(10)
Horrors of the Night
Ark trudged through the scorching sands, each step sinking into the shifting sand as the desert’s cruel heat seared his flesh. The relentless sun bore down like an unholy eye, its fiery gaze igniting to his very core, leaving his body and blood teetering on the precipice of boiling. His white, cloth-wrapped boots were as nothing to the endless day’s journey, offering little protection, and he’d lost feeling in his feet hours past.
Ark wrapped another swath of ragged white cloth around his head. It granted little respite. The red sands of the Ferl Sea Dunes clung to his sweat-stained tunic and pants, the fine grains embedding themselves in his skin like a thousand tiny needles. His sight wavered. Somewhere out there, Vreal’rune City awaited—or at least, it had better.
Water danced in Ark’s mind, taunting his heat-scorched, red-kissed skin—skin now flaking and bloody in patches. He had heard of the water fever from sailors back home by the docks, men driven mad for thirst. The dryness of his throat cried out for a cool liquid’s touch. He was hesitant to stop. Despite the brightness of the day, darkness would soon claim its due across the land. Ark had learned quickly the dangers of the night. His need to press forward overwhelmed caution and safety.
“Every step forward, one less to tread.”
The words had become his mantra, his savior. They rattled through his sun-soaked mind, drowning out all else, a rhythm that kept him moving when his body screamed for stillness. Fifteen days it had served him, whispered in the hollow spaces of his skull where reason once dwelled.
Fifteen days.
Fifteen days of heat and thirst, of bleeding skin and cracked lips, of dunes stretching into eternity.
The phrase was no longer just a thought—it was a compulsion. A force that dug into his marrow, that drove him onward when everything in him begged to collapse. He didn’t simply want to push on.
He needed to.
When they set out, Leed had estimated the caravan’s journey would take thirty days in all. Ark was twenty days in now, and already, that calculation had crumbled like brittle parchment.
Leed had not accounted for the attack.
Three days after they entered the crimson-cursed desert, the caravan was torn apart, its carefully laid plans reduced to blood and ruin beneath the night sky. Ark had been separated in the chaos, left to fend for himself in a land that did not suffer the lost to be found.
His breath hitched as the memories surged.
The screams.
The tearing of flesh.
The things in the dark—all teeth and claws and hunger.
He clenched his eyes shut, forcing the images away before they could take hold. But even in darkness, he could still hear the wet, gurgling cries of the dying.
“Every Step forward, one less to tread.”
Hours—or perhaps days—had passed. Ark no longer knew. Time had unraveled, stretched thin like old parchment under the weight of his exhaustion. His mantra had become a void, swallowing thought, swallowing pain. It had carried him forward, step after step, until awareness returned—slow and sluggish at first, a trickle through the cracks of his consciousness. Then it came rushing in, overwhelming, like floodwaters through a shattered dam.
He blinked, swaying on his feet.
Then he dropped to one knee, breath heavy, body trembling with the effort. His fingers fumbled for the travel pack at his side, jerking at the straps, shoving aside cloth and supplies until—
Ah, there.
Ark’s fingers curled around the rough leather of his water skin. He pulled off the cap and took three short sips of the warm, musty liquid within. He pulled it free, yanked off the cap, and drank—three short, measured sips of the warm, musty liquid within. It was not enough. Not even close. But for a fleeting moment, it was relief.
His parched throat eased, the taste—stale and bitter—still a gift against the rawness of his mouth.
And then, just as quickly, the moment was gone.
The skin was empty.
Ark stared at it, its hollowness echoing through him.
The sigh that left his lips was not relief but resignation.
He let the useless thing drop to the sands and forced himself to his feet. His clothing was heavy with dust, with sweat, but he brushed at it anyway—a meaningless gesture in a place where nothing was ever clean, ever whole.
A gust of wind rose, a dry, howling thing that raked at his skin, sent grains of red sand spiraling like embers in a wildfire. It growled in his face, and he growled back, low, wordless, defiant.
Then he set his shoulders, braced against the wind, and pressed onward.
