Time had ceased to exist as anything but the frantic percussion of his heart slamming against his ribs and the searing rasp of each breath dragging through his throat like he'd swallowed broken glass wrapped in sand.
The pursuit thundered through the canyon—boots hammering against sun-baked stone with the relentless rhythm of war drums, war hounds baying with a visceral hunger that transformed Elliot's insides to liquid terror. He could distinguish each element of the hunt now: the sharp crack of individual paw pads striking rock, the wet, labored panting of tongues lolling between yellowed fangs, the metallic jangle and scrape of chain leads dragging across stone. The sounds converged, compressed, grew louder with each of his ragged heartbeats.
Closer. Always closer.
His fingers clawed at the canyon wall with animal desperation, nails splitting against stone polished mirror-smooth by ten thousand years of desert wind and the rare, catastrophic flash floods that carved these channels through the wasteland like scars on flesh. Sweat sheeted down his face, flooding his eyes until the world became a stinging, wavering blur. Salt crystallized on his cracked lips, each breath pulling the taste of his own body's betrayal across his tongue. He lunged for another handhold—the stone crumbled to powder in his grip, ancient sediment that had surrendered to entropy long before his grandfather's grandfather had drawn first breath.
The rock face offered nothing. No purchase. No mercy.
Elliot gathered what remained of his strength and leaped. For one crystalline moment, he was airborne—weightless, suspended between desperation and hope. His fingertips brushed an outcropping, rough and solid, and that hope flared bright and savage in his chest.
Then his hands, slick with sweat and blood from torn skin, slipped.
His body plummeted. The impact against the canyon floor detonated through his skeleton, driving the air from his lungs in a violent, choking grunt. Dust erupted around him in a choking cloud, coating his tongue with the flavor of desiccated earth, filling his nostrils with the ancient smell of sun-bleached bone and things long dead. His teeth had clamped shut on his tongue during the fall—now blood pooled warm and copper-sweet in his mouth, mixing with dust to form a paste he couldn't quite spit out.
Pain radiated from everywhere at once. His shoulder. His hip. The base of his skull where it had struck stone.
"Please," he gasped, the word torn from somewhere deep and primal. He stared up at the indifferent stone looming above, its face cast in deep purples and blues as daylight bled away. The sun was dying, dragging the sky through shades of bruised flesh—violet and plum and the sickly yellow-green of old contusions. "Please, please, please."
The canyon walls absorbed his plea without echo. Stone cared nothing for human desperation.
The war hounds' baying crescendoed, no longer distant but immediate. Imminent. He could smell them now—rank musk of unwashed hide, the putrid sweetness of rotting meat clinging to their breath, the sharp ammonia stink of their excitement. Somewhere behind that wall of sound, he heard commands barked in the clipped, efficient dialect of Veridia soldiers.
His legs refused to obey. His body had finally reached the limits of what terror and adrenaline could extract from exhausted flesh.
This was where he died.
Do not worry. I will not let them catch you.
The voice didn't arrive through his ears. It bloomed directly inside his skull like a night-flowering desert lily unfurling in darkness—neither male nor female, carrying the warmth of noon sand and somehow, impossibly, the vast emptiness of the star-scattered void. The words seemed to emanate from everywhere and nowhere: from the stone beneath his shattered body, from the cooling air, from the space between his own frantic thoughts.
Elliot's spine went rigid against the canyon wall. Small stones scattered down around him, clattering like teeth. "Who—" His voice fractured, the word emerging as little more than a wheeze through his bruised throat. "Who's there?"
His eyes swept the canyon in jerking, panicked movements. Empty. Nothing but heat-shimmer rising from cooling stone and shadows pooling in crevices like dark water. The hair on his arms lifted despite the oppressive warmth still radiating from every surface—the stored sunlight of a brutal day bleeding back into the atmosphere.
Was this madness? Had the sun finally boiled his brain inside his skull like an egg? He remembered his mother's sister, before the militia dragged her away. She'd gone mad from heatstroke, shrieking about voices, about the dead rising from the dunes to whisper secrets in her ears. They'd found her three days later, her throat torn open by her own fingernails.
Come.
Light erupted.
Not gradually—not the gentle bloom of dawn. This was instantaneous and absolute, a detonation of brilliance from a shrine carved into the canyon face that he'd somehow never noticed. White-gold radiance burst forth, the exact color of lightning striking sand and fusing it to glass. Elliot threw his arm across his face, but the light was merciless. It pierced through his eyelids, through his flesh, illuminating the delicate architecture of bones in his fingers like crimson-shrouded candles.
The heat of it pressed against his skin. Not burning, but present—a warmth that felt alive, intentional.
Behind him, the war hounds' baying faltered. He heard them skid to confused stops, their handlers shouting commands that went ignored.
When Elliot could finally see again—his vision returning in stages, first as dancing afterimages, then shapes, then details—the shrine revealed itself.
Impossible. That was his first thought.
The structure had been carved directly into the living rock, but not with crude tools or slow labor. The stone looked grown—organic curves and flowing lines that suggested the patient work of water rather than chisel. Intricate glyphs covered every surface, characters from no language he recognized, each one seeming to shift and rearrange itself when he wasn't looking directly at it. They glowed with internal light, pulsing in rhythm with something he felt more than heard—a deep vibration that resonated in his chest cavity, making his heart stutter to match its cadence.
The entrance stood perhaps eight feet tall, the threshold marked by two pillars that curved inward like welcoming arms. Or closing jaws. Between them, darkness waited—absolute and hungry, untouched by the radiant light spilling from the glyphs.
The air around the shrine tasted different. Cleaner. It carried the ghost of moisture, impossible in this desert, and something else. Something that made his tongue tingle and his teeth ache—the electric charge before a lightning strike, the metallic tang of power barely contained.
Enter, the voice said, and now he could feel its source. The shrine itself. The ancient stone. The glyphs that wrote and rewrote themselves in languages older than human memory.
Elliot's legs trembled as he pushed himself upright. Every muscle screamed protest. Behind him, the war hounds had begun to bay again, but the sound carried a new quality—uncertainty mixed with fear. Their handlers shouted louder, angrier, but the animals refused to advance.
They knew. On some primal level, the beasts understood what stood between them and their prey.
Elliot staggered forward. His boots scraped against stone. Blood from his split tongue dripped onto his chin. The shrine's entrance loomed before him, that absolute darkness promising either salvation or a death more complete than anything the Veridia soldiers could deliver.
He had no choice. He'd never had a choice.
The moment his boot crossed the threshold, the light behind him vanished—snuffed out like a candle flame pinched between cosmic fingers. The baying of the hounds cut off mid-sound, replaced by a silence so profound it pressed against his eardrums like physical weight.
Elliot stood in darkness so complete he couldn't tell if his eyes were open or closed.
Then, slowly, other lights began to wake. Small at first—pinpricks of luminescence appearing in the walls around him, spreading like stars igniting across an infinite night sky. They illuminated a passage that descended deep into the earth, the walls covered in more of those shifting glyphs, all pulsing in perfect synchronization.
Welcome, the voice said, and for the first time, Elliot detected emotion in those words.
Not threat. Not hunger.
Relief.