The red dust of Sector 7 was not merely soil; it was the pulverized remains of a civilization that had rusted to death. It coated the throat with the taste of copper pennies and dried blood. It clung to the Strider-beasts' scales, turning them the color of a fresh bruise.
They had been walking for an hour since leaving the bridgehead. The landscape was a claustrophobic maze of industrial skeletons. Great ribs of steel rose from the earth, curving inward as if the island itself was a gargantuan beast that had died curled in the fetal position.
Kaelen walked at the head of the wagon, his hand resting on the hilt of his crossbow. His boots crunched on the grit—shhh-kruk, shhh-kruk—a sound that seemed aggressively loud in the stillness.
His Audit was silent. Not because there was no data, but because the data was overwhelming. Every beam, every bolt, every plate of metal here was flashing Critical Failure. To look at Sector 7 with the Audit active was to watch a landslide in slow motion. He had turned it off to save his own sanity.
"The smoke," Korgath rumbled from the rear. "It is close."
The Orc's voice was wet. The filters of his ventilator were clogging with the red heavy metals of the air. He sounded like a bellows that had sprung a leak.
"I see it," Kaelen murmured.
The orange glow flickered ahead, nestled in the hollow of a collapsed cooling tower. The structure lay on its side, a broken ceramic cylinder the size of a cathedral. Inside the curve of the ruin, sheltered from the stagnant wind, a fire burned.
It was wrong. Fires in the Rustlands were either blue or green. An orange fire meant wood. It meant carbon. It meant something was burning that had once been alive in the old way.
"Weapons tight," Kaelen ordered. "But keep them lowered. If it's a trap, we're already inside the kill box."
They approached slowly. The Strider-beasts whined, smelling something ancient and unfamiliar: burning paper.
Sitting before the fire was a figure.
It was humanoid, but in the way a statue is humanoid. It sat upon a throne made of welded gears and compressed scrap. It wore robes of heavy, lead-lined leather that had stiffened with age, cracking at the joints to reveal darkness beneath.
The figure did not look up as the wagon ground to a halt twenty paces away. It was holding a book—a massive tome bound in metal—and was carefully ripping pages out, one by one, and feeding them to the fire.
Rrip. Crinkle. Hiss.
The fire flared, casting long, dancing shadows against the curved walls of the cooling tower.
"Halt," the figure said.
The voice did not come from a throat. It sounded like the grinding of tectonic plates deep underground. It resonated in the chest cavities of the party members.
Kaelen signaled the stop. He stepped forward, his hands visible, palms open.
"We are travelers," Kaelen said, his voice raspy. "Crossing to the Engine."
The figure stopped its hand mid-motion, a page hovering over the flames. Slowly, agonizingly, it turned its head.
The face beneath the cowl was not flesh. It was a mask of porcelain and brass, fused directly to the skull. Where the eyes should have been, there were complex, multi-lens apertures, like the shutters of a camera, clicking softly as they dilated to focus on Kaelen.
"Travelers," the figure repeated. It tasted the word, rolling it around. "A transitive verb. implying a destination. There are no destinations here, Ranger. Only stopping points."
"Who are you?" Elara asked. She had climbed down from the wagon, drawn by the warmth of the fire despite the dread pooling in her stomach.
The lenses clicked, rotating to focus on the girl.
"I am the Archivist," the figure said. "I am the Curator of the heavy things."
"You're burning books," Vanya whispered. She stood by the wheel, her hand clutching her chest. She looked ill. The mana in this place was dense and radioactive, pressing against her senses like a lead blanket. "Why are you burning knowledge?"
The Archivist dropped the page into the fire. The flames licked it up greedily.
"I am not burning knowledge, Elf. I am burning weight."
The creature gestured with a hand that had too many joints. "Sit. The fire is warm. The fuel is expensive. Do not waste the entropy."
Kaelen hesitated. His instincts screamed Ambush, but his logic screamed Exhaustion. Korgath was swaying on his feet. The beasts needed rest. And if this thing wanted them dead, it likely could have done so already. The magic rolling off the Archivist felt ancient—older than the Rot.
"We sit," Kaelen decided.
They arranged themselves around the fire, keeping a respectful distance from the metal throne. The heat was intoxicating. It thawed the marrow in their bones, loosening the tension that had held them together since the bridge.
