Dusk leapt.
Bone to bone. Rib to spine. Spine to shattered shoulder blade.
Every landing was measured, corrected a fraction too late for instinct and a fraction too early for thought. Telekinesis threaded through his movements like a second nervous system, compensating where flesh failed, redistributing weight where balance no longer came naturally. The absence on his left side forced subtle adjustments. A tilt of the torso. A tighter pull at the hip. Pressure shifted where a hand should have countered momentum.
The body learned fast.
It always did.
He did not walk. Walking implied trust. He moved only where death had already passed and left its remains behind. Carcasses formed a jagged path through the sand, a broken spine road across a land that listened too closely. Beneath the surface, things moved. Slow. Heavy. Attentive.
He avoided them without looking.
Sound mattered more than sight. Pressure more than motion. Every leap was placed where vibration would die in bone instead of bleeding into the ground. When he paused, it was on carcasses only, boots planted on old ribs polished smooth by time and rot. He did not linger. Stillness invited attention.
The skull at his side remained silent.
That, more than anything, told him how deep his thoughts had gone.
He landed on a broad ribcage and stayed there longer than necessary. Not because he was tired. Not because the pain had worsened. The pain was constant now, distant and managed, a low static beneath everything else.
Something else had surfaced.
He tried to remember.
Not with urgency. Not with desperation. The attempt came quietly, like reaching for an object out of habit only to find the shelf empty.
Faces rose first.
Or the idea of them.
Contours without features. Expressions stripped of context. He felt the presence of someone close, once. Someone whose nearness had mattered in a way that bypassed logic. The shape lingered just long enough to be noticed, then dissolved as if his mind refused to render details it no longer possessed.
Voices followed.
Muted. Overlapping. None distinct enough to separate into words. He caught fragments of tone. Concern. Frustration. Warmth edged with something sharper. A sound like laughter, maybe. Or scolding.
It slipped away.
He reached again.
Nothing answered.
No memories surfaced. No anchors held. The past did not resist being recalled. It simply wasn't there.
Dusk exhaled slowly.
So that's gone.
The thought arrived without grief.
He considered it the way one might note an injury after the bleeding had already stopped. Information. Not tragedy.
If memory was identity, then identity was brittle.
A structure built on retention instead of function.
He had no patience for that.
He existed. He reacted. He adapted. Whatever name he had once carried, whatever history had shaped him, none of it altered the fact that he was here now, leaping across carcasses in a land that tried to erase him one piece at a time.
If memory defined the self, then losing it should have broken him.
It hadn't.
Which meant memory had never been essential. Just convenient.
A narrative humans clung to so continuity felt meaningful.
He dismissed it.
The question of who he had been was irrelevant. Whoever that person was had already failed to survive this place. The version of him that remained was the only one that mattered.
And it was still moving.
He pushed off the ribcage and leapt again.
Ahead, the terrain shifted.
The carcass field thinned, bones giving way to stone that jutted upward at unnatural angles. The ruin emerged gradually, not as a single structure but as a collapsed accumulation of wrongness. Walls of stone,charred and yet pale with ash, bleached until it barely held color at all. Staircases ended abruptly, steps vanishing into nothing. Support pillars had snapped, their broken segments hovering inches apart, held in place by forces that had no business being gentle.
The place wasn't ancient.
It was interrupted.
Like something had tried to finish destroying it and lost interest halfway through.
Dusk
landed on the last carcass before the stone boundary and paused.
Of course this was here.
Everything in this land felt cursed in the same lazy, indifferent way. Not hostile enough to warn you. Just wrong enough to punish you for noticing.
He adjusted his stance, compensating again for his missing hand, and leapt onto a slanted slab of stone. The impact rang hollow, vibration dying quickly. The sand beneath did not react.
Good.
He moved through the ruin without slowing, leaping across collapsed sections, avoiding surfaces that hummed faintly under his sense. The skull remained silent. No commentary. No warnings.
Its quiet pressed in on him.
He didn't like that.
The ruin opened inward.
Stone gave way to a wide depression, the ground sloping down into something smoother, darker. He landed at the edge and froze.
The surface below was still.
Too still. At first glance, it looked like water. Perfectly flat. Reflective. The dark sky mirrored so clearly it was hard to tell where land ended and reflection began. Then he saw the blood. Thickened, congealed, dulled to a muted rust—old, but not gone. It pooled in the basin like the ground had decided to keep its casualties. Fragments of bone floated and sank unevenly, half-submerged and slick. Ribs. Vertebrae. Splinters of skull, polished smooth in parts, jagged in others.
The scent hit him then—iron sweetened by age, a faint tang of rot long stripped to its essence, leaving only the memory of decay. The surface itself seemed to resist contact, viscous in a way that made each glance feel like pressure against his skin, a subtle, insidious insistence that he notice.
Dusk felt something twist in his chest.
Not fear.
Revulsion.
The wrongness radiated outward, immediate and undeniable. This place wasn't dangerous in the way the sand was dangerous. It wasn't predatory.
It was offensive.
His gaze locked onto the center of the basin.
A skull rested there.
Enormous. Inhuman. Its lower half had already sunk into the blood-slick surface, disappearing slowly, as if the basin were claiming it inch by inch.
And driven through it—
A sabre.
Black. Matte. Utterly without ornament.
The blade was embedded at an angle, forced down with enough violence to pin the skull in place. Not displayed. Not revered. Just used. The kind of weapon that existed for one purpose and had fulfilled it without ceremony.
Dusk's stomach turned.
The feeling was immediate, visceral. His body recoiled before his mind caught up. Telekinesis tightened reflexively, as if trying to pull him backward without moving his feet.
The sabre felt wrong.
Not powerful.
Wrong in a way that implied design, intent.
Like it didn't belong in this world, or any world that still pretended to follow rules. It wasn't radiating energy. It wasn't calling to him. It simply existed in a way that made his skin crawl, like a truth his body rejected even as his mind struggled to articulate why.
Every instinct screamed distance.
Not danger.
Distance.
He realized he'd stopped breathing.
Slowly, carefully, he inhaled.
The skull at his side stirred.
"…That blade," it muttered, its voice stripped of its usual detachment, "should not be here."
=================
Hey, it's your author—back again.
Yes, this chapter popped up out of nowhere and off schedule, but don't worry—it's just until I survive exams.
I'm taking your silence as affirmation for my novel, so naturally, I'm getting a little arrogant. But seriously, if you have feedback, drop a comment—it won't hurt. And if you're enjoying it… why stay silent? Share some of that glittery energy (powerstones), send it out there, let more people experience it.
Don't worry, our MC won't be one-handed forever. Pain and adaptation are temporary… but tension isn't.
Also, I'm already working on the next chapter, so stay sharp.