Kaelen had been on this road for three days.
The desert plain stretched before him like a wound that would not heal. It was not sand,not the soft, golden dunes of childhood stories,but something harder, older, a cracked and broken expanse of earth that had been baked by a sun that never seemed to move. The ground was a mosaic of fissures and ridges, each crack a dark vein running through the parched land, each ridge a spine of stone that had been pushed up by some ancient violence and left to wither.
The sky was white.
Not blue. Not gray. White. A vast, blinding white that pressed down on the world like a lid on a pot. The sun was there, somewhere, but it had no shape, no edge, no mercy. It was simply ...heat..., a weight that settled on Kaelen's shoulders and crawled beneath his skin and made every breath feel like swallowing fire.
The air shimmered.
