3 Days from system activation

  Sand found his mouth first.

  Grit packed his gums, stuck under his tongue, scraped when he swallowed. Heat clung to it like it had been baking all day, but the air that hit his face was cold enough to make his eyes water. Aydin coughed, and sand puffed out of him like he was a broken hourglass.

  Screaming carried over the street. Not one voice, many. Panic, sharp enough to cut through the ringing in his ears. He blinked hard. The light slanted wrong, like the sun did not quite know where it belonged.

  A temple sat ahead, hunched and dark. A shimmer traced a circle around it and the first row of homes, a bubble half-dead. The ward was not quiet. It made a high, strained whine, and dust lifted along its edge in a thin halo and hung there, refusing to fall. The wardstone set into the temple steps glowed through smoke, turning faces near it a sickly pale-blue. Aydin felt it in his teeth, a low vibration through the sand, deep enough to rattle his molars.

  Okay.

  Inventory.

  Limbs, check. Pain, yes, but nothing screaming broken. Mana, shaky but there. His heart was a fist in his ribs, doing the kind of fast work it only did when he had been running too long or scared too hard.

  He sat up and immediately regretted it. The world tilted, the screaming doubled, like his brain could not decide which direction the danger was in so it picked all of them. Aydin wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and tasted blood and salt.

  “Okay,” he managed. “That’s a new kind of bad.”

  The sand around his legs shifted. Not drifting, not settling. Sliding with purpose, grains moving as if the street had a current underneath. The pull went toward the temple ring, toward that whining strain.

  A shadow passed over him.

  He looked up fast, expecting a cloud.

  There were no clouds. Just torchlight, smoke, and something huge sliding between lantern glow and sand-strewn street, blotting out light as it moved.

  Aydin scrambled to his feet, sand sliding off his clothes. He was wearing rough fabric with stiff seams, a belt that was not his, boots broken in by someone else’s life.

  People poured past him. Panicked bodies, elbows, breath, grit, and he became a rock in a river. One man sprinted by, tripped, skinned his palms, and kept going without looking back. A child screamed one word over and over.

  “Breach!”

  Aydin’s body decided something before his mind caught up.

  It wanted to run.

  He turned, found an emptier street on instinct, and almost took it.

  Then a different sound cut through the chaos.

  Not a scream. A sob.

  Thin and raw.

  The image hit him so hard it stole his breath. Sun on his shoulders and salt in the air, the first vacation in years, the first day he had felt like a person instead of a schedule. His mother’s voice, half-laughing, half-warning.

  “Aydin beta, eat.”

  A tinny vendor bell. Someone yelling about corn on the cob. His cousin snapping a photo like proof he had left the house. Cheap sunglasses that made him look cooler than he had any right to feel.

  Then the girl’s gasp. The sudden wrongness in the water. The rip current pulling like a hand that did not negotiate.

  And him running. Of course him running.

  One clear thought, bright as a flare as the ocean closed over it.

  If I get out, I’m not going back to watching life.

  His feet stopped. His heart stumbled. Then he pivoted so fast his ankle barked.

  “Great,” he panted, already moving. “New life, same panic cardio.”

  He shoved into the flow of people, heading toward the thickest noise.

  “Sorry, sorry,” he said, because bodies bumped and shoulders clipped and elbows caught him. “Sorry, sorry, please, let me through.”

  The closer he got, the more the air tasted like metal and burned salt. Smoke stung his eyes, and something snapped ahead, a hard crack like timber giving up. Aydin hit a knot of panic. People jammed between buildings, trying to funnel toward the ward, toward the temple, toward safety that was visibly struggling.

  A body hit the sand in front of him.

  An older woman. Grey hair half-braided, scarf ripped loose, hands flailing in the grit.

  She went down hard and vanished beneath knees and boots. People stepped over her like she had become part of the street.

  Aydin stopped.

  His brain screamed at him to keep moving, not be the idiot who died because he wanted to be kind.

  He ignored it.

  He crouched, shoved hands through the stampede, took a boot to the shoulder, and got his fingers under her arm.

  “Hey,” he said, voice too loud. “Eyes on me. Up. Breathe. We move.”

  She was in shock. Dead weight.

  He hauled anyway. His legs burned. His shoulder screamed. He got her up to her feet and felt her sway like a tree in wind. Her eyes were unfocused. Her mouth worked around silent words. She tried to breathe and could not.

  Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.

