A Name That Doesn’t Exist

The silence was heavier now. Suffocating.

Xyro stood frozen in place, his breath unsteady as the last remnants of the child dissolved into the air. Gone. As if it had never been there in the first place.

He stared at the spot where the child had been, where its small, eerie footprints had pressed into the golden sand. But as he watched, even those began to disappear.

One by one, the prints sank into the shifting dunes, erasing every trace of its existence. The only thing that remained was the symbol the child had drawn.

Xyro crouched down, his fingers hovering just above the spiraling mark in the sand. It looked like a circle, but not a perfect one—its edges curled inward like a snake devouring its own tail. It felt important.

But he had no idea why.

His pulse drummed in his ears as he reached out, tracing a finger along the symbol's outline. The moment he made contact, a strange, icy sensation shot through his arm.

The world shifted.

For the briefest second—a blink, a heartbeat, a fraction of time that shouldn't have existed—Xyro wasn't standing in the desert anymore.

The air changed. Colder. Denser. He smelled something metallic, something ancient. The sky above him was no longer red, but black—a vast, endless abyss, filled with spirals of light twisting in unnatural patterns.

And beneath him—

Stone. Not sand. A floor made of smooth, polished obsidian, stretching out into the dark.

Xyro's heart stopped.

This place.

This wasn't the desert.

This was—

The world snapped back.

The desert sky burned red again, and Xyro found himself back where he had been, kneeling in the sand, his fingertips still pressed against the symbol.

His breath was ragged. His chest rose and fell in uneven gasps. His mind reeled, struggling to understand what had just happened.

That wasn't a hallucination. That wasn't some trick of exhaustion.

For a moment, he had been somewhere else.

His fingers curled into a fist, closing over the symbol, erasing it.

No.

He couldn't afford to lose himself now. He needed to focus. He needed to survive.

But the child's voice still echoed in his head.

"You're already too late."

Too late for what?

He forced himself to his feet, pushing away the lingering unease clawing at his spine. The wind had grown stronger, kicking up waves of golden dust, whispering through the dunes like distant voices.

The desert was changing.

Xyro's gaze swept across the endless horizon, searching for anything, any sign of structure, shelter, civilization—

Nothing.

The landscape was shifting, rearranging itself in slow, deliberate movements. He could see it now—dunes rising and falling like waves, reshaping the world around him.

This place… it wasn't just vast.

It was alive.

His jaw tightened. He couldn't stay here.

The longer he remained in one place, the more he felt like the desert was trying to consume him. Like it was waiting for him to make a mistake.

A sound cut through the wind.

Distant. Faint.

Footsteps.

Xyro's body tensed. His muscles coiled with instinct as he turned sharply, scanning the dunes.

Nothing.

But the sound came again. Closer this time.

Not footsteps.

Dragging.

Like something being pulled across the sand.

Xyro's pulse thundered in his ears as he reached for the dagger strapped at his waist. He didn't remember when he had gotten it, didn't know where it had come from, but his hand closed around the worn leather grip as if it had always been his.

His breath slowed. His stance shifted. Ready.

The sound came again. A slow, deliberate pull of something heavy against the ground.

Then, from over the crest of a nearby dune—

A shadow.

A figure, half-shrouded by the swirling dust, emerged from the haze.

Tall. Unnaturally still. The shape of a person, but something about the way it moved—or didn't move—was wrong.

Xyro gritted his teeth, gripping his dagger tighter. He took a slow step forward, his body low, controlled, ready for whatever this was.

Then the wind shifted.

And he saw it.

A man.

Or at least, what had once been a man.

Xyro's stomach twisted.

The figure's face was obscured by the shifting dust, but its body—its body was broken.

Its arms hung at unnatural angles. Its spine twisted in on itself, bent forward as if it had been crushed and then forced to stand again.

But the worst part—the part that made Xyro's blood run cold—

It was still alive.

The thing took another step forward, the weight of its own broken limbs dragging across the sand, a slow, agonizing movement.

Xyro's grip on his dagger tightened.

The thing stopped.

And then, in a voice that was barely more than a whisper—a voice that shouldn't have been able to speak through shattered lungsit rasped:

"Run."

The wind screamed.

The sand beneath Xyro's feet collapsed.

And the desert swallowed him whole.