---
The wasteland stirred.
Wind curled over the dunes like breath over the mouth of a dying god. Buzzards circled the rust-colored sky. Far below, hidden in the folds of sand and wreckage, something moved.
Not a war rig. Not a raider band.
Something older. Worse.
A machine crawled across the earth, belching black smoke and silence. It wasn't fast. It didn't need to be. It rode like a funeral procession. Like the world was already dead.
The few warboys stationed near the south dunes spotted the shape—massive, jagged, crawling with armor and dread. Their laughter died in their throats. One fired a flare. Another ran.
None lived long enough to scream.
---
The Revenant King sat behind the wheel of Black Silence, his breath hissing through the scorched remains of a rebreather mask. His hands, gloved in flaked, blood-worn leather, gripped the controls loosely—like he'd already made peace with where he was going.
In the distance: the Citadel.
The place he once burned.
The place that dared rise again.
His speakers played nothing. No war drums. No revving howls. Only static. The kind that made the skin crawl and the sandworms hide.
On a ridge above the canyon road, he stopped. Below, a convoy tore through the wastes—warboys on bikes, monstrous vehicles in pursuit of a war rig. The War Rig. He recognized it.
> Furiosa.
She was supposed to die years ago. He remembered her from the war of the Sunken Mines. She had fire then. She had fire now.
The warboys had no idea what they were chasing. But he did.
Hope. And that made them more dangerous than any bullet.
---
He didn't care about Max Rockatansky, clinging to the back of the rig like a chained ghost. Nor about the Five Wives, or even Furiosa's betrayal of Immortan Joe.
What drew him wasn't the people. It was the War Rig's path—the direction they were heading.
East. Toward the Hollow Sea.
Toward something buried beneath the salt dunes—Vault 79.
The last Vault that mattered.
He turned the rig's wheel. Black Silence groaned like an old god waking. Flames burst from the exhaust, and the monster rumbled down the dune.
He would follow the convoy.
He would burn what they sought—before they could even understand what it was.
---
Meanwhile, in the canyon, war reigned.
Furiosa gunned the rig through smoke and fire. Max fought like a man possessed, chained and bleeding, as bikers tried to pull him off. Explosions tore through the cliffside. The chase thundered on, dust swallowing sun.
No one noticed the black shape on the ridge watching them.
Until the horn blew.
A low, static-fueled wail—part animal, part machine—screamed across the sky. Every warboy froze. Even Furiosa flinched.
Nux looked up, pale as ash. "No…" he whispered. "No, no, not him…"
The Warlords had told stories. Of a man who burned Gas Town to the ground in one night. Who slaughtered Rictus's entire flanking column and left their bones in perfect rows.
Of the Revenant King.
Max didn't believe in ghosts. But as the Black Silence thundered toward them, engine roaring like the end of time, he started to.
---
The War Rig blasted forward, smashing through wreckage.
Behind them, another rig now followed—blacker than oil, its plow drenched in dried blood, skulls nailed across the grill. It didn't attack. It just followed. Unstoppable. Unafraid.
"What the hell is that?" one of the wives screamed.
Furiosa narrowed her eyes. "Trouble."
"No," Max said, staring at the looming death engine in the rearview. "Worse than that."
---
Up top, behind the wheel, the Revenant King said nothing.
But in his shattered mind, something echoed.
> "End it all. Leave no future."
His memories were fire and static. He had killed Immortan Joe once before, long ago. But warlords always rose again. Hope always returned.
And now someone was heading east—to a Vault with the power to reshape the Wastes.
He wouldn't let that happen.