My eyes opened to dust.
Not fresh.Not gentle.
Thick.Hot.Suffocating.
Each inhale felt like breathing in ash from my own memory—burnt breath, burnt soul.
I didn't remember falling asleep.Didn't remember stopping.
All I knew was that the fire had died down…
And the thirst was unbearable.
I dragged myself up from the crater's edge, arms shaking beneath the weight of my own frame. My mouth was dry enough to crack. My lips split open just from the motion of breathing. Blood trickled down my chin, and I licked it off like it was water.
My tongue tasted of iron and ash.
Two days.
At least.
That's how long I must've been out.
Two days without food. Without water. Without thought.
But I was still here.
Still burning—Just quieter.
Something in me had changed.
It wasn't Essence.
It wasn't power.
It was something deeper.
A presence.
A stirring.
Low, quiet… but not asleep.
Like a serpent curled in the hollow of my chest, resting for now—but ready to rise again the second I lost grip.
I ignored it.
Didn't acknowledge it.
Not yet.
I stood—shaky, slow—and looked around.
The Mortar Zone stretched endlessly in every direction.
Everything… black.
Charred stone.
Cracked ridges.
Volcanic dust clinging to every surface like a second skin.
Mountains in the far distance were sheared in half by old blasts, their peaks melted, their edges glowing faintly from inner magma veins.
There was no sky.
Just red mist.
And the echo of bombardments in the far-off hills, like thunder without rain.
The Dracus didn't just want to cleanse this place.
They wanted to erase it.
And everything crossing it.
I moved forward.
One step.
Then another.
Each step hurt.
Each step felt earned.
I passed what used to be a tree—now just a blackened skeleton jutting out of a fissure, twisted by heat, reaching skyward like it had tried to crawl away before it died.
Farther ahead, a pool of lava sat still, no ripple, no hiss—just glowing like an eye buried in the earth, unblinking.
I marked it on a mental path.Avoided it.
Not because I was afraid.
But because I didn't need to fight anything right now.
Not yet.
This part of the journey… was survival.
I traveled like that for hours—days, maybe.Sleep came in flashes.I'd collapse behind broken ridges or settle beneath overhangs to shield from fallout ashstorms.Meditation became my only real rest.
I'd sit cross-legged in the black silence, Essence curled around my spine like a sleeping dragon.
"Don't wake it," I'd whisper."Not yet. Not again."
Sometimes I saw visions during the meditations—Flashes of pyramids.Faze's voice.Nyxia's eyes.Violet's back as she walked away.Scarlett's scream in the distance.
None of them spoke.
They just stood there.
Watching me.
Like they were waiting for me to come back.
Other times, I'd hear nothing.
Just the hum of the Mortar Zone beneath my bones.
Alive.
Always humming.
There were landmarks I marked along the way:
The Hanging Teeth – jagged obsidian shards jutting from the ceiling of a collapsed mountain pass. I had to crawl under them sideways, the stone slicing my shoulder open like teeth gnashing against the sky.
The Spiral Basin – a crater that seemed bottomless, filled with thin plumes of fire curling upward like incense. I dropped a dead creature inside and never heard it land.
The Marching Wall – a broken cliffside with hundreds of scorched humanoid statues fused into it. No detail. Just outlines. Shadows of what once was. Their hands reached outward in agony. I didn't stop there long.
By the end of the first week, I stopped counting days.
It was all the same.
Ash.
Rubble.
Noise in the distance.
Sleep in the silence.
Hunger in my gut.
And that stirring in my chest, always coiled.
I didn't talk to myself.
Didn't say names.
Didn't cry.
But I thought about her.
Both of them.
Violet.
Scarlett.
What they'd say if they saw me now.
Would they even recognize me?
Would they want to?
I stopped noticing when the days changed.
There was no sunrise here.
No shift in air.
Only the same burning silence, draped over this land like a burial shroud.
Even the wind—when it came—carried no sound. Just heat and grit that ground into your skin like punishment.
I was three weeks deep into the Mortar Zone by then.
Rations were gone.
Water was found in pockets of steam, collected from crevices beneath heat-forged outcroppings. I'd burn my hands cupping it. Let it scald my throat going down.
Didn't matter.
Pain was survival here.
And so was silence.
I'd stopped fighting.
Not because the zone was empty.
But because whatever remained...
Knew better than to face me now.
Even the wind fled around me.
I'd killed too many.
Bled too much.
Whatever storm had possessed me in that fissure...
It still lingered.
Dormant.
Breathing just beneath the surface.
Sometimes I could feel it twitch beneath my ribs—like a second heartbeat, slow and venomous.
"Rest," I whispered to it."Not yet."
It would settle after that.
Not with obedience.
But with patience.
The terrain started to change around the fourth week.
Subtle shifts.
The black ground was still cracked, still burnt, but…
There were signs.
Broken columns.
Old remnants.
Structures, maybe. Ones lost long before the invasion. Long before even memory had roots.
I passed one ruin shaped like a twisted horseshoe, metal fused into stone. The center pulsed faintly—like something was buried under it, still trying to breathe.
I didn't stop.
Then came the slope.
Not steep.Just long.
And as I climbed it, I felt the wind shift again—not hot this time.
Cooler.
Faint.
Almost like—
Air.
Real air.
I pushed faster.
Essence still curled beneath my skin like a coil waiting to snap. I kept it quiet. Focused. Let it pulse through my legs just enough to keep moving without collapse.
I hit the ridge.
Crested it.
And stood there—alone, covered in ash and weeks of silent survival.
Eyes narrowed.
Jaw clenched.
Breath caught in my throat.
Below me… was the edge.
Not of the world.
But of the Mortar Zone.
And beyond it?
Not red.Not black.
But green.
Real green.
Lush.
Alive.
Fields that breathed.
Crisp air that shimmered like mist just beginning to settle over the valley ahead.
A settlement sat nestled just beyond a forest clearing—no guards posted, no walls raised. It was too quiet to be fortified.
But I could feel it.
Humans.
Alive.
Breathing.
Hiding.
I dropped to a knee without meaning to.
Not from pain.
From relief.
From the weight of a month-long war with silence and heat and hunger finally starting to loosen its grip.
I clenched my hands.
Let the dust fall through my fingers.
And whispered—
"I made it."
The wind carried the words away.
But the silence that followed…
Felt earned.