The desert stretched endlessly, a sea of dust and rust colored rock beneath a dying sun. Collapsed skyscrapers broke the horizon like the bones of a giant buried in sand.
A single figure walked through this wasteland. The boy could have been mistaken for a shadow if not for the pale glint in his eyes, His name was Drax. He was twenty years old. And he was alone
This was the world Drax had inherited scarred, hollow, and always hungry.
He moved across the dunes with cloak drawn close to shield against the blistering rays. His hood cast his face in shadow, but his eyes were sharp, scanning the horizon for movement. His hands gripped the compound bow that rarely left his side, the string worn smooth from years of use. On his back, a quiver of hand carved arrows rattled lightly with each step.
Drax lived by the bow. Which he made from the scrap, simply meant for survival.
He knelt in the sand and brushed away a patch of loose grit with the back of his hand. Tracks. Faint, but fresh. Small, clawed paws. Likely a sand hare, maybe two. Edible, if caught. He smiled faintly beneath the shadow of his hood. Tonight, perhaps, he would not go hungry.
Drawing the bow, he followed the tracks across a dune, keeping low, moving with the patience of a hunter who knew one wasted shot could mean a day without food. A flicker of movement caught his eye a creature darting between rocks, its ears high, its body lean with the same hunger that gnawed at him. Drax stilled, every muscle taut.
He exhaled slowly, aimed, and loosed. The arrow whispered through the hot air, striking true. The hare toppled with a squeal, kicking once before the desert claimed its sound.
Drax approached, lifting the kill gently. "Thank you," he murmured, as if the animal could hear him still. Words he had read once, long ago, in the survival book that had become his scripture. He never killed without gratitude the book had taught him that much.
That book bound in cracked leather, its pages yellowed and stained was more valuable to him than any weapon. He had found it in the ruins, buried under rubble while he scavenged for shelter as a boy. Others might have passed it by, seeing only rot. But Drax had taken it, and within its fragile pages he found more than words. He found life.
The book had taught him how to make fire from stone and steel, how to purify brackish water, how to track game and identify edible roots among the weeds. It taught him that survival was not just strength it was knowledge. While the world crumbled into chaos, and others fell to starvation, Drax endured because he had listened. Because he had learned.
Now, years later, he was no longer a boy. At twenty, his body was lean muscle hardened by sun and hunger. His skin bore the rough tan of endless exposure, his hands were calloused, his arms strong from pulling bowstring and shaping tools. He had become what the book had shaped him to be a survivor in a world designed to erase survivors.
But survival had its price.
Drax slung the hare over his shoulder and made his way back toward the jagged ridge he called home. Nestled beneath broken slabs of stone lay a crude shelter lined with scavenged sheet metal, scraps of cloth, and bones that once warded away intruders. It wasn't much, but it kept the wind off his back at night, and that was enough.
Inside, the shadows gave him relief from the sun's fury. He set the hare aside and knelt before a battered canteen. Only a swallow left. He tilted it, and the warm liquid touched his tongue, vanishing too quickly. His throat burned for more.
Water. Always water. The desert devoured it faster than it could be found. Some days, he walked for hours toward the mirage of an old well, only to find it dry. Other days, he dug at the roots of thorn bushes, coaxing a trickle of moisture from their hidden veins. The book had taught him where to look, but not how to conjure what was no longer there.
Still, he endured. Tomorrow, he would rise with the dawn and seek the underground cisterns he had marked on his map of memory. Until then, he would eat, sharpen his arrows
He unwrapped the old survival book from its cloth covering, hands reverent as he opened its fragile pages. The ink was faded, the corners worn, but the words remained: instructions, diagrams, fragments of wisdom from a time when knowledge was plentiful and the world was whole. Drax traced the lines with his finger, lips moving silently as he mouthed the lessons he knew by heart. Fire. Shelter. Hunting. Foraging. The rules of staying alive.
The wind howled outside, rattling the metal sheets of his shelter. Drax ignored it. He had grown used to the sound of emptiness. Loneliness, however, was harder.
He leaned back, eyes on the roof above. In his mind, he remembered the world before flashes of light, screams, the sky torn apart as the Anomalies descended. They had come without warning, burning through the atmosphere like shards of night. They drained the Earth's veins, stripped her bones, and enslaved those they did not slaughter. The machines and beasts they unleashed still roamed the surface.
That was why people fled underground, burrowing into the hollow earth like frightened moles. But Drax had not gone with them. He had chosen the desert. Chosen the sky, no matter how cruel, over the choking dark below.
And so he remained.
As dusk settled, Drax cleaned the hare, kindled a fire from dry roots, and roasted the meat slowly over the flames. The smell filled the air, sharp and savory, cutting through the stench of dust. He ate with his hands, savoring each bite as though it were a feast. Tomorrow, the desert might give him nothing. Tonight, it had given him this.
When he had eaten, he set aside the bones to dry. They could be carved into tools, arrowheads. Waste nothing the book's rule, his rule.
The fire crackled low. Drax pulled his cloak tight around him, resting with the bow at his side. He gazed into the flames, their light reflected in eyes that had seen too much for their years.
In the silence of the desert night, The wind carried ash across the dunes, whispering like forgotten voices. Drax closed his eyes and listened, the bowstring still taut in his hand. Tomorrow, he would rise again. Tomorrow, the hunt would continue.
In a world that had burned, he was the ember that refused to die.