William remained on the broken stone for several minutes after the creatures disappeared. Even after the sky emptied, he kept glancing upward, half expecting the pack to circle back and try again. The silence that followed their departure did little to settle him. If anything, it only made the desert feel larger.
Eventually he forced himself to move.
The stone beneath his feet extended farther than he had first realized. What had looked like a scattered ridge from a distance was actually a wide stretch of buried ruins, most of it swallowed by sand. Flat slabs rose from the dunes at strange angles, and sections of collapsed walls formed uneven paths through the terrain. In some places the sand had piled so high that only the tops of structures remained visible. In others, the wind had peeled enough of it away to expose pieces of whatever had once stood there.
William stepped over a cracked block taller than his waist and paused beside what looked like the remains of a pillar. The upper half had broken off long ago, but the base was still anchored in place, its surface carved with smooth, deliberate lines. He brushed his hand across it, clearing away a layer of dust and sand.
More markings emerged beneath his fingers.
They were unlike anything he had seen before. Some resembled circles surrounded by smaller rings, while others spread outward in long, flowing lines that intersected with sharp angles. The patterns repeated with just enough structure to make it obvious they meant something, though to him they were no more understandable than scratches cut into stone by an unknown hand.
He straightened and looked around.
The farther he went, the clearer it became that this wasn't just a handful of ruined buildings. The stone stretched across the desert in every direction he could see. Broken stairways disappeared beneath dunes. Sections of buried wall ran in straight lines far longer than they had any right to if they had been part of a single structure. Half-collapsed archways leaned crookedly from the sand like bones left behind after the flesh of a city had rotted away.
The place had been enormous.
William moved more slowly after that, no longer treating the terrain as random shelter. He climbed over buried foundations and followed stretches of exposed stone where the wind had carved narrow passages between dunes. Every new section of ruin hinted at something larger hidden beneath the sand. At one point he found the lower half of a statue emerging from a slope, the stone legs still standing on a pedestal while everything above the waist had been lost to time. The figure wore layered armor unlike anything familiar to him, its plates curved and elegant instead of bulky, with etched lines running along the greaves and lower torso.
He had no idea why that detail stayed with him, but it did.
Hours passed under the sun.
The heat pressed down harder as the day wore on, and William's throat had begun to feel dry enough that swallowing hurt. He kept moving anyway, partly because he needed to find some kind of shelter and partly because stopping in the open no longer felt like a good idea. The creatures in the sky had proven that much.
He climbed onto a broad slab of stone that rose above the surrounding dunes and used the higher vantage point to scan the ruins. From there he saw more of the same fractured landscape—buried walls, exposed stairways, broken foundations—but one section in particular stood out. Farther ahead, where several dunes met, the sand had sunk inward around a cluster of larger structures. From this distance he could only see fragments of their upper portions, but they were taller and more intact than anything else nearby.
William fixed his attention on that area.
If any part of these ruins still offered shade or cover, it would probably be there.
He stepped down from the slab and continued in that direction, crossing through a maze of broken stone and wind-shaped sand. As he walked, he began noticing smaller signs that the ruins were not entirely dead. Tiny insects crawled through the cracks in the stone, vanishing the moment his shadow passed over them. They looked like beetles at a glance, but their bodies gave off the faintest blue glow, like dull embers hidden beneath glass.
He crouched when he saw the first cluster.
The insects were gathered near a thin vein of blue crystal exposed in the side of a cracked block. They crawled over it in restless little movements, touching the crystal with their antennae before continuing along the fracture in the stone. When one of them paused directly on the blue vein, its glow brightened slightly.
William watched them for a moment, then looked at the crystal again.
It was the same color as the lines trapped in the fused glass farther out in the desert. The same color as the energy in the sky when he fell.
He stood and moved on, carrying that observation with him.
The larger structures drew nearer as the afternoon wore on. What he had seen from a distance turned out to be the upper portions of several connected buildings, most of their lower levels buried beneath the dunes. Thick walls of pale stone rose from the sand in broken sections, and a massive stairway emerged from one slope only to vanish again a few meters lower where the desert had reclaimed it. The architecture matched the rest of the ruins, but there was something different about these buildings. The carvings were more intricate. The surviving stone was cleaner, less worn by the elements, as though this part of the city had once mattered more than the rest.
William approached the nearest exposed wall and put a hand against it.
The stone felt cool.
That alone would have been enough to catch his attention in this heat, but there was something else as well. The same strange markings he had seen elsewhere had been carved more deeply here, layered in repeating bands that framed the wall like some kind of ritual design. The flowing lines and circular patterns were still meaningless to him, yet the precision of them made the place feel intentional in a way the scattered ruins had not.
He followed the outer edge of the structure until he found a narrow opening where part of the wall had collapsed inward. Sand had filled much of the gap, but enough space remained for him to squeeze through if he needed to.
He considered it, then looked toward the sky again.
The Razorwings had not returned, but the memory of their talons scraping stone remained vivid enough that he had no desire to spend the night in the open if he could avoid it.
William stepped closer to the opening and studied the shadowed interior beyond.
Cool air drifted out from within, faint and stale.
For the first time since waking in the crater, he felt like he might be standing at the edge of something more than simple shelter.
Then a low cry echoed somewhere overhead.
William looked up sharply.
Far in the distance, small dark shapes moved against the pale sky. The Razorwings were back, though they hadn't noticed him yet.
He turned toward the opening in the ruined structure and made his decision.
If the desert wanted him dead, the open dunes had made their point.
For now, stone was the better choice.