CHAPTER 7

*Chapter 7: "Ash Under the Crescent Moon"*

*Year: 4245 BC*

*Location: Arabian Peninsula – Rub' al Khali (The Empty Quarter)*

The desert did not welcome men. It erased them.

What once walked here with names became bones without stories, buried beneath waves of golden silence. Cities fell, swallowed by sand. Tribes vanished. Even the sun, high and brutal, seemed to forget those who wandered too long.

But Pluto was not a man.

And the desert knew it.

He walked alone, barefoot, robed in black, skin unburned, lips uncracked. The sand shifted around him like water, and even the wind kept quiet.

He did not seek shelter. He sought *a pulse*—a deviant energy buried deep, nearly still, as if asleep. It had not moved in centuries. That was unnatural.

The system confirmed his suspicion.

*[REACTIVATED SIGNATURE DETECTED]*

*Designation: Dhazur, Class 5 – Dormant Entity*

*Type: Bio-Psionic Desert Leviathan*

*Burial Age Estimate: 1,800 years*

*Status: Awakening – Energy Surge Detected*

It had slept since before Uruk. Before Egypt. Before memory.

And now, it stirred.

***

Three days passed before he found the ruins — half-buried bones of a city once called *Namash*.

No one remembered it. Not even the wind. But the architecture told stories: stone melted by heat beyond fire, carvings of a spiral sun devouring lesser stars, and a temple with a sigil no human had ever carved.

It was Deviant.

At the center, a pit opened. Beneath it, silence — and then breathing.

Pluto dropped into darkness.

***

The air was thick with psionic energy. His thoughts echoed before he thought them. Voices whispered to him in dead dialects, promising glory, fear, surrender.

At the bottom of the pit lay a colossal body — a serpent of stone, eyes dim, coils petrified.

Dhazur.

Its voice was not spoken. It simply *was*.

*"Another comes to kneel."*

"No," Pluto answered. "I've come to bury you again."

The beast laughed inside his head.

*"You are new. But your blood is old."*

It surged forward.

Faster than expected for something ancient.

Pluto adapted instantly — his bones hollowing to absorb shock, reflexes tuned to the shifting sands. The fight was not fast — it was *endless*. Dhazur existed across space; it struck from different angles, rewriting its shape as it moved.

Pluto endured.

And more—*evolved*.

He learned its pulse. Its rhythm. He began to tear its coils apart with bare hands, his system drawing in fragments of the creature's biological psionics.

Each wound made Dhazur faster.

Each strike made Pluto smarter.

Then, he stopped dodging.

Allowed himself to be struck — deliberately. Let his ribs shatter. Let his skin peel.

He *watched* how Dhazur did it.

And *rewrote himself*.

With one final motion, Pluto dove into the beast's maw, tearing it open from the inside — bones to nerves to the core.

Dhazur screamed.

And then was still.

***

He emerged from the pit, bloodless, dust-covered, glowing faintly. The desert fell silent again, and the air changed — lighter, thinner, grateful.

Somewhere beyond the dunes, a caravan saw the sky flicker red for a moment. They spoke of it for years after — "The Night the Moon Watched."

But no one ever found Namash again.

Pluto continued walking, not looking back.

The desert would remember what men forgot.

---

A/N: I have been forgetting to talk about my power stone please don't forget it please😭