered no comfort.
"But I'm so tired. So tired of being strong."
On what he guessed was the fourteenth day—though it might have been the fortieth or the fourth—the chains released. Not unlocked. Simply... opened. As if whatever force had imprisoned him lost interest.
Aru crawled through darkness, hands scrabbling against stone, following a draft of air that suggested escape. Hours of crawling. Skin tearing on rough stone. But eventually: light. Distant and dim, but light nonetheless.
He emerged into the desert at night, body broken, spirit fractured, but somehow—impossibly—alive.
For three days he wandered. No food. No water. Body shutting down in stages. But he walked toward something he couldn't name, pulled by instinct or fate or simple momentum.
On the third night, he stopped walking. Lay down in the sand. Looked up at stars.
"If there's another life," he whispered with his final breath, "I hope it's kinder than this one."
His eyes closed.
The desert accepted another offering.
Sabaku came back to himself gasping, tears streaming down his face and mixing with rain. The corpse-kid watched with those filmed-over eyes.
"Now you understand," it said. "You carry a dead kids wish. His final prayer. 'I hope it's kinder than this one.' But look around, thief. Is it?"
Sabaku looked. Rain falling wrong. Flowers blooming predatory. A world that had moved beyond apocalypse into something stranger and more terrible. And within his own heart, two hearts beating—his own frantic rhythm and Aru's ghost-pulse, echoes of suffering that death couldn't silence.
"No," he whispered. "No, it's not kinder. It's just... different ways of dying."
The corpse-kid nodded slowly. "Then perhaps you should finish what he started. Not escape. Not survival. But rebellion. The kind that changes things, even if it destroys you in the process."
"I don't know how—"
"You will. Memory teaches, even when we resist the lesson." The figure began walking backward, dissolving into rain. "But hurry, thief. The desert remembers everything. And it's starting to remember you."
The corpse-kid vanished, leaving Sabaku alone in the field of wrong flowers and cold rain.
He stood there, shaking, processing layers of trauma that weren't his own but felt increasingly indistinguishable from personal experience. Aru's memories were becoming his memories. Aru's pain was becoming his pain.
The integration was inevitable. Irreversible.
"Okay," he said to the absent ghost, to himself, to whatever gods or forces had orchestrated this impossible reincarnation. "Okay. I'll finish what you started, Aru. I'll prove that even a forgotten child—even two forgotten children—can change the course of gods."
The rain began to slow, clouds dissipating as quickly as they'd formed. The predatory flowers closed their petals, retreating into sand until the desert looked almost normal again.
Almost.
Sabaku clutched the pendant—Aru's memorial—and transformed it into a promise. Not escape from this world, but transformation of it. Not survival for its own sake, but resistance as meaning.
He resumed walking, no longer aimless. Somewhere in this desert was the temple that had tortured a kind-hearted child for refusing cruelty. Somewhere were priests who called suffering sacred. Somewhere was the system that fed children to gods and called it worship.
And Sabaku—Aru—whatever name he wore—would find it.
Would burn it down.
Would prove that rebellion wasn't futile, even when it seemed impossible.
The sun set behind him, casting his shadow long across the sand. And this time, the shadow held firm—singular, solid, belonging to one child carrying two lives' worth of rage.
Above, stars emerged. Wrong constellations in a wrong sky over a wrong world.
But for the first time since awakening in this body, Sabaku felt something other than fear or confusion.
He felt purpose.
The desert whispered his names—both of them—and he answered by walking deeper into its hostile embrace, toward whatever horrors or revelations waited in the endless dunes.
Behind him, in the sand where he'd stood, a single flower bloomed. Not predatory. Not wrong.
Just a lotus. Small and white and impossibly fragile. For a moment, it glowed with soft light. Then the desert reclaimed it, and the moment was gone. But Sabaku had seen it. And in seeing, remembered hope.
TO BE CONTINUED...