The storm announced itself as a line of shadow on a white-hot sky.
By the time the elders named it—Furnace gale—the horizon had already risen like a wall, ash and fire folding into one another, and the wind had learned a scream. The wise ran for stone. Archimedes was far from the hive.
He had returned to the wastes once his bandages dried, drawn by the clarity the desert enforced. Two other marchers—newly proud in their survival—came after him, laughing at the heat as if endurance earned mastery. He did not scorn them; he simply kept his eyes on the dunes. The Furnace found laughter tasteless.
The gale struck like a god that had been insulted.
Heat hit first, a hand without flesh. Air turned to scalding glass. Sand went airborne in sheets, then in knives. The three youths bent into it; torches were torn away like toys.
"Back! Back to the city!" someone shouted, but there was no direction in the black veil. One boy went to his knees and retched blood, the wind clawing strips from his robes. Archimedes took his arm and pulled, each step a theft from the storm.
Then the second marcher screamed.
Archimedes turned in time to see the boy lifted—weightless, unbelieving—snatched upward and sideways in a motion that made no sense. For a heartbeat, limbs flailed against a charcoal sky; then the Furnace took him. The scream cut away. Only the wind spoke.
Archimedes roared the boy's name. The gale ate the sound and offered nothing back.
There was no saving him. There was only the living. Archimedes dragged the survivor, head bowed, teeth bared against the heat that sought his lungs. He walked until the stone gates loomed like a miracle he had no faith in. Hands hauled them inside. The elders praised the Light for sparing two of three.
Archimedes lay on the floor and stared at the ceiling until it stopped moving. He did not sleep. The silence in his ears shaped itself like a missing voice.
When the storm died days later, he returned alone.
The dunes had been raked into new lines; the desert had adjusted its script. He walked until his shadow shortened and lengthened again, until he found what remained: a ribcage, half-buried; shards of a pelvis; finger bones like chips of chalk. No cloth. No torch iron. The Furnace had decided what to keep.
He knelt. The air was still now, the sun a silent coin burning through emptiness. He reached into sand and lifted a rib. It was smooth and pale, light as ash and heavy as guilt.
"I failed you," he said, voice a rasp against the wide quiet. "But I will not fail again. I will not waste your story."
He tore a strip from his sleeve and bound the bone, tucking it against his chest where the bandages had lain. Not a charm—debts are not charms. A ledger. A line written where he could feel it with every breath.
He stood and looked across the wastes, where wind had rewritten the world as if nothing were missing. The Furnace made no answer. It had never needed to.
Archimedes turned toward the hive. He walked with a new weight that the body could barely measure, and the heart could not forget.
Endure. Preserve. Remember, he thought, and for the first time the words felt less like prayer and more like praxis—a blade honed against the grain of grief.