  “It’s okay,” he lied. “You’re up, that’s the hard part.”

  The woman’s gaze snapped over his shoulder.

  Her pupils went huge.

  The vibration under Aydin’s boots deepened, hungry and close, as if something massive was sliding beneath the street.

  Then he heard it.

  A growl so big it did not sound like a throat. It sounded like stone grinding on stone.

  “No pressure,” he muttered. “Just me versus whatever that is.”

  He turned.

  The ground ahead of the temple ruptured like water breaking. Sand exploded upward in a geyser. Debris followed, chunks of stone and splintered boards thrown aside like toys. Something rose through it, not climbing, not stepping, but surfacing as if the earth was a river and it was built to swim it.

  A Riftbasilisk.

  Legless.

  A giant serpent, thick as a cart and longer than the street was wide, coils rolling over themselves as it poured out of the breach vent it had made.

  Its hide was deep imperial purple, marbled with shadow bands that made it look like night had been poured into skin. Crystals studded it, jagged yellow and blue growths embedded along its spine and cheek ridges. They caught torchlight and threw it back in sharp shards. Its tail lifted, thick and segmented, scorpion-like, curled high over its back, ending in a barbed stinger big enough to punch through a door.

  The Riftbasilisk slid toward the ring and pressed its crystal-studded jaw against the ward.

  The ward reacted like a struck drum. The whine spiked, dust at the boundary jumped and hung higher, and hair on the arms of the nearest people stood up. The wardstone on the temple steps flared brighter. A faint crackline lit inside it, then dimmed.

  The crowd screamed louder.

  Aydin’s skin went cold. That ring was the only thing between town and meat, and the creature was testing it like it had time.

  The Riftbasilisk pulled back, inhaled, and the crystals along its face glinted under sand-dust.

  It sniffed.

  Like it could smell mana and fear.

  Then its head swung away from the ward, slow and certain, toward the densest knot of running bodies.

  Toward him.

  Aydin shoved the woman behind him as gently as he could manage.

  “Run,” he said, pointing with a shaking hand. “Go to the temple. Go now.”

  She stumbled, caught herself, and vanished into the flood.

  Aydin stood there for one stupid heartbeat with nothing in his hands and sand under his boots and a monster about to turn the street into a slaughterhouse.

  His body made a decision without asking permission.

  His hands lifted. Elbows bent. Palms up, like he was about to catch something falling.

  He flinched and shoved forward.

  The sand in front of him surged.

  It rose like it got yanked on strings.

  A wall slammed up out of the street, rough and ugly, a slab of packed sand that should not have held shape at all but did.

  Aydin stared at it, mouth open.

  Then the Riftbasilisk hit it.

  Impact thundered through sand and bone. The wall bowed inward. Grains blasted out in a choking fog.

  Aydin felt the force in his arms as if the monster had smashed him directly.

  The wall held.

  For a beat.

  Then it started to collapse, sand pouring down like a curtain.

  Aydin’s hands jerked up again.

  “Again,” he gasped. “Again. Come on, again.”

  The same wall slammed up, overlapping the first, thicker by accident, not by skill. He was not shaping it. He was begging it into existence with his whole body.

  Somewhere in the crush of sound a voice screamed, “Wardkeeper!”

  Another voice answered, raw with terror, “Stone-lit, hold!”

  Aydin swallowed grit, blinked hard, and kept the wall between teeth and people.

  A ward bell clanged once, sharp and desperate, and then a stone crack popped from the temple steps like a snapped bone.

  Someone screamed, “Rim-Mother spare us!”

  The Riftbasilisk’s yellow-blue crystals brightened.

  Not all at once. In sequence.

  Yellow, then blue. Yellow, then blue. Climbing in a ladder up its face like a heartbeat pattern that did not belong to anything alive.

  Aydin’s stomach dropped.

  “Sorry,” he whispered to nobody. “Sorry, sorry, I know, just let me...”

  He threw his hands up again, faster, desperate to beat whatever that glow meant.

  The sand heaved.

  It rose before his palms finished the motion.

  Like it was eager.

  Aydin’s breath hitched.

  The Riftbasilisk’s crystals pulsed once, tight and bright.

  The air in front of its mouth rippled, and a translucent second jaw snapped into being.

  It lunged past the wall and bit down on empty air a handspan from Aydin’s face, close enough that the cold of it kissed his skin.

  Aydin flinched so hard his neck cracked.

