The air changed the moment Adonis crossed the threshold.

  Outside, the desert was heat and wind and endless sky. Inside the ruin, it was nothing. No sound. No breeze. Even the torch Nyra had pressed into Kalen’s hand sputtered as though it resented burning here.

  The walls of the ruin weren’t stone, not entirely. They were carved slabs of black material that shimmered faintly when Adonis brushed his palm against them. At first glance, they were etched with glyphs — the kind his people had once used, words of psionic command, fragments of thought shaped into power.

  But wrong.

  He traced one line with his finger. Glyphs were supposed to flow like rivers, channels of will and meaning. These twisted backward, like veins cut against the grain, designed not to give but to unmake. Where his glyphs bent sand, water, and life into order, these ones clawed at them, unraveling the weave of nature itself.

  Adonis’s jaw tightened.

  > Observation, Vantage whispered in his mind, steady but sharp. Glyphic analysis: ninety-eight percent inversion of psionic language. Purpose not constructive. Purpose—

  “Destructive,” Adonis finished aloud. His voice echoed down the dark hall. “Not by mistake. By intent.”

  Kalen shifted behind him, bow half-raised, eyes flicking warily over the crawling etchings. “So someone made this? On purpose?”

  Adonis’s golden flecks dimmed in his gaze, his expression unreadable. “Glyphs are words. Words carry thought. Thought shapes reality. These words speak only of ruin.”

  He stepped deeper, the sand swirling faintly at his boots despite the dead air. The glyphs pulsed faintly in answer, like veins filled with poison.

  Whatever had carved them had not just wanted to harness psionic power. It had wanted to pervert it. To twist life into corruption. To unmake.

  > Recommendation, Vantage murmured. Terminate source. Total annihilation.

  Adonis’s lips curved faintly, a smirk without humor. “For once, you sound like me.”

  The corridor bent downward, into shadow. The smell of rot thickened. From deep below, something moved — a sound like chitin scraping stone, too slow, too heavy, to be anything natural.

  Adonis’s psionic aura flared, faint sparks of sand lifting into the stale air. His voice was calm, absolute.

  “Whatever lives down here,” he said, “I’m going to kill it.”

  Kalen swallowed, tightening his grip on his bowstring.

  The ruin groaned in reply.

  ***

  The corridor narrowed as they descended, the walls closing in, the glyphs crawling brighter with every step. The air grew thicker, heavy with rot, until it clung to their tongues like spoiled meat.

  Kalen’s bowstring creaked softly as he drew, the void faintly shimmering along his arrowhead. “Feels like the whole place is watching us,” he muttered.

  “It is,” Adonis replied. His voice was calm, almost amused. “Words have eyes. And these are words written by something that wants us gone.”

  The tunnel bent sharply, and the ground cracked open ahead with a sudden hiss.

  Six-legged forms crawled from the fissures — scorpions larger than wagons, their shells jagged with black corruption, their stingers dripping trails of venom that burned the stone beneath. Their eyes glowed the same sickly green as the glyphs, and when they moved, the walls pulsed brighter as if feeding them.

  Kalen’s breath caught in his throat. “Those things are bigger than the one Barek killed.”

  Adonis raised his hand, sand curling up from the floor despite the suffocating air. “Barek isn’t here. You are.”

  The first scorpion lunged. Kalen loosed, his arrow curving unnaturally mid-flight to pierce an eye. The beast screeched, thrashing against the wall.

  Adonis flicked his wrist, and the sand surged upward, shaping into jagged spears that tore through another’s legs, pinning it to the floor. His eyes narrowed as he watched the corruption fight back — the glyphs on the walls pulsed harder, trying to undo the shape of his weapons.

  > Analysis, Vantage pulsed in his mind. Corruption actively counters psionic formations. Structural stability of constructs reduced by twenty-two percent.

  “Then we hit harder,” Adonis muttered.

  The pinned scorpion ripped free, hissing. Two more charged, claws snapping.

  Kalen void-stepped sideways in a blink, reappearing on higher stone. He drew three arrows in quick succession, each humming with distortion. They split mid-flight, twisting like serpents, burying into the beasts’ joints. The scorpions faltered, stumbling, their shells cracked by impossible angles.