“Every step forward, one less to tread.”
The wind had built over the last few hours into a true gale. It howled through the dunes, carving sharp ridges into the ever-shifting landscape, sending waves of red sand rolling across the horizon in crashing, chaotic swells. The desert writhed and reshaped itself before his eyes, never still, never settled.
Only now did he understand why they called this place the Ferl Sea.
Of all the deserts in the known lands, only this one bore the name of water. To step into its expanse was to sail the unknown, to be swallowed by the endless tides of sand. Those who braved it—whether out of duty, desperation, or madness—were called Sailors of the Sands and often likened the dunes to the waves of the great waters of the world.
Ark had never seen a desert before this journey. He had never imagined one could move like this—alive, restless, hungry. And yet, for a fleeting moment, something within the storm changed.
The wind curled around him, shifting, cool and salted. The scent of brine filled his nostrils, crisp and unmistakable. The blistering heat softened into something gentler, something familiar.
His vision blurred—not from exhaustion, not from the sand—but from something deeper, some trick of memory woven into the storm.
The dunes were gone.
The red sands had melted into water, shimmering green, rippling beneath a sky that stretched wide and endless.
The Emrise.
Ark’s legs dangled off the dock, bare feet grazing the waves, cool and welcoming. A spring breeze tousled his hair, carried the scent of driftwood and sun-warmed stone. The distant cries of gulls filled his ears.
Home.
For one perfect moment, he was home.
“Every step forward, one less to tread.”
Ark shouldered on.
An indeterminate span of time later—minutes, hours, days, he could no longer tell—the storm’s fury began to wane, though its dying breath was no gentle thing. The wind still howled, a frenzied wail, pulling Ark this way and that, a plaything in the storm’s fading grasp. He had survived by sheer instinct, hunkered beneath his pack, half-buried in the sands like a thing already claimed by the desert.
A trill of unease coiled in his gut as he glanced at the sky.
Damn it.
The storm’s suffocating gloom had hidden the passage of time, and now, as the last vestiges of dust spiraled into the fading light, he realized how close he had come to losing the day.
The creatures of the day were even then slithering back to their places of refuge for the night; it was time for other things to creep into the dying light. Malformed shapes of gargantuan size rose from the sands, lumbering off in the distance, while great winged forms leapt into the sky, casting their shadows over the land.
Ark swallowed. His pulse thundered in his ears. The sun was nearly gone. And night in the Ferl belonged to them.
Ark grimaced as a sharp, piercing sensation tore through him like needles scraping against bone. The night split with a shriek so sharp it rattled him to his very core. He was as a mouse hearing the shriek of the owl, frozen with terror of the night skies.
No time for thought.
Visions of claws and beating leather wings flooded his mind. His muscles coiled, and he sprang into action, hands flying to his pack.
No time. No time
Ark tore open his pack, sending its contents flies in mad pursuit of what he sought.
There!
Arks fingers closed around cold metal, and he wrenched it free.
A rod of bronze, small and unassuming. Plain, unadorned, forgettable, scrap that looked like it belonged among a blacksmith’s castaways, not clutched in the trembling hands of a desperate man.
Wingbeats drew near, Ark dared not turn to look else lose his nerve.
He closed his eyes, focusing inward. His body went numb as the icy bite of the grave seeped into his mortal form. The void came quicker than ever before—faster with each attempt now. That should have terrified him, but it didn’t—or at least, not as much as the now painfully audible clicking of teeth snapping with eager anticipation scant feet from his flesh.
“Treshendo!” Ark cried, his eyes snapping open as he thrust the bronze rod high above his head.
Color bled from the world, shifting to shades of grey. Blood thundered in Ark’s mind and his knees weak. He drifted deeper into the void, and not for the first time since entering the Ferl, a gnawing, ravenous, and rageful hunger pulsed beneath him, reverberating through the sands to taint the emptiness within.
