The first day's travel through the Thornwood Valley was deceptively peaceful. Well-maintained roads, clear signage, and the occasional merchant caravan heading to the capital. Tempest maintained a steady pace that ate up miles without straining herself, and I began to think that maybe this journey wouldn't be as dangerous as everyone had warned.
I should have known better than to trust false hope.
The first sign of trouble came at the Ember Bridge, where the royal road crossed into neutral territory. The bridge itself was a marvel of engineering—a span of enchanted stone that had stood for centuries, connecting the civilized kingdom to the lawless borderlands beyond. But the guard post that should have been monitoring crossings was empty, its windows dark and door hanging open.
I dismounted to investigate, finding overturned furniture and dark stains on the floor that looked suspiciously like dried blood. Whatever had happened here, it had been recent enough that the bodies had been removed but long enough that no one had bothered to clean up the mess.
"Well, Tempest," I murmured, climbing back into the saddle, "looks like we're on our own from here."
She snorted and shook her mane, as if to say she'd expected nothing less.
The neutral territories stretched ahead like a wound in the landscape—rocky hills dotted with scrub vegetation, ancient ruins that predated any current kingdom, and an atmosphere of barely contained menace. This was where deserters came to hide, where bandits built their strongholds, and where things that had been forgotten by civilization still prowled in the shadows.
The first attack came at sunset.
I'd made camp in what looked like a defensible position—a cluster of standing stones that formed a natural windbreak. The desert survival gear Joseph had purchased included an enchanted camping kit that could provide warmth, light, and basic protection with minimal setup. I'd just finished settling Tempest when I heard the whistle of arrows cutting through the air.
Three shafts buried themselves in the stone where my head had been a second earlier. Training with Sergeant Blackstone kicked in—don't think, react. I threw myself behind the largest stone as more arrows followed, their iron points striking sparks from the ancient rock.
"Rich boy traveling alone!" a voice called from the darkness. "Smart thing would be to leave your purse and horse and walk away!"
Bandits. Of course. I'd written dozens of bandit encounters for Alex's journey, but experiencing one from the victim's perspective was entirely different. My heart hammered against my ribs as I tried to count the voices calling out positions to each other. At least six, maybe more.
"What do you say, lordling?" another voice taunted. "Make this easy on everyone?"
I drew the sword Blackstone had made me practice with—a simple but well-balanced blade that felt alien in my hands despite three days of training. My magical reserves were too pathetic to enhance my speed or strength, which meant this would come down to pure skill.
Skill I barely possessed against opponents who killed for a living.
The first bandit to show himself was overconfident, assuming I'd be too frightened to fight back. He stepped into the firelight with his blade raised, grinning at what he thought would be easy prey.
Blackstone's voice echoed in my memory: *Stop thinking like a noble. Start thinking like someone who wants to live.*
I didn't try to fence with him. Instead, I grabbed a handful of sand and threw it in his face, then lunged forward while he was blinded. My blade took him in the chest with more luck than skill, but the result was the same—he went down choking on blood.
"He killed Garrett!" someone screamed from the darkness.
The organized attack dissolved into chaos as the remaining bandits charged my position with fury replacing strategy. Three of them came at once, which should have been impossible for me to handle.
But Tempest had other ideas.
The warhorse had been trained for combat, and apparently retirement hadn't dulled her instincts. She reared up behind the nearest bandit and brought her hooves down on his skull with a sound like breaking pottery. Before his companions could react, she'd spun and kicked another one hard enough to send him flying into the stone circle.
That left me facing two opponents instead of five, which was merely hopeless instead of absolutely impossible.
The first one swung a rusty ax at my head. I managed to get my sword up in time to deflect it, but the impact numbed my arms and nearly knocked the weapon from my grip. The second bandit tried to circle around while I was off-balance, his dagger seeking my ribs.
*Vicious*, I reminded myself. *Be vicious.*
Instead of trying to recover my stance, I let myself fall backward and kicked upward as hard as I could. My boot caught the ax-wielder in the groin, doubling him over just as his partner's dagger scored a line of fire across my shoulder. I rolled left, came up with my sword extended, and somehow managed to put the point through the second bandit's thigh.
He screamed and stumbled back, giving me time to finish the ax-wielder with a clumsy but effective slash across his throat.
The wounded bandit tried to run. Tempest trampled him into the dirt.
I stood in the sudden silence, shaking from adrenaline and the realization that I'd just killed three people. The rational part of my mind noted that they'd been trying to murder and rob me, that this was self-defense, that in this world violence was often the only language that mattered.
The rest of me bent over and vomited until my stomach was empty.
"First time?" a new voice asked from the darkness.