But with the relaxation came the horror.
Elara looked at the fire. She saw the writing on the curling paper before it turned to ash. It was a diagram. An architectural drawing of a bridge.
"That was a blueprint," she said.
"The blueprint for the Bridge of Saints," the Archivist nodded. He reached for the book again. "A structure that collapsed forty years ago. It no longer exists. Therefore, the memory of it is a lie. Lies are heavy. We burn them to stay warm."
"You're erasing history," Vanya said, her voice trembling.
"I am balancing the equation," the Archivist corrected. He ripped another page. This one contained a poem. "The world is sinking, little mage. The Void pulls us down. We are too heavy with our past. We carry cities that are dust, laws that are broken, and gods that are dead. If we do not shed the weight, we will fall into the abyss."
He fed the poem to the fire.
"I am simply lightening the load."
Korgath sat heavily, his armor clanking. He removed his helmet, setting it on the red dust. His face was grey, sweat tracing lines through the grime.
"It is a losing battle," the Orc grumbled. "You burn a page. The rust takes a beam. The Void takes the rest. Why struggle?"
The Archivist turned his lenses toward the Orc.
"Because the struggle produces heat," the creature said. "And heat is the only proof that we are not yet the same temperature as the grave."
Silence stretched between them, filled only by the crackle of burning poetry.
Kaelen took a nutrient brick from his pack and began to carve it. He watched the Archivist. He recognized the creature's philosophy. It was the Ledger, taken to a monstrous extreme. Kaelen balanced assets and debts; this thing balanced existence and oblivion.
"We need to reach the Tectonic Engine," Kaelen said, keeping his voice steady. "The records say it stabilizes the island. If we can restart the core, we can stop the drift."
The Archivist made a sound that might have been a laugh. It sounded like a ratchet stripping a gear.
"The Engine," the Archivist mused. "Yes. The great heart. The rhythm of the earth."
He leaned forward. The lenses whirred, zooming in on Kaelen's face.
"And what makes you think the Engine wants to be started?"
Kaelen paused, the knife halfway through the brick. "It's a machine. It doesn't have wants."
"Everything has wants, Ranger. Even iron. Especially iron. Iron wants to rust. It wants to return to the earth as oxide. It tires of holding the shape men forced upon it. The Engine has been sleeping for a century. To wake it is to torture it."
"If we don't," Elara said, her voice small but firm, "Sector 7 falls into the Void. And everyone here dies."
"Everyone here is already dead," the Archivist said gently. "They just haven't finished the paperwork."
He pointed a long, metal finger at Korgath.
"Look at the Orc. He carries the weight of a mountain that no longer stands. His lungs are filled with the dust of his ancestors. He is tired. Are you not tired, warrior?"
Korgath looked into the fire. His eyes were rheumy. "I am... very tired."
"See?" The Archivist said. "He wants to lay the burden down. He wants to stop fighting the gravity. The Void is not cruel. It is merely rest. Infinite, silent rest."
Vanya flinched. She looked away from the fire. "That is the whisper," she hissed. "That is what the shadows say before they eat you."
"The shadows eat the flesh," the Archivist said. "I am speaking of the soul. Why do you persist? Why do you walk the Razor's Edge, cross the Shore of Nothing, and come to this graveyard?"
He looked at Kaelen.
"What is the asset that justifies this debt, Ranger? Show me your math."
Kaelen looked at his ledger. It was sitting on his knee. He thought about the numbers. The food supplies. The bolt counts. The distance. None of it justified being here. The math always said to stop.
He looked at Elara. She was chewing her lip, terrified, but she hadn't moved away from the fire. She was holding the obsidian dagger, but her other hand was resting on Vanya's knee, offering comfort.
"We aren't here for the math," Kaelen said slowly.
"Then you are here for a delusion," the Archivist countered. He ripped another page—a map of a forest that was now a desert—and held it up. "Hope is a delusion. It is a projection of a future that the data does not support. It is the heaviest thing of all."
He offered the page to Kaelen.
"Burn it," the Archivist commanded. "Burn your hope. Admit that you are walking toward a grave. Admit it, and you will feel lighter. You will sleep tonight without nightmares."
Kaelen stared at the paper. It was brittle, yellowed.
