Dusk moved across the forest of carcasses, stepping from rib to rib as if the ground itself were an ambush waiting to swallow him. The hollow bones jutted upward like the remains of a fallen kingdom, their shadows long and skeletal. The air didn't shift here. It pressed down, dense and expectant. Skulls littered the heaps of ancient remains, empty sockets tracking his movement as though waiting for him to stop breathing.
The one tied to his hip was the worst of them.
It rattled against his thigh with each careful step. Even that tiny clack felt too loud.
"Quiet," Dusk murmured, voice flat with calculation. "If anything hears you, this ends."
The skull didn't answer.
Good. Silence was currency out here, and he had none to spare.
He crouched beside a collapsed ribcage big enough to walk through standing. Sand pooled between the bones in dull ripples. It looked harmless. Fine. Soft. Deceptive in a way only something deeply hostile could be. The carcasses were the only safe ground; everything else was bait.
Dusk lowered his weight into his legs, the movement too precise for someone running on exhaustion and blood loss. Almost pre-measured. Almost pre-corrected. A quiet shadow of his trait working beneath his awareness, nudging, adjusting, aligning.
He exhaled once through his teeth.
Then he leapt.
His foot touched the spine of the next carcass so lightly the bone barely creaked. His landing wasn't graceful; he'd never been graceful. It was just right in a way most people's instincts couldn't replicate. The faintest tug in his muscles, the faintest tilt of balance — like something inside him corrected the trajectory mid-fall.
He moved again.
Forward.
Forward.
Forward.
The silence around him was fragile, held together only by his control over every breath, every step, every fiber of muscle that dared to flex.
But control had limits.
His heel grazed the slope of a shattered rib.
The bone rolled.
He slipped.
He didn't think. Didn't breathe. Didn't make a sound. His hands shot forward, fingers digging into a jut of vertebrae. His body swung downward, ribcage scraping under his boots as the sand below shifted in a soft, sinister exhale.
His grip held.
Barely.
Not touching the sand mattered.
But not making a sound mattered more.
His lungs stayed locked. His ribs stayed frozen. The smallest grunt would have been a death sentence.
Another second. Two.
Then a voice, bored and bone-dry, drifted out of the skull tied to his hip:
"…may I speak now?"
The timing was obscene.
Dusk's heartbeat spiked hard enough to make his vision stutter.
He didn't answer.
He didn't need to.
The sand did.
It inhaled.
Then erupted.
A column of armored mass tore out of the ground, the sand worm's jaws snapping open with a sound like stone being chewed in half. Plates scraped. Sand blasted into the air. The shockwave rattled skeletons across the field.
And Dusk jumped.
Not far.
Not fast.
Just right.
The worm's mouth slammed shut on the space where his torso had been a blink before. The impact rattled bone, shredding decayed flesh from the ancient carcass beneath him. He landed on the spine of another beast, his ankle twisting sharply. Pain lanced up his leg.
He kept moving anyway.
The worm tunneled down, sand spiraling like water draining through a ruptured sinkhole. The ground pulsed once. Twice.
Then it homed in on him again.
Dusk leapt to the next carcass, his knees almost buckling. His foot skidded across a slick skull, sending loose bone fragments clattering. His trait jerked at his instincts, pulling his center of gravity into alignment just enough for him to catch himself.
But the sound was already out.
Tiny.
Sharp.
Fatal.
The sand behind him churned.
He spun, leaping to the nearest ribcage — too slow.
The worm launched upward, jaws gaping wide. One of its inner plates caught him across the ribs, flinging him sideways. He hit the next skeleton with enough force to crack bone.
Blood filled his mouth.
He pushed himself to his feet. His hand trembled. His breath shook.
He moved anyway.
The worm surged again.
And again.
Dusk dodged.
Not with grace.
He wove from carcass to carcass, threading his path through ribcages and broken spines with movements that didn't belong to panic or instinct. Each shift, each tilt of his body was a quiet correction, a subtle adjustment nudging him along the only surviving line between death and falling apart.
But even correction had limits.
He stepped onto a rib polished by time and rot.
It snapped under his heel.
Loud.
Final.
The sand reacted instantly.
The worm tore upward beneath him, jaws snapping so close the force rattled his teeth. Dusk jumped, but the angle was wrong. His right shoulder slammed into a jut of bone, spinning him mid-air. He landed with his left arm dangling over open sand.
The worm surged again, jaws clamping down.
On his hand.
A violent pressure swallowed his wrist. There was no pain yet. Just the wrongness of something vital being trapped inside something hungry.
He slid toward the sand, his shoulder nearly dislocating as the worm dragged.
He grabbed a massive rib with his free hand and locked his elbow, muscles screaming.
The worm twisted downward, trying to tear him into the pit.
His grip slipped.
His body tilted dangerously toward the sand.
He had seconds.
Maybe less.
His hand would tear off either way.
But if the worm took him whole, that was it.
Dusk ripped the canine he'd taken earlier from his belt — the curved, serrated fang of some long-dead beast — and jammed it between the worm's jaws.
The worm thrashed.
He pulled the fang toward himself.
Hard.
The blade tore through flesh.
Through tendon.
Through the last meat holding his hand to his arm.
It severed.
He wrenched himself free and collapsed across bone. Blood poured from the ruined wrist. His vision thinned, edges dissolving into static. A tremor ran through him, small and involuntary, the closest thing to a scream he wouldn't let out.
The worm sank back beneath the sand, dragging his hand with it. The ground trembled as it circled, still hunting, confused.
Dusk stared at the empty space where his hand had been.
Not shock.
Not grief.
Something colder. Something like acceptance cracking down the middle.
The stump pulsed with heat, strength leaking out in slow beats. His breath hitched once, thin and sharp.
"…should have eaten it myself."
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Yo y'all,
This your author. We got the chance for a Webnovel contract. Couldn't have done it without you just reading and being there. You didn't have to, but you did, and that made all the difference. Thanks—this step is as much yours as it is mine.