The summoning did not feel like movement. It felt like punishment. One moment Keynaan was lying on the thin mattress in the small room he had shared with fear, hunger, and responsibility for most of his life, and the next his body was seized by something so absolute that it made pain feel almost thoughtful in comparison. Every part of him was pulled in different directions at once, as if flesh, bone, blood, and thought had all been given separate destinations.
He could not tell whether he was falling, rising, or being torn apart. His lungs convulsed without air, his jaw locked so tightly that pain burst through the roots of his teeth, and a scream formed somewhere inside him without ever fully escaping. There was no light in the passage that took him, only pressure and rupture, only the sickening sensation that he had become something soft being dragged through the teeth of an unseen machine. By the time darkness finally claimed him, it did not feel like unconsciousness. It felt like mercy.
When he woke, heat was the first thing he understood. It sat on his skin like a living hand, pressing into him from every direction, creeping down his throat with every breath and drying his tongue until it felt heavy and rough inside his mouth. Sand clung to the side of his face and neck, hot enough to sting, while the air above him shimmered with pale distortion. For a few moments he could not remember where he was. Then memory crashed back into him in full, and he pushed himself upright too quickly, swallowing a groan as his head spun.
All around him stretched a barren expanse of gold and white, broken only by a rocky incline a short distance away and an endless sky so bright it seemed intent on stripping the world bare. There was no city. No village. No summoning ground crowded with frightened children and desperate prayers. From the little he had learned in the district library, those chosen were normally brought to a central point in the outer regions of the Trails, where instruction, selection, or immediate catastrophe awaited them in equal measure. This was none of that. This was emptiness.
He stood slowly, wiping grit from his lips, and turned in a full circle. The desert looked dead at first glance, but death had never truly meant stillness. Years of watching sickness work through his mother's body had taught him that danger often moved quietly, with patience. It was that same instinct that made him narrow his eyes when he saw the disturbance in the sand.
Far ahead of him, something moved beneath the surface in a low, deliberate line, cutting through the dune with a smoothness that made his stomach tighten. At first he squinted only out of caution, wanting a better look. Then something colder than fear touched the base of his spine. Whatever was coming was not drifting. It was approaching him.
He ran before thought could slow him. The heat hit harder in motion, the sand collapsing under each footfall so that his legs had to fight for every inch. It felt as though the desert itself resented speed, swallowing his steps, dragging him deeper with each desperate push forward. The rocky rise ahead of him was not far, yet distance changed shape under panic, stretching and taunting as the hidden thing beneath the sand gathered speed.
The dry air burned his chest almost immediately, and the taste of iron flooded his mouth as he forced himself onward. The rocky ground was close enough now for him to see shadow pooled in its cracks, close enough that hope, cruel and sudden, flashed through him. The attack came one stride too early.
Something burst upward behind him with a violent spray of sand, and a jagged pain tore through his thigh with such force that his vision blanched white. He stumbled, half-fell, then hurled himself forward with the last of his momentum, crashing onto the hard surface of the rocks. His shoulder struck first, then his ribs, and the impact drove the air from him in a harsh, animal sound.
Behind him the desert shifted violently for a moment, then stilled. Whatever had struck him had already retreated beneath the sand before he could force himself to turn and see it. All he had was the wound hot, wet, and immediately terrifying.
When he pressed his hand against his thigh, blood came through his fingers at once, slick and dark against the dust covering his skin. Something hard was still lodged there, jutting out from the torn flesh at an angle. The sight turned his stomach, but panic had no practical value. He gritted his teeth, caught hold of the object, and ripped it free in one brutal motion that made his whole body convulse. The pain was immediate and blinding, so sharp it was almost sound, and for a few seconds he could do nothing but gasp through it while the blood ran faster. The thing in his hand looked like a long tooth or claw, slightly curved, yellow-white and ridged near the base.
He threw it aside only long enough to tear a sleeve from his shirt with shaking hands. The fabric resisted at first, then gave way with a rasping sound. He bound the cloth tight around the wound, pulled it harder when he saw the blood soaking through, then scooped up a handful of burning sand and pressed it into the torn flesh beneath the wrapping. The heat was obscene, but it slowed the bleeding, and practicality had always mattered more than comfort in his life.