  The phantom jaw hit the sand wall and the wall answered like it could. Grains burst outward in a hard, glittering spray, not pushed aside so much as shaved away. The projection did not bite through like a real mouth, it dragged through, chewing a pale groove in the sand that immediately tried to collapse behind it. For a fraction of a second the translucent teeth fuzzed at the edges, like the wall had made the ward stutter.

  That fraction was everything.

  If he had stayed, he would be missing a face.

  Aydin hopped sideways on pure panic, boots skidding, shoulder slamming a post. The spectral bite snapped shut where his face had been. The air snapped back with a sound like wet cloth torn in half.

  Behind him, someone screamed again, higher, sharper, and the sound ended too suddenly, like a hand had clamped over a mouth.

  Aydin’s stomach rolled. He tasted bile. He did not blink.

  He threw his hands up anyway.

  The sand heaved, same ugly slab, same crude wall, like his body only knew one word and it kept shouting it at the world.

  The Riftbasilisk hissed, and the sound came through the street in a vibrating ribbon that made the dust dance. Its coils rolled forward, smooth and heavy, and it drove its head into the sand wall again with a patience that felt worse than rage.

  Impact.

  Sand burst in Aydin’s eyes and mouth.

  He coughed grit and kept his palms up.

  “Hold,” he gasped, to the wall, to the sand, to himself, to God, to anyone listening. “Hold. Don’t fall, don’t fall.”

  The wall held for half a heartbeat.

  Then it collapsed like a tide breaking.

  Aydin jerked his hands higher, almost slapping himself in the face with panic. The same wall slammed up again, overlapping the first. It was thicker by accident, because his arms shook and the sand came in sloppy.

  It bought him another second.

  The Riftbasilisk’s tail rose behind its coils, segmented rings catching torchlight.

  The barbed stinger hovered, perfectly still, like it was thinking.

  Aydin did not like the way it waited.

  The stinger struck.

  It punched through the sand wall with whip speed, a clean puncture that tore a hole the size of Aydin’s fist. The stinger’s shadow crossed his throat. Grains sprayed in a hard line. The stinger withdrew, and the puncture sagged, widening, as if the sand had forgotten how to be solid.

  Aydin’s breath hitched.

  Venom, his brain supplied, with no evidence except the way his skin crawled.

  He threw another wall up, frantic, trying to seal the hole. The wall formed, rough and shuddering, but the sand did not settle right. It slumped.

  His fingers cramped again, harder this time, and the cramp did not leave.

  It spread up his wrists, a hot clawing ache that turned into something else.

  Numbness.

  It washed over his hands like he had plunged them into winter water.

  “No,” he breathed.

  He flexed his fingers.

  They did not feel like his.

  His fingers felt borrowed.

  He pinched his thumb and felt nothing.

  On the temple steps, the wardstone flared pale-blue.

  That crackline inside it lit again, longer now, spidering fast through the glow.

  Aydin saw it and did not understand it, but every part of him understood breaking.

  “Wardkeeper!” someone shouted, raw and pleading.

  A bell clanged twice in fast succession. Not ceremonial. Not measured. A warning hammered into metal.

  The Riftbasilisk lifted its head.

  It did not look at the wardstone. It did not look at the ward.

  It looked past the ward, toward the people packed behind it.

  His tongue went thick again. He kept his eyes on the serpent anyway.

  Its crystals brightened again.

  Yellow, then blue. Yellow, then blue.

  Aydin’s mouth tasted copper. His hands felt like dead weight at the end of his arms.

  He threw them up anyway.

  “Sorry,” he whispered, because his brain latched onto the only thing it knew how to give in a crowd. “Sorry, sorry, please, just...”

  He pushed.

  Nothing.

  “Yeah,” he breathed, staring at his hands. “That tracks.”

  A few grains lifted. Not a wall. Not even a sheet.

  Just a weak flutter, like sand startled by a sigh.

  Aydin stared at his hands.

  He pushed again, harder, like force could replace whatever he had just lost.

  The sand answered with a pathetic twitch.

  His forearms burned. His fingers did not.

  The Riftbasilisk’s crystals pulsed once, tight and bright.

  The air in front of its mouth rippled.

  The translucent jaw snapped into being again, wider this time.

  It opened past the collapsing curtain of sand, already sliding through the groove it had carved.

  Aydin’s breath went thin.

  His hands hung in front of him, useless, shaking.

  The phantom bite came for his face.