Ark bit his lip, hard, the sharp sting flooding his mouth with the salty tang of iron. The sting snapped him back to himself and out of the inner world, the grey world. He opened his eyes as light burst forth from the scepter, its brilliance intensifying until Ark was blinded by its blazing golden radiance.
The world dissolved into the light, blinding, all-encompassing, and absolute.
Thick jagged runes, as if carved by an impossibly large blade, erupted across the rod’s surface with a brilliant flash. They split and multiplied, branching outward as Ark’s eyes strained to make sense of them. He tried, as he always did, to decipher their meaning, but it was no use. The runes grew in number, overlapping again and again until they covered the surface without a hint of the original metal visible, making any attempt at understanding impossible.
Suddenly, the light recoiled.
Like liquid drawn backward, it slithered into the etched runes, sinking deep until its brilliance dimmed to a flickering ember. What remained was a smaller sphere of radiance—ten feet across, a fragile cocoon of luminescence encasing Ark in a protective halo.
Beyond its trembling edge, the darkness raged.
Some slithered like sentient shadows, darting and weaving, testing, probing, their forms flickering between solidity and mist. Their movements were unnatural—jerking, unpredictable, as if they were half-formed, half-real.
But others…
Others were physical. Hulking horrors, their bloated bodies stitched together with rot and held upright by sheer, unholy will. Bones jutted at odd angles, piercing through blackened, decaying flesh that refused to succumb to time or the cruel desert winds.
Their empty sockets burned with something ancient, something hungry.
And they would not wait forever.
Ark ignored them.
He did not flinch at the writhing shadows, nor did he recoil from the grotesque hulks pressing at the edges of his sanctuary. Their snarls, their clicking teeth, their mindless, gnawing hunger—none of it mattered.
Not anymore.
This was not his first night weathering their malevolent visitations. Now, within the safety of the dome, he looked out at the roiling masses and smiled a hunter’s grin.
“Thar’oska,” he hissed, staring at the creatures with a bone-deep hatred. These creatures, these wrongs, they should not be. Ark knew not how he knew this, but deep in the depths of his being, he knew it to be true.
As words of casting thrummed through the air, resonating in the dry cold air of the desert night, something shifted.
Something old.
Something waiting.
The ancient presence within the sands turned its attention upon Ark. A force vast and unknowable pressed against his being, its awareness slithering through the dust, through the very fabric of the Ferl. It felt him. Knew him.
And despite the protective light encircling him, a thrill of fear coiled in Ark’s chest—deep, primal, as if his soul itself recognized what his mind could not.
The will of the Ferl touched him.
And then… recoiled.
Not in rage.
Not in rejection.
But in hesitation.
Something passed between them—a note of… something.
Recognition?
No. Impossible.
Why would it feel as though the desert itself knew him? Why did the brush of its presence stir something within him—some buried instinct, some faint, unspoken familiarity?
Ark clenched his jaw, shaking his head.
No.
This was madness—a trick of exhaustion, of thirst, of a mind battered by days beneath an unforgiving sun.
He could not afford these thoughts.
The air crackled as the edges of the circle of light hardened, bolstered by the word of activation, Thar’oska, Ark made a note to look up the language when he arrived in Vreal’rune. The Particles of radiance fused together, weaving into an opaque shell—a barrier of pure, condensed light, its surface etched with ancient runes, the same now missing upon the scepter, that pulsed with golden warm radiance.
Ark exhaled, watching as the last threads of power sealed the dome around him. The outside world fell away—the creatures, the wind, the ever-hungry night. He neither heard, felt, nor saw as his world became the inside of the dome.
For now, he was safe.
But one thought continued to nag at Ark.
The desert was watching.
Sleep took him.
The Emerald Sea gleamed beneath the noonday sun, its waters rolling in waves of liquid jade. The air smelled of salt and spice, of fresh fish and warm bread, carried on a sea breeze that danced through the streets.
The docks were full to bursting, alive with trade and laughter. Carts trundled over the worn wooden planks, wheels creaking under the weight of fine silks, fragrant spices, and crates of fresh-caught fish. Merchants bickered in good-natured tones, and sailors called to one another as they secured their vessels as gulls chattered lazily overhead.
