Azrana's walls stood tall, but beneath them, the earth whispered.
It began with a tremor—so slight that only the oldest of the masons noticed it. A soft shift in the sand beyond the city's edge, like something stirring deep below. They said the ground had spoken before the fall of the last empire. They said it had spoken before the First Flame was lit.
Kael dismissed the rumors at first. He had no room for myths. The city was still bleeding, its people barely holding together the threads of survival. Rebuilding mattered more than ghost stories.
But then the children started dreaming.
And in every dream, the same word: Aukar.
---
Kael found Narek in the eastern archive, surrounded by scrolls and tablets. The scribe looked paler than usual, eyes rimmed red from sleepless nights.
"You've heard?" Kael asked, arms crossed.
Narek didn't look up. "The dreams. The tremors. The symbols scratched into the walls by children who don't know how to write."
Kael narrowed his eyes. "You think it's connected to the First Flame?"
Narek shook his head. "No. Older. Deeper. Whatever's waking beneath the sand, it was buried long before fire touched this land."
He pushed a brittle scroll toward Kael. "This speaks of the Shal'ari—the Silent Ones. Priests who worshipped the sand itself. They believed something lived beneath it, something that watched the empires rise and fall."
Kael frowned. "Why would it be stirring now?"
"Because we broke the seal," Narek said. "Even if we closed the door, the earth remembers the flame."
---
Later that night, Kael stood at the edge of the city, where the dunes swallowed the road whole. The sky was black, starless. The air tasted of iron.
He knelt, pressing his palm into the sand.
It was warm.
Too warm.
And it pulsed.
---
By dawn, reports had come in from the outer villages. Wells going dry. Livestock vanishing. People speaking in tongues not heard in centuries.
Kael called a meeting.
"We need to know what this is," he said. "If it's more than fear, we face it now. Not after it tears another hole in this land."
Liora nodded. "Then we go to the source."
Bael, scarred but alive, cracked his knuckles. "Let's see what's whispering down there."
---
They rode at noon, six riders in all. Kael, Liora, Bael, Narek, and two desert trackers. South of Azrana, into the heart of the empty quarter—a place said to swallow men whole.
The land shifted as they rode. The dunes had changed shape, as if molded by a giant's hand. Rocks jutted from the sand like bones. Strange symbols marked the stones, spirals and slashes that made no sense in any known language.
The first tracker disappeared by nightfall.
They found his body half-buried, mouth full of sand, eyes wide in terror.
---
On the third day, they found the crater.
It wasn't natural.
A perfect circle, thirty paces across, sunken into the earth like a wound. At its center, a stone door, half-cracked, with something breathing behind it.
Kael stepped closer. The breath of the sand hit him like heat from a forge.
"I've seen this before," he murmured. "In my dreams."
Narek was pale. "We shouldn't open it."
But Kael already knew it was too late.
The door was opening from the inside.