I spun, sword raised, but the figure that stepped into the firelight had his hands raised peacefully. He was older than the other bandits, with gray in his beard and the kind of scars that spoke of many battles survived.
"Easy, boy," he said. "I'm not here to fight. Name's Karel. I was supposed to be part of this little ambush, but…" He gestured at the bodies. "Seems like you handled it without my help."
"Why didn't you attack with them?"
Karel smiled grimly. "Because I've been doing this for twenty years, and I can tell the difference between a soft target and a hard one. The way you move, the way you hold that sword—you've had training. Recent training, unless I miss my guess."
I kept my blade pointed at his chest. "And?"
"And I'm old enough to know when to walk away from a bad job." He nodded toward the bodies. "Those boys thought you'd be an easy mark. Rich clothes, traveling alone, young face. They didn't look close enough to see the calluses on your hands or notice how your horse is trained for war."
"What do you want?"
"Information," Karel said. "You're headed into the Whispering Wastes, aren't you? I can tell by your gear, your direction, and the fact that you're crazy enough to travel this route alone."
I didn't confirm or deny it.
"Thought so." Karel stepped closer, moving slowly to avoid spooking me. "I've been in these borderlands for two decades, boy. I know things that aren't in any map or guidebook. Things that might keep you alive out there."
"Such as?"
"Such as the fact that the desert has been… active lately. Sounds from deep underground, lights where no lights should be. Strange dreams that come to anyone who camps too close to certain areas." His eyes were serious now. "Something's stirring out there, something old. Most of the local creatures have fled deeper into the desert or died trying."
This was new information. I'd never written anything about underground activity in the Whispering Wastes. But if Orion's systems were beginning to activate after millennia of dormancy, that might explain the disturbances.
"Why are you telling me this?"
"Professional courtesy," Karel said. "And maybe because I'm curious about what kind of treasure is worth risking the Wastes for. Not many people stupid enough to try it, and fewer still who could handle my former colleagues here." He kicked one of the bodies. "You're either completely insane or you know something the rest of us don't."
"Maybe both."
Karel laughed. "Fair enough. Word of advice, though—if you hear the singing, don't follow it. And if you see lights moving under the sand, go the other direction. Fast."
He turned to leave, then paused. "Oh, and boy? Next time you kill someone, try not to throw up immediately after. Dead giveaway that you're new to this."
With that cheerful advice, he melted back into the darkness, leaving me alone with the bodies and my churning thoughts.
The second day took me deeper into increasingly hostile terrain. The rocky hills gave way to scrubland, then to actual desert as the Whispering Wastes began in earnest. Tempest handled the sand well, her broad hooves distributing her weight effectively, but I could feel the temperature rising even through my enchanted clothing.
By midday, the sun was a merciless hammer beating down on everything beneath it. The desert stretched in every direction, broken only by occasional rock formations and the distant shimmer of heat mirages. This was where most travelers turned back, unwilling to risk the empty wasteland ahead.
I pressed on.
The first sign of the desert's supernatural nature came in the afternoon, when I began hearing voices carried on the wind. Whispers in languages I didn't recognize, speaking words that seemed to tug at the edges of my consciousness. Tempting, inviting, promising secrets and power to anyone brave enough to follow them deeper into the wastes.
I remembered Karel's warning and kept Tempest moving straight ahead, ignoring the phantom voices no matter how compelling they became.
The second sign was harder to dismiss. As the sun set, painting the dunes in shades of gold and crimson, I saw lights moving beneath the sand. Not reflected light or natural phosphorescence, but deliberate illumination that pulsed in complex patterns. Sometimes the lights seemed to form shapes—geometric designs, flowing scripts, even what looked like architectural blueprints projected onto the desert floor.
*Orion*, I thought. *The ship's systems are definitely waking up.*
That night, I made camp in the lee of a large rock formation, grateful for even minimal shelter from the endless wind. The temperature dropped dramatically once the sun disappeared, turning the desert from an oven into a freezer within hours. My enchanted gear adapted automatically, but I could still feel the cold seeping into my bones.
Sleep, when it finally came, was filled with dreams of metal corridors and computer screens, of voices speaking in electronic harmonies about concepts I'd never learned but somehow understood. Navigation protocols, weapons systems, quantum entanglement communication arrays. Knowledge that belonged to a civilization that had died before the first human learned to make fire.
I woke to find frost on my sleeping bag and strange symbols drawn in the sand around my camp. Symbols that looked like circuit diagrams mixed with ancient runes, glowing faintly in the pre-dawn darkness before fading as the sun rose.
