The night was silent —
except for the sound of breathing.
Slow, ragged, dragging breaths that filled the cracked shell of the clay hut like dying winds trapped inside a tomb.
Raghoul sat cross-legged in the center of the broken floor, his thin frame shivering under the threadbare scraps of a robe too ruined to keep the cold out. His head drooped forward slightly, black hair slicked to his brow with sweat, his mouth slack with exhaustion.
Only the faintest orange glow clung to the dead fire beside him — a pitiful memory of warmth, swallowed by the creeping darkness that pressed against the hut's crumbling walls.
The desert night had come hard and cruel, stripping away the blistering heat of the day and replacing it with a gnawing, marrow-deep chill.
The kind of cold that didn't just freeze flesh — it chewed through bone.
Raghoul barely noticed anymore.
Pain was a familiar companion.
Hunger, closer still.
But tonight... tonight the ache ran deeper.
Tonight, it wasn't his battered body screaming the loudest.
It was something beneath it.
Something coiled.
Something ancient.
Something hungry.
He sat motionless, palms resting on his knees, fingers twitching uncontrollably no matter how hard he clenched them into fists.
It wasn't fatigue. It wasn't weakness.
It was the storm.
The storm the old monk had spoken of in dying breath, in fevered ramblings before the flies claimed his tongue.
"Still the storm inside, boy," the old man had rasped, white eyes staring sightlessly at the ceiling. "Still it... or it'll tear you apart before the gods can."
Raghoul had spat on the monk's corpse before burying it shallow in the sand. He didn't need sermons. He needed power.
And yet...
And yet, tonight, he found himself chasing that old madman's words.
Still the storm.
Find your center.
Ground yourself to the broken earth.
Reach the skies with bloodied hands.
Move mountains, he had said. Command thunder. Ride the coming apocalypse like a demon on the winds.
It sounded like madness.
It was madness.
But it was all Raghoul had left.
No scrolls.
No family.
No past worth remembering.
Only the thing inside him, the cursed energy that snarled and hissed with every beat of his blackened heart.
The old monk had called it chakra.
A river of power, if you could tame it.
A coffin, if you couldn't.
Raghoul clenched his jaw so tight he thought his teeth might shatter, and closed his eyes.
He fell inward.
Into the humming, broken void within.
---
At first, there was only darkness.
The soothing nothingness that greeted him every night.
The soft rasp of sand against the hut's outer walls.
The faint stench of death lingering in the cracks — bones of the last fool who thought to cross this wasteland littered just beyond the threshold.
Then —
something changed.
The darkness began to pulse.
To breathe.
Not into light.
But into red.
A searing, visceral crimson that bled through the black, choking the shadows with burning veins of molten fire.
It dripped down the walls of his mind, thick and sticky, and the very air shuddered with each fresh heartbeat of the terrible thing coming.
Raghoul recoiled instinctively —
but the vision dragged him deeper.
---
The sun.
A monstrous, cancerous sun, bloated and twitching like a dying beast.
It clawed at the heavens above a world broken beyond repair.
Its flesh was veined with black rot, its surface blistering and writhing with open wounds of molten gold.
And it was falling.
Not gently.
Not slowly.
Crashing toward the earth like a hammer of judgment, vomiting rivers of liquid fire that turned the sky into a gaping, screaming maw.
The ground split open under its gaze — a thousand chasms spewing flame, swallowing cities whole in seconds.
Rivers hissed into nothingness.
Mountains crumbled into dust and bone.
The screams of a million burning souls rose in a single, deafening howl — a dirge of extinction.
Raghoul staggered through the nightmare landscape, choking on ash and blood, watching as faces twisted in agony rose from the earth itself — their mouths frozen in eternal, pleading terror.
He ran.
He fought to move.
But the ground turned slick beneath his feet, a sea of molten flesh and bone and memory dragging him under.
Above him, the red sun fell lower.
Closer.
Hungrier.
It was coming for him.
And in that moment, Raghoul understood:
This was not a dream.
This was a warning.
A memory of the future.
An omen written in blood and fire and ruin.
His fate.
