Titus, a corporal in the Third Legion of Aerthos, had once believed the desert was merely empty. He was a veteran of the Northern Uprising, a campaign fought in cold forests and muddy fields. He understood the hardship of rain and frost. He did not understand the tyranny of the sun. The sun was not weather; it was a malevolent god that beat down relentlessly, stealing the moisture from a man's body and the reason from his mind.
General Kaelen's great southern march had begun with pomp and confidence. Ten thousand men, the pride of the kingdom, were a moving city of steel and leather. But after two weeks in the Southern Wastes, they were a column of ghosts trudging through hell.
Their maps, meticulously drawn by the Royal Cartographers, were a lie. The first oasis, marked as a "major source of potable water," was a stinking, viscous pit of black sludge. The men who drank from it before the water-masters could test it died screaming over the next two days, their guts twisted into knots. The second well was bone dry, filled with sand, a skull of a goat placed on the stone lip—a clear and silent message.
They were being bled by an enemy they could not see. Sickness, born of the heat and the bad water, spread through the ranks. Dysentery became a more feared foe than any army. The men grew weak, their disciplined marching columns becoming a shambling, head-down trudge.
Then the ghosts appeared. At first, it was just rumors from the outriders. A scout disappearing without a trace. A patrol found dead, not from swords, but from single, expertly placed arrows, their waterskins pierced and empty.
Titus saw it for himself one evening. He was on watch, his eyes scanning the endless, shimmering horizon. He saw a flicker of movement on a distant ridge. Not a man, but something smaller, faster. A desert horse, impossibly swift, carrying a rider who seemed a part of the animal itself. Before he could even raise the alarm, a soft hiss passed by his ear, and the man standing next to him grunted, an arrow suddenly protruding from his throat. Titus dropped to the ground, shouting, but by the time the guards rallied, the ridge was empty. There was nothing there but the wind and the oppressive sun.
The desert was not empty. It was watching them. Every rock, every dune, seemed to hold a pair of unseen eyes. The psychological toll was immense. The men grew jumpy, irritable. Fights broke out over rations of water, which were now cut in half. The heavy plate armor they had polished with such pride in the capital was now a personal furnace, a leaden weight sapping their strength.
General Kaelen rode along the column, his face an unreadable mask of granite. He was a brilliant commander, and he knew what was happening. This was not random misfortune. The contaminated wells, the precise, harassing attacks—it was all part of a deliberate, masterful strategy. The desert itself was being wielded as a weapon against him. His grand plan of a swift, surprising encirclement had devolved into a death march.
He had underestimated his enemy. He had underestimated the bastard prince he had been sent to crush. He had thought he was the Patient Vulture, circling his prey. He now understood that he was the ox, plodding stupidly into a slaughterhouse, and the doors were closing behind him. He was too deep in the wastes to turn back; to retreat now, with his supplies dwindling and his men weakening, would be to guarantee the army's annihilation. His only hope, his only path to survival, was to push forward. To force a confrontation. To reach the enemy's heartland and pray he had enough strength left to cut it out. Titus, trudging through the sand with a thirst that felt like a fire in his throat, looked at the grim faces of his comrades and felt, for the first time in his life as a soldier of the King, the cold touch of true despair.