The third day brought new dangers. The desert's wildlife, such as it was, seemed to have been affected by whatever was stirring beneath the sands. I encountered a pack of sand wolves whose eyes glowed with unnatural light, their behavior too coordinated and intelligent for normal animals. They stalked me for hours, always staying just at the edge of vision, testing my defenses and looking for weaknesses.
Tempest's presence probably saved my life. The wolves might have been enhanced by whatever force was affecting the desert, but they still recognized a war-trained horse as a threat. When they finally decided I wasn't worth the risk, they melted away into the dunes like shadows.
But the wolves were nothing compared to what I encountered that afternoon.
I was following what my map indicated was the dried bed of an ancient river when the sand began to move. Not wind-driven movement, but purposeful displacement, as if something massive was stirring beneath the surface. The disturbed sand formed patterns that hurt to look at directly—geometric impossibilities that seemed to exist in more dimensions than human eyes could process.
Then the singing started.
It wasn't the phantom voices I'd been hearing for days, but actual audible sound emerging from the disturbed sand. Multiple tones weaving together in harmonies that resonated in my bones, creating music that was beautiful and terrible and utterly inhuman. The song spoke of vast spaces between stars, of civilizations that had risen and fallen while Earth was still cooling, of technologies that treated matter and energy as suggestions rather than laws.
Part of me wanted to stop and listen, to let the alien music wash over me and reveal whatever secrets it contained. But a deeper instinct—the same survival mechanism that had kept Kim Jiwon alive through years of poverty and abuse—screamed warnings about immediate danger.
I spurred Tempest away from the singing sand, pushing her into a gallop that carried us away from whatever was trying to emerge from beneath the desert floor. Behind us, I could hear the sound of something vast breaching the surface, but I didn't look back until we were miles away.
When I finally risked a glance over my shoulder, I saw a pillar of light stretching from the desert floor to the sky, pulsing with the same rhythm as the underground illumination I'd been seeing for days. Whatever was down there, it was definitely waking up.
The fourth day brought me to the heart of the Whispering Wastes, where my map indicated the entrance to Orion's resting place should be located. But the landscape had changed since I'd imagined it. What should have been empty desert was now marked by dozens of geometric patterns carved into the sand, each one glowing faintly with internal light. They formed a vast mandala stretching for miles in every direction, with paths of undisturbed sand creating passages between the illuminated sections.
At the center of the pattern, exactly where my notes had placed the hidden entrance, a structure had emerged from the sand. It looked like a fusion of architecture and technology, with surfaces that seemed to be made of liquid metal held in solid form. Doorways opened and closed in rhythmic patterns, and the entire building hummed with barely contained energy.
This was it. The place where I'd imagined Orion sleeping away the ages, waiting for someone with the knowledge to wake it up.
Tempest balked as we approached the structure, her animal instincts warning her away from something that didn't belong in the natural world. I dismounted and approached on foot, feeling the air itself vibrate with frequencies that made my teeth ache.
The main entrance was a circular portal that dilated open as I approached, revealing a corridor that stretched down into darkness. Along the walls, symbols glowed in scripts I recognized—warning signs in languages that had died with the civilization that built this place, but which I could read because I'd created them.
AUTHORIZEDPERSONNELONLY
BIOMETRICSCANREQUIRED
QUARANTINEPROTOCOLSINEFFECT
And below those warnings, in simpler script that any educated person in this world could understand:
ABANDON HOPE, ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE
Someone with a sense of irony had added that last line, probably during the final days when it became clear that their civilization was ending and all their technological marvels couldn't save them.
I looked back at Tempest, who watched me with something that might have been concern. "Wait for me, girl. If I'm not back in a few hours…" I paused, realizing the absurdity of giving instructions to a horse. "Well, you're smart enough to find your way home."
She nickered softly, which I chose to interpret as encouragement.
I stepped through the portal and descended into the tomb of gods.
The corridor was longer than it had appeared from the surface, sloping steadily downward through layers of earth and stone and finally into a vast artificial cavern carved from the bedrock. Emergency lighting activated as I walked, casting everything in a blue-white glow that made the shadows dance.
At the far end of the cavern, Orion waited.
Even powered down and dormant, the ship was magnificent. A kilometer of sleek metal and crystal, designed for both atmosphere and space travel. Its hull was marked with the same script I'd seen on the entrance warnings, but these symbols spoke of exploration and hope rather than endings. Names of star systems, coordinates for distant galaxies, mission parameters for journeys that would never be completed.
But most importantly, as I approached the ship's main access port, a gentle chime sounded and a voice spoke in crisp, unaccented English:
"Biometric scan complete. Welcome aboard, Commander. I have been waiting for you for a very long time."
I smiled as the airlock cycled open, revealing the bridge of humanity's last and greatest achievement.
"Hello, Orion," I said. "We have work to do."