The silence belonged only to dying places. Not peace—never peace—but the ground forgetting what rain felt like, the wind carrying nothing but the faint metallic taste of dust, and waves of heat rising like ghosts from soil that had once known life.
It was the silence of a world that had already passed judgment on me and was now simply waiting for my body to accept the verdict.
"Abram." Venna's voice cut through even here, soft but insistent, her fingers still threaded tight through mine in the shadowed quiet of the libra. "If it's too much, open your eyes."
I didn't. The pull of the memory was stronger, dragging me deeper.
The wind scoured the wilderness in lazy, indifferent sweeps, pushing pale dust across the cracked plain like it had somewhere urgent to be. The sun, however, had nowhere else to go and made that everyone's problem—blazing down with merciless white fury, turning the air into rippling glass.
