The desert did not forgive.
A caravan dragged itself across the dunes, little more than a collection of wagons lashed together by rope and desperation. The people moved in rags, their faces hidden beneath torn cloth, their lips cracked from thirst. Every step crunched in the burning sand, and every step could be their last.
Above them stretched an endless vault of blue — cloudless, merciless, and unbearably bright. The sun pressed down like the palm of a god, punishing them with heat until their shadows seemed to smolder on the ground. To these wanderers, this sky was a curse. Clear skies meant still air, no mercy of wind, no chance of rain.
A child faltered. Their small body, still too new to endure the cruel rhythm of sand and heat, sagged against the rope that bound them to the wagon. The father stopped, stooped, and gathered the child into his arms. He pressed the boy against his chest, whispering comfort he did not believe, and shaded his eyes against the unbearable glare.
That was when the shadow fell across them.
The man froze, squinting upwards.
At first, it seemed like a mirage — an impossible darkness sweeping across the sky. Then the truth struck him: clouds, vast and towering, charging across the heavens like a stampede. White fury boiled against blue emptiness, and at their head, framed in light, was a figure. A man — or something in the shape of one — striding high above the world, his arms raised as if pulling the sky by invisible reins.
The clouds roared with life, fat with vigor, spilling shade upon the desert like spilled water upon parched lips. The caravan gasped as one. Mothers pressed children to their breasts. Old men dropped to their knees. The father clutched his son tighter, trembling in awe and fear alike.
"The Cloud Chaser," someone whispered.
The words spread like fire, traveling from wagon to wagon, from cracked lips to bleeding tongues. The legend had come alive before their eyes. Without him, the sky was barren, time itself unmoving. But when he strode across the firmament, the wheel of the world turned.
No mortal dared call to him. They only watched, held breathless beneath the sudden shade. To them, he was not man, but the hand of inevitability. The promise that the world would move, even if it moved to crush them.
High above, the Cloud Chaser did not glance down. He never did. His gaze was fixed forward, toward horizons unseen, leading the storm to its next destination. The people were dust; the sky was eternity.
And then, as swiftly as it had come, the shade passed. The desert roared with heat once more. But no one moved. They stayed kneeling in the sand, staring after him until the sky was empty again.
Far away, in a place untouched by sand or sun, someone laughed.
The Tower of Babylon hung outside time, its roots planted in nothing, its crown brushing against eternity. Its walls were not stone but parchment; its spires not steel but shelves upon shelves of books, grimoires, and forgotten manuscripts. Words filled the air like dust, every mote of knowledge drifting on invisible currents.
In one of its endless halls, a man sat reading.
Books whipped around him in a storm, shelves tearing themselves apart, tomes flying like arrows through the air — enough weight and velocity to pulp his fragile, flesh-bound body a thousand times over. Yet he did not flinch.
His eyes traced a line of text, lips twitching in faint amusement, as the tempest of pages howled around him. The ink bled, the parchment screamed, but his fascination remained vigilant, undisturbed.
A volume passed so close it sliced a lock of hair from his temple. Another brushed his wrist with enough force to split bone. But nothing reached him. Nothing ever would.
The Book Keeper was untouchable, not through strength or speed, but through the quiet truth of his existence. Cause and effect could not touch him. He was paracausal — immune to the chains of reality itself.
And so he read, surrounded by hazards that would shred lesser men, a faint smile on his lips as if danger itself were a passing curiosity.
Here, in the Tower of Babylon, he was god. He had only to speak and the world bent to his command. He had only to name, and reality obeyed. He had only to call, and legions of himself would answer.
But outside this place, stripped of its impossible walls and boundless shelves? He was nothing more than a man with cracked hands and tired eyes. A man no stronger than the wanderers in the desert.
For now, though, he turned another page. The world groaned with storms and silence. He kept reading.
The Book Keeper's finger paused on the page.
A tremor passed through the Tower — not through stone, for there was none, but through knowledge itself. Entire shelves rattled like bones in the throat of some vast beast. Tomes screamed in languages long dead. Ink shivered in its wells, pulling upward as if gravity had been inverted.
He exhaled, a faint hiss of delight.
"…Another one."
A book broke from the swarm and flew into his hand. Its cover was leather, stitched with sinew, its title shifting with every blink. He did not read the words so much as peel them open. The Tower yielded. Pages flared with light, and in that light he saw a place not of his domain.
A desert.
The vision spread across the chamber, swallowing him in heat and blinding sun. He saw the caravan stretched thin across the dunes, their bodies wilted like dying stalks. He saw the child limp in his father's arms, the shade of the Cloud Chaser passing like a god's shadow. He saw, further still, something the mortals could not — the air splitting, horizon bending.
A Door.
It was not a door in wood or steel. It was an absence, a slit of unbeing that bled pale radiance. The sand beneath it froze into glass. The wind died. The world itself held its breath.
The father did not see it. The child did not see it. None of the caravan noticed, for the Door had not chosen them.
But the Book Keeper did. He alone, sitting within his tower of impossible shelves, felt its birth.
The Tower groaned. Books screamed. The Door widened.
He closed the volume and set it down gently, reverently, as though laying a weapon to rest.
Another one had come. Another soul dragged from time and space, cast into this planet's endless pit. A new page in the ledger of suffering.
His lips quirked. "How quaint."
For a moment, he considered ignoring it. Another victim meant little to him. The Tower kept its own counsel. But there was something… odd in the ink, in the weight of the words. A resonance.
The Book Keeper leaned back, closing his eyes. The Tower shivered as he whispered:
"Actualise."
The air rippled. The grimoire he had touched burned with white flame, and the vision solidified. He did not merely see — he witnessed.
