The desert wanted Slade dead.
The sun hung overhead; malicious and merciless, a white-hot brand pressed against his retinas. Heat rose in waves thick enough to choke on, warping the horizon into a smeared watercolour of ochre and pale blue. Every breath scorched Slade's lungs, dry air rasping against the back of his throat like sandpaper.
The sand scorched through his boots. Each individual grain seared like embers against leather, tiny points of fire that climbed up through the soles and settled into the bones of his feet.
The dunes stretched endlessly in every direction, and sweat plastered Slade's shirt to his spine. It soaked through the fabric in dark patches, salt crystallising at the edges where the moisture evaporated faster than his body could produce it.
His tongue felt swollen, stuck to the roof of his mouth. And the canteen at his hip was nearly empty — he could tell by the hollow slosh when he moved, more air than water. He'd learned not to think about it. Thinking about water only made the thirst worse.
The wind picked up, and with it came the sand. Not the gentle drift of beach grains, but instead something vicious and stinging. It peppered his exposed skin, collecting in the creases of his neck, working its way into his collar, his cuffs, the corners of his eyes. He squinted against it, raising one arm to shield his face, but the sand found him anyway. Grit crunched between his teeth when he clenched his jaw, mineral and ancient, like chewing on the bones of the earth itself.
Somewhere ahead, movement. But he was prepared. In his right was a razor of industrial grey, shrieking against the dry air, and clung to his left was the bitter scent of sulphur. Fingers curled around the leather grip. The pommel was hot enough to brand, but he held on anyway.
Through the shimmering heat haze, figures emerged — at first it looked like a blur, then it evolved into dark silhouettes that solidified into shapes, then men.
Enemies.
Eight of them.
He could tell by the colours they wore, faded blues and greys that marked them as belonging to the kingdom across the border, the kingdom that wanted this strip of worthless sand badly enough to die for it. They moved in a loose formation, spread out but within shouting distance of each other.
His pulse was a frantic percussion against his ribs, the rhythmic panic of a bird trapped in a cage of bone, the electric hum of a body preparing to break. And on top of that, there was nothing but wind, sand and silence — where his buddies shouts should've been. The ones who'd promised to fight to the death with him.
"Perhaps they were busy with their own battles"
"Perhaps they had escaped"
"Perhaps they were… already dead"
The thoughts clawed at each other, each one fighting for dominance while the wind kept howling, and the enemy kept coming… closer and closer.
But Slade had no choice.
He couldn't run.
He couldn't hide.
He had to fight this on his own. A solitary ghost in a land of the dying.
His fingers tightened around the knife's grip. This was survival. This was the only math that counted anymore: them or him.
The sand shifted beneath his boots, unstable footing that threatened to pitch him forward with every step.
The soldiers hadn't seen him yet, or if they had, they were playing it careful, waiting to see what he'd do.
The distance collapsed between them.
Fifty yards.
No. Forty.
Close enough now to see faces, sun-scorched and wind-burned, lips cracked and bleeding, eyes hollowed out by the same exhaustion that lived in Slade's bones.
Close enough to see that they were just as scared.
The first soldier broke formation, charging with a wordless cry that got lost in the wind.
Slade's knife came up.
Time didn't slow — that was a lie people told, a romanticism slapped onto something fundamentally ugly.
Every detail crystallised: the way the soldier's boots kicked up plumes of sand with each stride, the glint of sunlight off a raised blade, the wild animal panic in eyes that had already accepted death.
Steel met steel with a shriek that set Slade's teeth on edge.
The impact jolted up his arm, vibrations rattling through bone and sinew all the way to his shoulder.
His boots skidded backward in the sand.
The soldier pressed forward, swinging again. Slade sidestepped — barely, sand nearly betraying him — and brought his blade around in a tight arc.
Slash
The sensation was nothing like the stories. There was resistance, yes — the brief catch of fabric and flesh and something harder beneath — but mostly there was give.
The knife slid through the soldier's side like a knife through overripe fruit, and then Slade was yanking it back out, blood following in a dark spray that looked almost black against the white sand.
The soldier staggered, a collapsing piece of engineering. His mouth opened in a silent scream, producing only a sound like a fish drowning in air. He dropped to his knees, futilely gripping the wound. Crimson leaked between his fingers, a flow of high-salinity fluid. It pooled in the sand that didn't just drink it like a sponge; it consumed it with a thirsty, evaporative hiss. The sand was already incorporating the liquid into its own ancient composition, erasing the man's mortality in one efficient gesture.
But Slade couldn't watch him die. There were seven others.
His pistol cleared the holster. The first shot — through the ribs.
Dead.
Third. Fourth.
His trigger finger ached. Thankfully, it was close quarters now. No room for guns.
Slade's blade carved through the heat again and again, meeting the hollow resistance of ribs and the tearing of wet silk. Each impact was a discordant note in a symphony of failing anatomy. Blood misted the air. It painted his hands like ink on a chalkboard, his arms, soaked into his shirt until the fabric clung to him heavier than before.
The copper-salt smell of it mixed with sand and sweat, thick enough to choke on.
The blade grew slick.
Seven bodies now.
The clock in his head kept ticking, like a grim abacus sliding beads of life into the column of the dead.
They lay scattered across the dunes like broken chairs; they had stood for a while, but the clock inevitably marked their fall.
And that fall was now.
The sand had already begun its work, pressing against their backs, seething its way into their open mouths, and, in a few hours, their flesh would strip back under the sun's attention, unzipping just like a banana peel in the hands of a hungry child.
Soon, curves the colour of a ghastly army of tombstones by moonlight would emerge from the sand — arching like cathedral vaults, as well as a reliquary of salt and calcium with their empty gazes fixed on nothing, and a clutch of winter branches scattered like dice. In a week, the desert would have its architecture: pale frameworks bleached clean, half-buried monuments to men who'd thought they mattered.
Slade's lungs burned and his arms screamed. The knife felt like it weighed a thousand pounds.
He pulled his pistol, and shot each and every one of them. Death was receiving the ruins of men, and he was simply ensuring that the demolition was complete.
"But there were eight…" he remembered.
Suddenly, a movement… small… of what looked like a child who'd stepped into his crosshairs.
He looked twelve, maybe younger. His skin was still smooth and unmarked by the sun's cruelty, cheeks rounded with the last remnants of baby fat that hadn't yet sharpened into adolescence. His gaze was quiet, his eyes like deep pools of water in a well, so deep that there seemed to be no end, framed by lashes so long they cast shadows across those blemished cheeks. That kind of face belonged in a schoolyard, laughing over scraped knees, stolen sweets… not here.
The pistol in those tiny hands looked obscene — black metal biting into fingers like waxen tapers, fingers that should have been raised to ask questions or turning the crisp pages of a story, that should have been stained with nothing more than blue ink or the dust of a chalkboard.
But Slade's finger found the trigger before his brain caught up. Adrenaline. Or perhaps, with every strike, blood wasn't the only thing seeping into the sand beneath him.
"Sorry, kid," he muttered.
Click…
Click…
Click…
Thump.