  Adonis slammed his palm to the floor. Sand erupted beneath the largest one, forming a colossal spike that impaled it through the thorax, lifting it thrashing into the air before crumbling back into dust.

  Kalen dropped to one knee beside him, panting, sweat streaking his brow. “That’s… three down.”

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  Adonis smirked faintly. “Then the rest are just practice.”

  The last scorpion shrieked and lunged straight for him, stinger raised like a spear. Adonis didn’t move until it was a breath away. Then, with a thought, the sand surged upward in a massive hand, catching the stinger mid-strike. He twisted. The stinger snapped with a crack like bone, venom spilling across the stone.

  The beast writhed, flailing helplessly, before collapsing into stillness.

  The silence that followed was thick, broken only by Kalen’s ragged breathing.

  The glyphs on the walls pulsed once, brighter than before — like a heartbeat.

  Adonis straightened, brushing dust from his hands. His voice was low, calm, but edged with iron. “That was the welcome. Now let’s meet the host.”

  From deeper in the ruin came a sound — a scraping, dragging weight, too heavy, too vast, to be another scorpion.

  The Overseer was waiting.

  ***

  The chamber trembled as the Scorpion King crawled into the open. Its human torso hunched grotesquely, claws fused into its arms, while its lower half was a colossal arachnid body dripping venom that smoked against the stone. The glyphs along the walls pulsed brighter, feeding it like veins carrying poison.

  Then it spoke.

  “Akh’tar-seh… brother of the dunes…”

  Adonis froze. The words cut deep. The tongue of the Sphinx had not been heard since before the stars had shifted in their courses.

  Kalen’s voice cracked. “What did it say?”

  Adonis didn’t answer. His nostrils flared, psionic energy rippling from him.

  The Scorpion King’s mandibles clicked, its corrupted voice warping. “You are not whole. Not Sphinx. Not man. A fracture. A lie.”

  The truth stung. Adonis’s jaw clenched. He raised his hand and slammed it into the floor.

  Sand surged. Three Golem Titans rose from the earth, each towering higher than the chamber ceiling, their fists like boulders, their eyes glowing with psionic fire.

  Blood already trickled from Adonis’s nose. His body trembled with the strain, but his voice was steel.

  “Break him.”

  The Titans advanced.

  The Scorpion King shrieked, its claws scything. It caught the first Titan’s fist mid-strike and crushed it, venom eating through sand and stone alike. The Titan howled as its arm dissolved. The King reared and smashed its stinger down, impaling the second Titan through the chest. The golem shattered into a cascade of sand.

  Only one remained.

  Adonis staggered, blood dripping from his chin, veins bulging against his dark skin. His breath came ragged, each particle he held together threatening to unravel.

  Kalen loosed arrow after arrow, void energy bending their flight — but the King moved too fast, deflecting them with armored claws. One struck deep but barely slowed it.

  The last Titan grappled with the King, massive arms locking around its torso. The King shrieked, claws tearing chunks from its body. Adonis pressed harder, pouring every fragment of psionic strength into the construct.

  “Hold,” he rasped.

  The King twisted, venom spewing, and the Titan buckled.

  Kalen’s hands shook, void energy spiraling dangerously along his bowstring. His sister’s warnings echoed in his mind: Don’t draw too deep — the void eats back.

  He drew anyway.

  The arrow formed, not wood or steel but a shard of absence, a line of pure void. The air around it warped, stone trembling as if space itself were bending.

  Kalen loosed.

  The arrow screamed through the chamber, tearing reality with it. It struck the Scorpion King dead-center, ripping through its armored chest and bursting out its back in a storm of black ichor and void-light.

  The King shrieked, its legs buckling, ichor pouring across the glyphs. The last Titan collapsed with it, both crumbling into ruin.

  Adonis fell to one knee, his body convulsing, blood streaming from his nose and mouth. Kalen staggered beside him, eyes wide, his hands trembling from the backlash of void.

  The Scorpion King writhed, its mandibles clicking one last time.

  “We were thirteen… left behind… not born, but made. She called us her children. Your sister… Nefra-Tari. Even after twenty million years, her brood still remembers her name.”

  Its voice cracked, hissing through ichor. “We… the Corrupted Kings… will remake the desert in her image.”

