Page 83 of New World

Dorane didn’t answer at first, as if the words hadn’t quite reached him through the storm of his thoughts. Then, slowly, he looked at her.

Mei held his gaze, letting him see the regret in her eyes. Understanding flickered across his face. He nodded once before turning back toward the village.

“No,” he murmured. “You were right. It’s the perfect place.” A sharp exhale. “And it’ll play into Zoak’s mind frame.”

Relief mixed with the ache in Mei’s heart, but there was no time to dwell on it. They had a fight to finish. She pulled out the map Dorane had drawn, spreading it between them as they stood on the compacted dirt just outside the ruins of the first huts.

“There are three main ways he could’ve entered,” she said, pointing at the different entry points. “Through the main road, the west via the desert, or a wide arc from the north.”

Dorane traced a finger along the main road, shaking his head. “He wouldn’t have come this way. Too exposed.”

Mei nodded. “Then that leaves the desert.”

Dorane’s jaw tightened. “We practiced with the Staff for almost too long. If we were any later, Zoak would be suspicious.”

Mei agreed, scanning the canyon walls as they moved forward. The silence was unnatural. No birds. No shifting of desert creatures. It was the hush before the kill.

Zoak was here. Watching. Waiting.

Her eyes swept the ground, searching for fresh tracks. Her fingers tightened on the Staff Dorane had given her.

They passed the first huts, and the air grew heavy with the weight of devastation long past but never forgotten. Mei’s steps slowed as she saw the mounds of rocks—scattered between huts, along the road, markers of the dead.

Her throat burned. She clenched the Staff so tightly that the etched metal dug into her palm, grounding her in something tangible, something real. Rage and sorrow twined together inside her, knotting into something fierce, something unbreakable. This place had once been filled with life. Dorane’s life. And Zoak would dare to twist it into his battleground? No. No more. Never again.

Dorane’s voice was quiet, distant. “I was the one who buried them.”

She turned toward him sharply.

“When I came back,” he continued, his voice raw, “they were all gone. The Legion didn’t leave survivors.”

He was staring at the graves, his hands at his sides, fingers curling slightly, as if they could still feel the weight of stone in a child’s grip.

“I carried the stones to cover them,” he murmured, his gaze flickering to a low wall, half-collapsed from missing stones. “I didn’t want the wind to take them. Or the animals.”

Her heart cracked at the thought of Dorane as a child, carrying rock after rock, alone in a world that had erased everyone he loved. Mei clenched her jaw, channeling the pain into resolve.

Zoak wanted to drag Dorane into his grief. To break him, wound him, strip him down to a lost boy among the ruins.

A dry wind stirred the dust at her feet. It should have been empty, silent, just the weight of a long-forgotten tragedy pressing down on them. But something was off. The silence wasn’t natural—it was waiting. Watching. Her fingers flexed around the Staff. Her skin prickled, as if unseen eyes were brushing against her, their gaze crawling along her spine. Not yet. But soon.

She barely brushed her fingers against Dorane’s hand as they neared the far end of the village. A slight imprint in the dirt caught her attention.

Dorane saw it too.

His voice was a low murmur. “Tracks.”

They exchanged a look before stepping toward the nearest hut. Inside, the air was stale, heavy with the weight of time. Sand had crept through the broken doorway, covering the faded carpet, the fractured stone floors. Furniture lay in ruin, skeletal remnants of a life once lived here.

The walls were scarred with absence—the nails where pictures had once hung stood bare, tiny ghosts of what was.

Several small, alien birds burst from the alcoves, startled by their entrance.

Mei didn’t touch anything.

This was a sacred place.

She paused in the living room, her breath catching when she saw them. Twin stains of dark red, forever etched into the faded carpet, the crevices of stone.

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