The Whisper didn't return.
But the wound he left in the desert did.
Aero hadn't slept in two days.
Every time he closed his eyes, the monolith spoke.
Not in words. Not in visions like before. It pulsed. Echoed. Filled his veins with fireless heat, with weight. Like the earth was trying to fold him into itself.
"You need to rest," Mica said, pressing a water pouch into his hands. "You're running on nerve and sand spit."
"I can't," he whispered. "Something's calling me."
"To what? A rock that screams?"
"To me."
She stared at him for a moment, then sat beside him with a long sigh. "You ever think maybe you were born broken?"
"Every day," Aero said.
"Huh." She passed him a strip of dried meat. "Me too."
They ate in silence. The wind howled outside the crater like a grieving animal. The roots Aero had summoned were still twitching in their sleep, wrapped around the edges of the stone like a forgotten curse.
The monolith hadn't stopped pulsing.
Aero knew it wasn't over.
That night, it changed.
He was meditating beside the monolith, one palm pressed to the earth, his breathing slow, steady—trying to match the Resonance's rhythm—when the hum beneath the sand shifted.
No longer the deep thrum of life.
This was... different.
Sharper. Hungrier.
He opened his eyes—and the sand around him began to ripple.
Mica sat up instantly. "Uh. Aero. Is this your doing?"
He shook his head.
The crater floor cracked.
Something was rising.
Roots blackened with ash burst upward, spiraling around the monolith like armor. The carved symbols began to burn—not with fire, but with memory. Each one flashed images behind Aero's eyes.
A city beneath the sand. A tower made of bones. A voice calling a name he had never heard… but somehow remembered.
"Arak'hul."
The word struck him like a hammer. He gasped, staggering backward as the name carved itself into his mind like flame on stone.
"You are the last. You are the broken. You are the seed. Rise, child of ash. Rise, false flame."
Aero screamed.
His body convulsed.
And then he was inside it.
The world around him shattered.
He stood in a void of endless dust. Black sand whipped around his feet. Above, a dead sun hung unmoving in a white sky. Before him, a figure sat on a throne of fused roots and glass.
Not a man.
Not a god.
A memory of one.
Its face was half-burned, eyes like twin voids. Its chest glowed with a green-gold symbol that matched the monolith's surface. When it spoke, it sounded like a forest being torn apart.
"You heard the pulse."
"I didn't ask to," Aero said.
"The Resonance doesn't ask. It chooses."
"Why me?"
"Because you are dead, and still you breathe. Because you are flame-born, and still you grow."
The figure stood, the throne dissolving into vines.
"Your ancestors devoured this world. Burned it for light. Worshipped heat. Killed soil and root to praise sky and flame."
Aero's fists clenched. "I'm not my family."
"No. You are worse. You still love them."
The void cracked beneath his feet.
"You will learn. Or the land will reclaim you."
The memory raised a hand.
Aero felt his chest ignite—not with fire, but with pressure. The roots wrapped around his ribs, not to crush but to anchor. His heartbeat synced to the void's rhythm.
THRUM. THRUM. THRUM.
"You are now marked," the voice said. "Child of ash. Seed of the forgotten. Learn. Survive. Or rot where they buried you."
The figure dissolved into dust.
Aero woke screaming.
Mica caught him as he collapsed.
His skin steamed. His veins glowed faintly green. The symbol from the monolith was burned into his chest—pulsing slowly, like a second heart.
"Okay," Mica said. "What the hell just happened?!"
"I think…" Aero panted, still half-lost in the void. "I've been given a name."
They left the crater by sunrise.
The symbol on Aero's chest had faded into a scar. But the Resonance felt different now—closer. Clearer. As if something ancient had decided to stop whispering and finally start speaking.
They didn't talk much as they walked.
Not until they crested a dune and saw the first village.
Or what remained of it.
Ash.
That was all. Ash and silence. The wind had blown the corpses into bone piles. The stone homes were scorched black, the ground split as though lightning had torn through it.
Mica stepped forward, her voice quiet. "Slavers?"
"No," Aero said. "Too clean. Too fast."
He knelt beside a ruined well.
Pressed a hand to the dust.
And heard screaming.
Children. Mothers. Magic surging and dying all at once. A sky that split with flame. Not a raid.
A massacre.
His breath caught.
"Someone's testing something," he whispered. "Something too strong. Too unstable."
Mica gritted her teeth. "You think it's the Empire?"
"No." Aero stood slowly. "Worse."
She turned. "Worse than the people who exiled you?"
"Yes."
He looked past the village, beyond the dunes, into the endless breathless horizon.
"There are others like that Whisper. People hunting me. People who know what the Resonance is."
"And they're scared of it," Mica said.
"Or hungry for it."
The wind picked up, scattering more ash into the sky.
Mica pulled her scarf over her mouth. "Then we go west. To the edges."
"Why?"
"Because if I were running from gods and ghosts," she said, "I'd want answers only the mad ones still speak."
Aero said nothing.
But he followed.
Because he felt it too—beneath every step, every breath, every heartbeat.
The earth was watching.And it was no longer patient.