The wind dragged across the plains, carrying dust that clung to the back of Kalath's hand. The speck didn't fall. It stuck, gave a slight tremble, then began crawling toward his veins like a metal ant drawn to a magnet. Far off, where the violet sky met grey earth, a point of gold flickered into life, swelling far too quickly to be natural.
Kalath was planting.
Or more honestly, forcing seed into soil that had given up. Every swing of his hoe dug more like a wound than a furrow. The ground was the colour of ash, smelled like rusty iron mixed with something sweet that had died months ago but refused to stop rotting.
"It won't grow," whispered his sister, Elara, from the doorway of their clay hut. Her voice was barely more than a draft.
"It will," Kalath muttered, not looking back. He gripped a handful of Last-See seed-Veridia's final stubborn crop. Hard, small, dull brown. "It just needs patience."
"We don't have patience, Kal. We've only got time." Elara coughed, a brittle sound, like a dry leaf being crushed.
Kalath turned at last. She leaned on the doorframe, pale, her wide eyes - their mother's legacy—looking too large for her thinning face. The Withering didn't tear flesh like it did the earth; it swam through the blood, slowing everything except hunger and exhaustion.
He wiped sweat from his brow with his sleeve. It dried instantly into a line of salt. On Veridia, even sweat didn't last long.
He finished the final row, pressing the last seed into the dirt with a desperate thumb. When he stood, his sight wavered – not from fatigue, but from a pattern. For a second, hairline cracks spread everywhere: across the soil, the air, even across Elara's body. Like the whole world was glass, struck but not yet shattered. Just a trick of exhaustion, he told himself. Starvation, stress… the usual.
Night came – or more accurately, The Dimming. The pale violet sky drained into a heavy charcoal grey. Stars blinked into view, dull and smothered. No moon. Veridia's moon had "broken" centuries ago, the Recallers said, leaving only a faint belt of debris across the sky like a scar no one bothered to heal.
Inside the hut, Kalath split a miserable bowl of Stillwood bark porridge. Elara only inhaled the steam, eyes half-shut.
"Tomorrow," Kalath said, forcing his voice firm. "I'll go to the Blight Fields. There might be tubers left."
Elara nodded, but her gaze drifted past the wall, as if she could see through it. "I dreamed of green again," she murmured. "Green that… made noise."
Kalath said nothing. Dreaming in colour was a final symptom. The brain feeding on what was left of the world's Memory. The Withering inside her had gone deep.
He shut his eyes, crushing back the panic swelling in his chest. No. Not again.I've already lost Father. Mother. Not her.
When he opened his eyes, his gaze caught the window. Out beyond the ridge split by The Weeping Chasm, a brief flash ignited. Not lightning – lightning hadn't shown itself in ages. This light was steady. And gold.
A colour alien to Veridia's dying palette.
Kalath's heart hammered – an instinct older than language: curiosity tainted with fear. He stepped to the window.
The night wind slid in, cold and sharp, carrying a speck of dust. Not ash-grey dust like the rest of Veridia, but something faintly luminous, like ground-up brass. It landed on the back of his hand.
He went to brush it off.
It didn't fall.
It clung. Trembled. Then – with a disturbing, deliberate awareness—began crawling toward his veins. Like metal ants desperate to find blood.
And out on the ridge, the golden light grew. Not like a sunrise.
Like a door opening in the sky.
And something bright, ordered, and merciless was stepping through.