The storm did not end all at once.
Instead it faded slowly, like a massive animal moving across the desert and leaving only the echoes of its passing behind. For two more days the buried ruin trembled under distant thunder while blue lightning continued flashing somewhere beyond the dunes.
William lost track of time.
Without sunlight reaching the deeper chambers, the difference between day and night meant very little. The storm's energy pulsed through the crystal veins in uneven cycles, sometimes bright enough to illuminate the massive hall completely and other times fading to a faint glow that left most of the structure buried in shadow.
During those days he survived on the creature's meat.
He ate sparingly, never more than small portions at a time. The first transformation had been violent enough that he had no interest in repeating it with larger amounts of Uon-rich flesh. Even so, each piece he consumed brought a faint warmth back into his muscles, reinforcing the quiet changes already taking place in his body.
The pain never returned in the same overwhelming way.
Instead the energy spread through him in smaller pulses, tightening his muscles and sharpening his senses in subtle ways that were difficult to measure but impossible to ignore.
The more immediate problem was water.
The storm brought lightning, sand, and blue dust in endless waves, but actual rain rarely reached the desert floor. Whatever moisture existed in the towering clouds seemed to scatter into the storm's violent winds long before it could fall normally.
By the third day his throat had grown painfully dry.
William could feel the dehydration settling into his body. His lips had begun to crack, and the subtle improvements in his strength did little to ease the fatigue that came with thirst. The creature's meat kept him alive, but it did nothing to replace the water he had lost.
Still, he waited.
Leaving the ruin too early would have been suicide.
Even deep beneath the desert, he could hear the storm tearing across the land above. Several times the tremors grew strong enough that he feared the ancient structure might collapse entirely. The deeper chamber held firm, but the upper levels of the ruin continued shedding debris long after the worst of the lightning had passed.
Eventually the thunder faded.
Not completely, but enough that the vibrations through the stone weakened to a dull, distant rumble. The crystal veins along the walls dimmed slowly as the storm moved farther across the desert, their glow settling into the faint steady light he had first seen when entering the ruin.
That was when William decided to leave.
He climbed back through the narrow passage connecting the deeper chamber to the upper levels of the ruin. Sand had shifted considerably during the storm, filling several corridors that had once been clear while uncovering others that had been buried before.
The outer chamber looked worse than he remembered.
Part of the ceiling had collapsed entirely, leaving a jagged opening through which pale sunlight filtered into the ruin. Sand had poured through the gap in enormous drifts, reshaping the floor and burying several of the pillars beneath a new layer of desert.
The storm had not destroyed the ruin.
But it had changed it.
William stepped carefully through the debris and climbed toward the opening.
The moment he emerged from the structure, the desert air struck him like a furnace.
Heat radiated from the dunes in visible waves, and the sky above stretched wide and clear as if the storm had never existed at all. Only the distant horizon still carried faint traces of dark cloud where the massive system continued its slow movement across the desert.
But the landscape itself had transformed.
Entire dunes had collapsed or shifted during the storm, exposing sections of the buried city that had remained hidden for centuries. Broken walls and massive stone blocks now protruded from the sand in every direction, forming jagged pathways through the desert.
More importantly, water had collected in the ruins.
Shallow pools had formed wherever the storm's moisture had gathered in low points of the ancient architecture. Most were little more than muddy puddles, but to William they looked like salvation.
He moved toward the nearest one almost immediately.
The water was cloudy with dust and fragments of sand, but the sight of it alone made his throat tighten painfully. He knelt beside the pool and stared into the shallow basin for a moment, forcing himself to breathe slowly.
Then he cupped his hands and drank.
The water tasted like stone and sand, but it was cold.
William drank again.
And again.
Each swallow felt like life returning to his body. The dryness in his throat eased gradually, and the constant ache in his head began fading with every handful he pulled from the puddle.
He sat back after several minutes, breathing deeply while the relief settled through him.
For the first time since waking in the crater, the desert did not feel like it was actively trying to kill him.
When he finally stood again, he noticed something new on the horizon.
At first he thought it was simply another ruin exposed by the shifting dunes.
But as he looked closer, the scale became clearer.
The structure rose far above the desert floor, taller than any building he had seen so far. Two enormous pillars of pale stone leaned inward toward one another, forming half of a massive circular arch that had once stood complete.
Now the upper portion of the ring had collapsed and lay partially buried in the sand around its base.
Even so, the remaining structure towered over the desert like the skeleton of something ancient and enormous.
Thin lines of blue crystal ran through the stone.
And several of them were still glowing.
William stared at the distant structure for a long time.
Whatever it was, it had survived the storm.
And in a desert full of buried ruins and shattered stone, that alone made it the most important place he had seen yet.