  Then it collapsed, dissolving into black dust, the glyphs dimming into silence.

  Adonis’s vision blurred, his body shaking violently. Kalen grabbed his arm, panting. “You… you almost died back there.”

  Adonis wiped the blood from his lips, his smirk faint, bitter. “Almost. But not yet.”

  Vantage’s voice cut through his haze, flat and grim.

  > Confirmation: Nefra-Tari conducted experiments. Offspring remain — corrupted into rulers of beasts. Threat: systemic. Entity classification: Corrupted Kings.

  Adonis’s eyes burned faintly, his voice low. “Then I’ll kill every last one of her children.”

  ***

  The campfire shadows flickered across the ruin’s edge as the world snapped back into place.

  Kalen staggered, void smoke trailing from his hands, Adonis limp against his shoulder. He blinked them both into the Warband’s camp with a crack of air, nearly collapsing as the effort ripped through him.

  “Nyra!” His voice cracked, sharp with urgency. “Now!”

  The Phoenix girl knelt beside Adonis instantly, crimson fire spilling from her palms. The flames coiled around his wounds, burning away venom, knitting ruptured veins. The men drew back in awe, whispering, but Adonis’s eyes remained shut. His chest rose shallow, his lips stained red with blood.

  Because he was somewhere else.

  ***

  The mindscape stretched open.

  Adonis drifted through psionic haze, with Omari and Vantage tethered close, passengers to a memory far older than they could comprehend.

  The dunes shimmered under a different sky, alive with power. Colossal creatures prowled — titans of sand, serpents of fire, scorpions with shells that glowed like molten stone. This was the desert as it had been in the Psionic Age.

  And towering among them were Sphinxes. Whale-sized, falcon-headed, lion-bodied gods that bent the world with their glyphs.

  But not all were the same.

  One, smaller than the rest, had no wings. His mane was still young, his frame leaner, but his eyes burned with golden fire. He sat on the sand, watching, observing.

  Andonis.

  The cub that would one day call himself Adonis in a human body.

  Across from him loomed his sister.

  Nefra-Tari.

  Her feathers glowed faintly with psionic aura, wings unfurled as though to blot out the horizon. Before her lay a menagerie of broken creatures — lions fused with serpents, serpents mangled into scorpions, beasts stitched together with glyphs twisted against their nature. Most collapsed into heaps, their forms unstable, their screams muffled by the desert wind.

  Andonis growled low, his young mane bristling. “This is wrong. You twist what should not be touched.”

  Nefra-Tari’s eyes blazed with feverish obsession. “Wrong? No, brother. This is vision. The desert shapes only what already exists — but I will remake existence.”

  Her claw traced glowing lines in the sand, forcing a scorpion’s tail into the body of a serpent. The creature writhed, convulsed, and shattered into lifeless parts. She hissed in frustration.

  “I will perfect it,” she vowed. “I will weave flesh the way we weave sand. I will make beasts greater than us. Stronger than us.” Her gaze sharpened on her smaller brother. “One day, I will even learn to recreate the Sphinx. And when I do, I will become mother to a new age.”

  Andonis’s claws dug into the sand. “You’ll only destroy yourself.”

  But she only laughed, wings spreading wide enough to throw dunes into shadow. “You’ll see, lazy one. Sleep in your tombs while I build a legacy that endures forever.”

  Her words echoed, twisting with venomous pride.

  Omari whispered from the sidelines, stunned. “She wanted to remake you. She wasn’t satisfied with what she was.”

  Vantage’s voice was clinical, but edged with alarm.

  > Observation: experiments were unstable. Yet remnants persist. Conclusion: the ‘Corrupted Kings’ are byproducts of her obsession. Threat level: systemic.

  The younger Andonis snarled one last warning, but the dunes shifted, the memory breaking apart.

  ***

  Adonis jolted back to his body, gasping. Nyra’s fire flared bright, sealing the last wound, her brow furrowed with strain. His eyes opened slowly, the golden flecks dimmed but burning with ancient fury.

  One name slipped past his lips, a whisper that froze the camp.

  “Nefra-Tari.”

  The men stilled. Even the Ironbacks groaned uneasily in their pens.