William stood in silence for a long time before he started moving.
The crater was larger than it first appeared. From the bottom, the walls had looked like steep slopes of sand and rock. Now that he was actually walking toward them, the scale became clearer. The distance alone was enough to make his legs ache before he even reached the incline.
Still, standing idle wasn't an option.
The desert stretched endlessly beyond the crater, and the longer he looked at it the more obvious the situation became. If there was water, shelter, or any sign of life in this place, it wasn't going to come to him.
He started walking.
The sand shifted under his feet as he climbed the sloping wall of the crater. Every few steps he slid slightly backward, forcing him to dig his heels deeper into the ground just to maintain progress.
As he moved higher, the damage became easier to see.
The crater walls weren't just loose sand and broken rock. In several places the surface had hardened into smooth, glass-like patches where the sand had melted and fused together. Some of the rock formations had cracked outward in strange patterns, as if the force that created the crater had pushed through the ground rather than simply striking it.
William paused beside one of the fused sections and ran his fingers along the surface.
It was smooth.
Too smooth.
The texture reminded him of polished stone, except the color was wrong. Faint streaks of blue ran through the glassy surface like veins.
He pulled his hand away.
Something about those lines unsettled him, though he couldn't explain why.
The wind stirred again, dragging loose sand across the crater wall. William looked up toward the rim and continued climbing.
It took longer than he expected.
By the time he finally reached the top, his legs were burning and his throat felt dry. He stepped onto solid ground and slowly straightened his back, taking in the view beyond the crater.
The desert stretched in every direction.
Dunes rolled across the landscape like frozen waves, broken occasionally by scattered patches of exposed rock. The horizon shimmered faintly in the distance where heat distorted the air.
There were no roads.
No buildings.
No signs that anyone had passed through this place in a very long time.
William exhaled slowly and turned back toward the crater behind him.
From the rim, the destruction looked even more unnatural. The crater carved a perfect scar across the desert floor, its edges jagged and uneven where the blast had torn through layers of sand and stone.
His eyes drifted toward a patch of disturbed sand near the edge.
Something was partially buried there.
At first he thought it was just another piece of broken rock. The shape was irregular, half covered by loose sand that had blown in after the explosion.
But the longer he stared, the more certain he became that it wasn't stone.
He walked over.
As he approached, the wind shifted slightly and pushed a thin layer of sand away from the object.
A bone-colored surface emerged beneath it.
William stopped.
It took a moment for his brain to fully register what he was looking at.
The shape in the sand wasn't rock.
It was a body.
Most of it was buried, but enough was visible to make the conclusion obvious. A long, segmented torso curved beneath the sand, covered in a hardened shell that resembled chitin or bone. Several thick limbs protruded from the body at odd angles, their joints twisted as if they had snapped during whatever had killed it.
The creature was large.
Even with half of it buried, the exposed portion alone was longer than William was tall.
He crouched slightly, studying it.
The shell wasn't a normal color. It was pale and cracked in places where the surface had split open. Inside the fractures, faint lines of blue crystal had formed along the creature's internal structure.
The same color as the energy from the sky.
William frowned.
He didn't know how he knew that something about the creature was wrong, but the feeling was immediate and unmistakable.
Whatever this thing had been, it probably hadn't died peacefully.
His gaze shifted toward the crater behind him.
The pieces began to connect, even without memories to guide him.
The explosion.
The blue energy.
The dead creature.
If this thing had been anywhere near the blast when it happened, the outcome would have been inevitable.
William straightened and brushed sand from his hands.
The desert wind moved quietly across the dunes again.
For several seconds the landscape remained completely still.
Then something changed.
At first it was subtle, almost easy to miss.
A thin line of shifting sand appeared far out in the distance, cutting across the surface of the desert like the wake behind a boat moving through water.
William narrowed his eyes.
The disturbance was moving.
Fast.
It tore across the dunes with unnatural speed, the sand behind it collapsing inward as something large pushed through the ground beneath the surface.
For a moment he simply watched it, trying to understand what he was seeing.
Then he realized something.
The moving line wasn't wandering randomly across the desert.
It was heading straight toward the crater.
Toward him.
William stood motionless on the edge of the massive scar in the desert, staring out at the rapidly approaching disturbance.
Whatever was moving beneath the sand…
It was getting closer.
And it was moving much faster than he expected.