The Door yawned wide, and something fell through.
A body.
It tumbled, screaming, sand rushing up to greet it. A mortal shape, clad in the remnants of another world. A figure with no place here.
The Book Keeper's eyes opened, their edges lined with amusement, like a scholar finding an annotation in the margins of a manuscript.
"A new arrival…"
His voice was low, soft, almost drowned by the storm of tomes around him.
"…Let us see how long they last."
Far below, in the desert of shifting glass, the Door tore itself wider. Its edges sparked with pale fire, and the air around it bled a sound like cracking bone. From its gullet, a body fell — a mortal figure plummeting through endless sky.
The man crashed into the dunes with a roar of displaced air. Sand buried him, choking, dragging him down. For a long moment he did not stir. Then, with a guttural heave, he rose.
The sun struck his form, and the world seemed to pause.
Blonde curtain bangs framed his face, strands falling to his shoulders, disheveled yet sharp. His jaw was strong, his features cut with the kind of harshness that did not belong to the meek. His eyes, evergreen and piercing, scanned the horizon with the instinct of a warrior.
His attire spoke louder than words.
Monster leather, dark and strange in texture, hugged his chest and legs, lined with white fur at the edges. A heavy coat hung from his shoulders like a cape, its fur collar gleaming in the sunlight. His trousers were thick, bound at the waist and ankles with fur, boots of hide and metal sinking deep into the sand. Bands of steel encircled his wrists, practical and scarred, the kind meant to turn blades aside. Upon his brow lay a circlet, faintly glowing with inscriptions in a language no soul here would recognize.
An empty holster clung to his back, fastened into his furred coat. Waiting.
The man blinked, groaning faintly as he steadied himself. His hand brushed his temple. His eyes widened as he noticed the caravan in the distance, drawing closer.
The caravan's fighters moved to the front, weapons drawn in wary silence. They were lean men, hardened by survival but unremarkable. He studied them quietly, his evergreen gaze narrowing as his thoughts churned:
Three blades. Rusted steel. Stances rough, untrained. Weak at the knees. The tall one favors his right hand too heavily… easy to break. The others, afraid but desperate. A fight I would win.
His hand twitched toward his back — but the holster was empty. He exhaled, forcing the tension down. There was no need.
Not yet.
He stumbled forward, hands raised in peace.
The fighters called out in harsh, guttural tones. Their words were nonsense to him, but their intent was clear enough: Who are you? What do you want?
He answered in his own tongue, a low murmur of syllables alien to their ears. Confusion deepened on both sides.
Then slowly, deliberately, the man knelt. He drew with his finger in the sand: two figures standing side by side, their hands joined in a crude likeness of friendship.
Though it was of partial authenticity, the sands of the dune seemed to dislike such half-hearted endeavours, the depiction was soon grained over like it had never been sculpted to begin with.
The caravan leader squinted. One of the fighters laughed nervously, lowering his weapon an inch. It was not trust — but it was enough.
They let him approach. Side stepping to create what the musclebound man thought was a mild depiction of welcome.
Among the caravan, whispers stirred.
The father of the sick child frowned, his grip tightening protectively. "A stranger," he muttered in his tongue, the words low but bitter. "We take him in, and perhaps we invite ruin."
The child stirred weakly in his arms. "But Father… didn't the Cloud Chaser appear today? Isn't that a sign?"
The man's jaw clenched. He said nothing more.
The newcomer tilted his head, catching only one word that crossed the boundary of language.
"…Cloud."
He looked up. Empty skies burned above him. Not a wisp of white in sight. His brow furrowed. What did these people mean?
Subtly he manoeuvred around the caravan, making out as if on patrol for whatever manner of beasts await them in the dunes ahead, he counted 14 all together.
"Six Women. Four Elderly. Three Men. One Child. If a fight were to break out against any manner of beast. Would be wise that I prioritise the men's safety over the others. In this environment I cannot afford deadweight."
Then shouts erupted at the head of the caravan. Something had alarmed the caravan.
The man paced towards the front with a veteran's stride. Devoid of any unnecessary movement. Lacking the flair of personality that would set him aside from others.
Upon reaching the forefront of the caravan a cluster of people were huddled together, though he didn't spot the Child he had overheard earlier or his apparent father. Everyone else was present.
The fighters were pointing, voices tight with alarm. Something moved in the distance, crawling across the horizon.
He squinted his eyes to hone in on the disturbance on the horizon only to have shock colour his face. Staggeringly large amounts of sand were being hurled up into the air, as if a small army of men were flicking it up on the move at high speeds.
The man's hand twitched again. He could feel it — a threat. His back was still empty, the weight of Raya absent. But deep within, his soul fire stirred. His face hardened and his hand gripped itself in a vice grip.
"It would seem this place is also prone to the misfortune of giant pests."
High above, in the Tower of Babylon, the Book Keeper leaned forward, eyes alight with curiosity.
"…How very interesting."
The monotony of expectation in the Book Keepers line of work was rarely disturbed and often endured for extensive periods of time. Yet in just one day a single planet had caused more interest to stir within him than thousands of others had accomplished in millenia.
"If this keeps up I might just have to visit you myself. I can't recall the last time I had an outstanding balance of curiosity as large as this. I don't suppose a slight detour from my usual routine would be out of order now would it."
A cacophony of pages fluttering resounded throughout the Tower like butterflies sapping the pollen from a budding flower. Thousands of grimoires, tomes and pages of parchment began zooming on all levels within the tower. Some made a B-Line for their destination while others would go galavanting around the halls as if time was on their side.
And it was.
"Show me your secrets. Mortal." The Book Keeper spoke, his eyes wide, his mouth spread apart in a wide and unsightly grin no man or beast should ever hold.