Night came quickly in the Salt Wastes.
Kael learned this when the horizon swallowed the sun like a closing mouth. Heat bled from the ground, replaced by a cold that crept up through his boots and into his bones. The wind howled low and constant, carrying the smell of rot from miles away.
He walked until his legs trembled, afraid to stop.
Every time he blinked, the world changed.
At first, he thought it was exhaustion. Fireflies of pale light drifted at the edges of his vision, winking in and out like dying stars. Then he realized they weren't floating freely they were anchored.
To corpses.
The first one lay half-buried in salt-crusted sand, ribs exposed like a broken cage. Kael slowed, heart pounding. Where there should have been emptiness, he saw it clearly now: a thin, trembling flame curled inside the chest cavity.
He swallowed.
When he focused, the world sharpened. The salt dunes faded slightly, as if dimmed by an unseen hand, while the flame burned brighter. Threads of light stretched from it into the dark, brushing against other unseen presences scattered across the wastes.
Souls.
The word came unbidden, heavy with certainty.
Kael staggered back. "This isn't real," he muttered. "I'm starving. I'm tired."
The flame pulsed in response.
Pain lanced through his skull. He clutched his head and dropped to one knee, teeth grinding. Images flooded him, faces without names, voices without words, a thousand endings stacked atop one another.
You see us now.
The thought was not sound. It was pressure, weight, insistence.
Kael screamed and the vision shattered.
When he opened his eyes again, the world was still wrong.
He could see the living too.
Far to the north, faint silhouettes moved survivors huddled around a fire. Their souls burned differently: warmer, fuller, tied tightly to flesh. Lines of emotion rippled through them like heat haze fear, hope, desperation.
Kael recoiled.
"I won't," he whispered, though no one had asked. "I won't take from the living."
The Sight did not answer.
He forced himself onward until he found the remains of a watch post three stone slabs arranged in a half-circle, long abandoned. Kael wedged himself between them, back against cold rock, spear across his knees.
Sleep came in fragments.
Each time he drifted off, the Sight dragged him back. He saw the world layered atop itself: flesh and soul, bone and memory. The dead whispered without sound, their longing brushing against him like grasping hands.
Hungry, they said.
He woke shaking, clutching his chest.
At some point before dawn, rain fell....not water, but fine ash drifting from the sky. It settled on Kael's skin without warmth, without weight.
As the eastern sky lightened, Kael realized something that made his blood run cold.
He could not turn the Sight off.
Closing his eyes did nothing. Looking away did nothing. The souls burned on, relentless, undeniable.
Kael stared at his hands.
They looked the same.
But when he flexed his fingers, faint lines of pale light traced beneath his skin, vanishing as quickly as they appeared.
He remembered the calm after feeding. The absence of fear.
The hunger stirred, slow and patient.
Somewhere in the wastes, a corpse collapsed fully into dust.
Kael felt it.
Not joy. Not sorrow.
Recognition.
The gods had abandoned the world.
Something else had chosen him instead.