He felt the pull. God, he felt it. The desire to just agree. to say 'Yes, we are dead men walking. It doesn't matter.' The relief would be instantaneous. He could stop counting. He could stop worrying about the axle. He could just lie down in the red dust and let the chemistry take him.
Korgath was nodding slowly, his eyes half-closed. The seduction of nihilism was strong in him.
Kaelen reached out. He took the page from the Archivist.
He looked at the map. It showed the Green-Reach. A place he had played in as a boy, before the sky broke. Now it was a nesting ground for flesh-spiders.
"You're right," Kaelen said. "This place is gone."
"Burn it," the Archivist urged softly.
Kaelen crumbled the paper in his fist.
"But I'm not," Kaelen said.
He didn't throw the paper into the fire. He shoved it into his pocket.
"The map is wrong," Kaelen said, his voice hardening, turning back into the steel rasp of the Commander. "But the paper is useful. It can patch a boot. It can plug a leak."
He looked the Archivist in the lenses.
"We don't carry hope, Archivist. We carry tools. And we don't look for a future. We look for tomorrow. Just tomorrow. That's not heavy. That's just one day."
The Archivist stared at him. The lenses clicked rapidly, zooming in and out, trying to find the flaw in the logic.
"One day," the Archivist repeated. "A small unit of measurement. Insignificant."
"manageable," Kaelen corrected.
He turned to Korgath. "Helm on, big guy. Don't breathe the smoke. It's drugged with despair."
Korgath blinked, shaking his head as if waking from a trance. He looked at the Archivist, then at his helmet. He grabbed the helm and jammed it back onto his head, sealing the gorget with a sharp clack. The rhythmic hiss-click of his ventilator returned, drowning out the crackle of the fire.
"Your fire is warm," Korgath growled, his voice amplified and metallic. "But your words are cold."
Vanya stood up, her hand glowing with a faint, grey light. She wasn't casting a spell, just asserting her presence.
"We are leaving," Vanya said. "We will find the Engine ourselves."
The Archivist did not rise. He simply lowered his hand. He picked up the heavy tome and closed it with a thud that echoed like a coffin lid slamming shut.
"Go, then," the creature said. "Walk toward the center. But know this, Ranger."
The Archivist leaned back into his throne of scrap.
"The Engine is not just a machine. It is a lock. And the key was lost when the Paladins died."
"We have a lockpick," Kaelen lied, glancing at Elara.
The Archivist's lenses focused on the girl. For a moment, the firelight reflected in the glass eyes made them look almost human. Almost sad.
"She is not a lockpick," the Archivist whispered. "She is the thing the lock was made to keep out."
Elara froze. "What does that mean?"
"It means," the Archivist said, turning his attention back to the fire, "that you should enjoy the warmth while you have it. The center of the island is very cold."
He reached for another book from a pile beside his throne. He opened it, ripped out a page—a drawing of a child playing with a dog—and dropped it into the flames.
"The toll is paid," the Archivist dismissed them. "You provided me with an anomaly. A man who counts days in a timeless void. That is... interesting data. Begone."
Kaelen didn't wait. He grabbed the bridle of the lead beast.
"Move out," he ordered.
The wagon lurched into motion. They walked away from the orange glow, back into the suffocating darkness of the industrial ruins.
No one spoke for a long time. The encounter had left a residue on them, stickier than the Mnestic oil. It was the feeling of being observed, cataloged, and dismissed as a statistical error.
"Kaelen," Elara whispered, walking close to him.
"Yeah, kid?"
"Why did you keep the paper? The map?"
Kaelen didn't look at her. He kept his eyes on the shadows ahead, scanning for movement.
"Because he was wrong," Kaelen said.
"Wrong about what?"
"He thinks we burn things to stay warm," Kaelen said, tapping his chest where the crumbled paper lay against his heart. "But sometimes, you have to carry the cold. If you burn everything that hurts, you end up with nothing left but ash."
He checked his audit.
Sanity: Stabilized. Objective: The Tectonic Engine. Distance: 12 miles.
"We keep moving," Kaelen said. "One day at a time."
Behind them, the orange light of the Archivist's fire faded into a pinprick, a lonely star dying in a galaxy of rust. The silence rushed back in, reclaiming the space, but the grinding of the wagon wheels pushed it back.
Shhh-clack. Shhh-clack.
It wasn't a hymn. It wasn't a war cry. It was just a sound. But for now, it was enough.