The desert stretched endless, dunes rolling like the bones of dead giants.
Three days had passed since Veyth's retreat. Three days of silence, broken only by the crunch of boots in sand and the weary coughs of survivors. The camp was gone; the group carried what little remained on their backs.
Every step felt like walking into a furnace. Even Mira, tireless and sharp-tongued, moved slower. Kael limped heavily, though he refused to complain. Lysa scouted ahead, eyes always on the horizon.
And Aelric… Aelric walked at the rear, corrupted arm tucked under a ragged cloth. The black veins had crept higher, spreading up his neck, pulsing faintly with each heartbeat.
Elara stayed beside him. She never let him lag too far, never let him slip fully into the shadows of his own silence.
"You're worse," she said quietly, not a question.
He smirked, though sweat dripped from his brow. "Thanks for noticing."
Her glare could have cut stone. "I'm serious. How much longer until it—until you—"
"Until I crack?" His grin was thin, brittle. "Guess we'll find out together."
Her throat tightened. She hated when he joked about it, hated how much truth hid behind the smirk.
---
That night, they made camp in the hollow of a dune. The fire was small, barely enough to ward off the creeping cold. The desert nights bit harder than the days.
Mira poked at the flames with a stick. "We need water soon. Food too. If the Hunters don't kill us, the desert will."
Kael muttered, "Maybe that's mercy."
"Shut it," Mira snapped. But her own shoulders sagged.
Lysa returned from scouting, silent as always. She dropped a handful of withered desert fruit by the fire. "Barely edible. But it'll keep us walking."
They ate without complaint. Survival had no taste anymore.
---
Later, when the others drifted into uneasy sleep, Aelric stayed awake, staring at the stars. Elara sat beside him, silent at first.
Then she asked softly, "Do you remember before all this? Before the timers? Before the Council?"
He chuckled bitterly. "Before? Can't say I do. My whole life's been ticking digits and borrowed time."
"Liar," she whispered, leaning closer. "You told me once… about the river near your home. How you used to skip stones until your mother yelled at you to come back."
For a moment, his smirk faltered. A memory stirred—sunlight on water, laughter echoing, a warmth he hadn't felt in years.
"Yeah," he murmured. "Guess I did."
She smiled faintly. "That's the Aelric I fight for. Not the corruption. Not the Hollow. You."
His chest tightened. For the briefest second, the whispers went silent.
---
The peace didn't last.
The air shifted—too still, too heavy. The flames sputtered as though smothered by unseen hands.
Lysa's eyes snapped open before anyone else's. Her voice cut through the night, sharp and urgent. "Something's here."
The survivors scrambled awake. Mira grabbed her makeshift spear. Kael clutched a broken blade. Elara lit her faint glow, though it flickered nervously.
Aelric rose slowly, sword in hand, his corrupted arm twitching like it recognized something.
Then the sound came.
Not footsteps. Not wings.
Tick. Tick. Tick.
The survivors froze. It wasn't the tick of a clock—it was dozens, layered, out of rhythm, wrong. The noise crawled into their bones, made their timers ache against their skin.
From the horizon, the sand stirred. Something massive shifted beneath the dunes.
And then it rose.
A figure taller than the tents they had lost, stitched from bone and broken glass. Its chest was hollow, but within it ticked countless fractured timers, digits overlapping in chaos. Its face was a shattered clock, hands missing, the circle cracked.
The Weaver.
Elara's glow faltered. Mira swore under her breath. Kael made a choked sound somewhere between fear and prayer.
Aelric grinned, though his eyes burned with unease. "Guess Veyth wasn't bluffing."
The Weaver tilted its head. Its voice wasn't a voice at all—it was the sound of a thousand timers breaking at once.
"Unravel."
The ground split beneath their feet.
---
Elara screamed as her digits flickered wildly on her wrist, the timer spasming like it was being rewritten. Mira staggered, clutching her head as visions of past deaths flashed before her eyes—lives she'd never lived but could suddenly remember losing.
Kael fell to his knees, timer glitching with impossible numbers: [−43 Days : 12 Hours] … [∞] … [0:00:01].
Lysa hissed through clenched teeth, holding her wrist as though the digits were burning into her flesh.
And Aelric—Aelric roared as his corrupted arm surged with wild energy, veins glowing like molten black fire. His timer spasmed, digits racing forward and backward. For a moment, it went blank.
No time at all.
Just nothing.
He staggered, sword trembling in his grip. "What… what the hell are you?"
The Weaver's fractured face tilted again.
"The end of what should never have been."
---
Reality rippled.
The fire collapsed into sparks that froze mid-air. The stars overhead bled across the sky, their constellations unraveling into spirals of broken light. The survivors felt themselves split in two, their bodies pulled between what was and what should have been.
And the Weaver stepped forward.
Each step was a tick out of rhythm, a fracture in the world.
Aelric raised his sword, his grin sharp despite the blood trickling from his lips. "Fine. Let's see how many times I have to kill you before you stop ticking."
The Weaver's hollow chest pulsed.
The night shattered.
---
To be continued…