He sat back on the rock, breathing hard, every pulse in his leg sending fresh agony through him. Sweat ran down his temples and into his eyes, stinging with salt. He slapped himself across the face once, hard enough to wake the edges of his mind, and tried to steady his breathing. Then, remembering what little he had learned, he whispered the frame-words used by survivors to call forth their status, their trial designation, the first signs of what path had accepted them. Nothing happened. He tried again, changing the phrasing. Still nothing. No voice answered him.
No mark revealed itself. No system, no guidance, no formal acknowledgment of what had claimed him. Confusion pressed against the fear already building in him. Had he failed to trigger it, or had something gone wrong in the summoning itself? The memory of that second voice from the day before returned to him then, heavy and unwelcome. Child of sorrow… I await you at the end of darkness. He did not know what that meant, but he knew enough to understand that whatever had happened to him was not ordinary.
The sun remained pitiless overhead, and the rocks beneath him offered only momentary relief. He needed shade, height, and time to think. When he looked upward, he saw the mouth of a cave higher along the rocky incline, a dark hollow cut into the stone. Reaching it took far more out of him than it should have. His body, already weakened by years of poor food and thin living, betrayed him at every stage. His arms shook when he pulled himself over ledges that a stronger person might have climbed in minutes, and his injured leg trembled violently whenever he placed weight on it.
The stone scraped his palms raw, hot grit found its way into every crease of skin, and his breath grew so ragged he could hear its dryness with every pull of air. By the time he finally dragged himself into the cave, the heat outside had begun to feel like another creature entirely, something patient and murderous waiting just beyond the threshold.
Inside, the air was blessedly cooler. It smelled of stone, old dust, and something faintly animal, a musk that had long since settled into the cave walls. He stood still for a while, allowing his eyes to adjust while he listened. He made noise deliberately, scraping a loose rock along the wall and stamping where he could, then paused for any reply from deeper within. Nothing came. The silence was natural, not the tense silence of a predator holding itself back. He moved farther in.
The nest surprised him. It occupied a shallow recess in the cave, built from dried reeds, strips of hide, and fibrous material he could not identify, all woven into a structure large enough to cradle something far bigger than any bird he had seen. Four eggs sat there, though three were already broken open, their shells split and empty. The fourth remained intact. It was large, pale, and lightly speckled, almost the size of his torso.
He searched the cave again with more urgency now, checking every corner for movement, every shadow for the shape of whatever had laid them, but found nothing. Either the creature had gone or he had entered the remnants of something abandoned.
He retrieved the tooth-like object he had pulled from his thigh and used it carefully against the shell. There was no movement inside. No tapping, no twitch, no sign of life. He widened the opening slowly, then stopped when he saw the truth of it. The egg had never developed. Relief mixed with hunger so suddenly that it almost embarrassed him. He carried it toward the mouth of the cave, dragging rather than lifting, and positioned it where the desert heat could strike it directly. When he returned to the nest, he found more than straw.
There were pieces of clothing there light, sand-coloured wrappings, fitted boots of soft but durable material, and a pair of gauntlets built for travel rather than battle. They were not human-made in any design he recognised, but they fit him with alarming ease. He put them on anyway. Bare need had long ago taught him not to reject usefulness simply because it arrived strangely.
When the egg had warmed enough to change under the heat, he used a long, smooth stick from the nest to stir its contents through the opening. The smell that rose from it was rich and strange, halfway between meat and something cleaner, and his stomach clenched so hard it hurt. He ate quickly at first, then slower once the first violence of hunger eased. The taste was heavy, slightly sweet, with an earthy depth he had never known from the poor food back home. Warmth spread through him almost immediately, not comfort exactly, but fuel. It did not heal his leg or strengthen his body in some miraculous way, yet it reminded him of what nourishment actually felt like.
He did not linger. Whatever had made that nest might return, and this world had given him no reason to believe in second chances. Using a broad section of shell as a shield against the sun, he descended carefully from the cave and paused on the lower rocks to survey the desert again. That was when he saw the tower. It stood far in the distance, thin and improbably straight against the wavering horizon, dark enough to stand apart from the gold of the sand. It might have been a ruin, a signal, a trap, or salvation. At this point, it did not matter. It was a destination, and that alone gave it value.
He began to move toward it, keeping to the remaining stretches of hard ground wherever possible. The heat warped the air so severely that he began to see impossible things at the edges of his sight, green gardens trembling above the dunes, silver sheets of water that vanished when he blinked, cool shade beneath trees that were never truly there. His lips split from dryness. Sweat dried almost as soon as it formed. The sun did not seem to shift at all, hanging over the world with an unnerving fixity that made time feel trapped.