Through the streets, the voices of neighbors twined together—a warm, familiar hum of greeting and gossip. Children darted past, bare feet slapping against sun-warmed wood, their laughter carrying on the wind.
Ark stood watching, motionless, his chest tight with something he couldn’t name. A weight pressed against his shoulder—a hand.
His father. Tall. Sandy-haired. A figure of quiet strength.
But his face… blank.
Ark frowned, realization striking like a cold knife to the gut. He could not remember his father’s face anymore. Nor his voice.
The figure’s lips moved, forming silent words, but no sound came. Nothing. Ark’s stomach twisted. He forced himself to look away.
And then he saw them.
Glenn and Saria.
Hand in hand, smiling, radiant, lost in each other. A perfect picture of love, a moment frozen in time. Ark’s throat tightened. He turned his gaze away, heart hammering.
Not yet. He loved them both. But he couldn’t—not yet.
The image flickered.
The warmth bled away. The sky, once radiant and blue, turned ashen and dull.
The docks were empty. No merchants, no sailors, no laughter. No life.
The once-thriving streets lay silent, hollow, the few figures that remained moving like specters, their voices hushed and worried.
The boardwalk groaned beneath him, the wood splintered and rotting, left to crumble under the weight of neglect. No hands had mended it, no feet had danced upon it in years.
And the smell.
Not the briny freshness of the open sea, but something foul, something rotting. The stench of decay— fish left to fester, sea scum thick and putrid, wafting in from waters that had lost their luster. The Emerald Sea was no longer emerald—only a sickly green stain, thick with death.
Ark’s stomach churned.
That’s right, Father is dead. Mother is dead. Ten years now.
No graves to mourn. No bodies to bury. Only the certainty that they were gone.
They had to be.
If they lived, they would have sent word.
Leed had made it through the pass. If there had been a message, it would have come. But there was nothing. Only silence.
The image flickered again—a cruel juxtaposition. The golden days of Ermise. The husk of what remained. Neither real. Both ephemeral.
Ark stood trapped between the two, lost in a city that no longer exists and the one waiting for him, counting on him to survive and carry on their message in a bottle.
He had survived the goblins of the wood, faced his fears, accepted his unrequited love, and wished his friend well. He had shouldered the hopes of his people upon the most unlikely of shoulders for such a task.
“Every step forward, one less to tread.”
The mantra echoed within, threading through the fabric of his dream.
For that’s what this was—a dream.
A lucid vision woven from his hopes and his fears, a place between memory and longing.
And he knew it.
He could feel it, in the way the air trembled, in the way the images blurred at the edges, shifting between what was and what should have been.
Odd.
Ark did not dream. Not since the last, the night he dreamt of the dragon.
The dream faded to the oblivion of true sleep.
The Sand remembered.
The Sand did not forget.
It had no eyes, yet it watched.
No voice, yet it spoke.
A presence, ancient and unknowable, stirred within its half-formed consciousness—a slumbering will now pricked awake, drawn to something familiar.
Something lost.
Something returning.
And then, like a blade sliding from its sheath, the whisper came.
“Betrayer.”
The word slithered through the air, a venomous thread woven into the fabric of the night.
It did not speak in mere sound but in force, in weight, in memory. It howled across the dunes, carried upon the breath of the wind, sinking into every grain of sand, every buried bone.
The desert heard.
And the desert shuddered.
In their burrows, the creatures of the day curled into themselves, their tiny hearts hammering with a terror they could not name.
And the monsters of the night?
They went mad.
A frenzy of howling slaughter erupted across the Ferl.
Fangs and claws, bone and sinew—they turned upon one another with mindless brutality, driven to madness, to bloodlust, to death.
The air filled with screeches, with flesh torn asunder, with the sickening chorus of things too monstrous to be named.
The night had become a feeding ground.
And above it all, the wind carried its whisper.
“Betrayer.”