Unless he burned first.
---
He screamed.
Or tried to.
His throat ripped open soundlessly as his body convulsed, every muscle locked in rictus as the sun engulfed him — flesh peeling from bone, soul melting into the inferno.
---
Raghoul's eyes snapped open.
The hut was silent.
Dead.
The embers of the fire had long since crumbled into black dust.
The air hung heavy and still — thick with the scent of old blood and cold stone.
Above him, through the cracks in the roof, the desert moon stared down — a cold, pitiless coin in a sky blacker than any dream.
Raghoul gasped like a drowning man, clutching at his chest, feeling the frantic hammer of his heart against ribs that felt too fragile to hold it.
He was soaked in sweat.
The simple robe clung to him like a shroud, and the dirt beneath him was wet, steaming in the night's chill.
Every breath he took tasted like ashes.
"Fuck..." he whispered hoarsely, dragging the back of a trembling hand across his mouth.
His voice sounded wrong.
Thin.
Dead.
Like something already buried.
But the vision clung to him, refusing to die.
He could still feel the sun's heat peeling the flesh from his bones.
He could still hear the screaming of the world.
He could still smell the stink of burning blood.
And worst of all —
some part of him had welcomed it.
Had longed for the fire.
---
Raghoul sat there for a long time.
Curled in on himself.
Listening to the low moan of the desert wind through the broken walls.
Wrestling with the truth the vision had carved into his bones.
He was not meant to survive.
Not meant to be forgotten in this wasteland.
He was meant to burn.
Or be burned.
There was no middle path.
---
When he finally rose, his body moved like a man half-dead — jerky, trembling, stiff.
Each step sent bolts of pain through his torn muscles, but he didn't care.
The oasis was close.
The only place that hadn't turned its back on him.
The dying palms loomed ahead — skeletal sentinels under the bleeding stars — their fronds rattling in the wind like dry bones clashing.
The pool itself reflected the moon like a knife's edge.
The water looked black.
Thick.
Oily.
But it was life.
And life was not to be wasted.
Raghoul knelt at the water's edge, scooping handfuls into his cracked hands and splashing it over his fevered face.
The shock of it — cold as a grave — snapped some of the tremors out of him.
He drank greedily, ignoring the metallic tang that hinted of decay.
When he finally stopped, he sat back on his heels, staring at his reflection.
He barely recognized the thing in the water.
A boy's body, thin and hard with suffering.
A man's eyes — hollowed out by hatred and hunger.
The scar across his throat — the vultures' gift — gleamed like a brand.
Raghoul touched it with one shaking hand, tracing the old wound.
"You should have died," he whispered to his reflection.
It stared back, silent, accusing.
"You should have died. You fucking coward."
The desert had left its mark.
But it had not taken his fire.
Not yet.
Not ever.
---
He rose to his feet, fists clenching at his sides, feeling the coarse robes pull tight across his scarred shoulders.
He turned his face upward, toward the vast, indifferent heavens.
The stars burned cold.
The moon hung silent.
But something watched.
Something old.
Something waiting.
Raghoul's voice, when it came, was raw and low — a rasp pulled from the pit of his soul:
"I will not rot in this place."
He stepped forward, the cracked earth breaking under his bare feet.
"I will not bleed out in the sand."
The night wind howled in mockery — a thousand voices hissing from the dunes.
Raghoul bared his teeth.
"I will survive. I will grow. I will learn."
He stretched his arms wide, embracing the bitter wind, the empty sky, the broken world.
"And when I am strong enough..."
His hands curled into claws.
"...I will burn it all down."
---
Somewhere, in the deepest reaches of the desert, a vulture screamed.
A low, rattling challenge.
Raghoul smiled — a jagged, feral thing — and felt the storm inside him twist and crackle, sparking along his nerves.
The world thought it had forgotten him.
The world was wrong.
A storm was coming.
And at its center would be a boy no longer afraid to bleed.
A boy ready to set the sky itself on fire.
---
CNT
3:17 AM — Oasis of Broken Sands.
A boy stood alone beneath the stars.
And the sky, for the first time in a long age, shuddered.