A landscape that was ash white on an ash white sky.
That was the first thing Alaric saw.
"What is this place?" he wondered aloud.
"Dust, it seems sir" James answered, reliable as always.
"That wouldn't be terrible, if it weren't going to the horizons in every direction." Alaric replied.
It was an ash white desert, not made of sand – no but made of dust. Think of the white dust in a leftover firepit. That was what was around Alaric and his first golem.
"No wind, no sounds, no life – even the damn sun in this place has the same color." Alaric muttered already analyzing his surroundings in detail.
There was no mountain range in the distance like on Arrakis. No rising tension in the area, as if a killer was waiting for Alaric to make a mistake. The temperature wasn't even really hot– it was just lukewarm. Everything just felt dead.
"What is this place," he wondered "has it always been like this or has something happened here?"
Then he started walking.
Not necessarily with a goal in mind. He just wanted to look around – see if there even was something to be found in this dreary place.
Dust clung to his boots like a second skin. It didn't feel like dust—it was too fine, too dry. It whispered beneath his steps, barely disturbed, as if the land itself refused to acknowledge intrusion.
James followed behind in absolute silence, his footsteps unnaturally light despite his weight. The golem's arcane sensors swiveled periodically, scanning the environment with quiet glyph pulses, but returned no feedback.
No mana signature. No electromagnetic frequency. No vibration.
Nothing.
It was a void without being a void. A graveyard of possibility.
Alaric stopped after what felt like half an hour. He knelt and sifted a pinch of the pale ash through his fingers. It was coarse, then powder, then gone—evaporating in the air like memory fading. He frowned.
"I think this place is wrong," he said quietly. "Not dead. But... erased."
"Clarify, sir?" James asked, tone modulated to match the stillness.
Alaric stood again, eyes narrowed. "There's no decay. No fossilization. This dust isn't the aftermath of time—it's the residue of removal. Something powerful didn't let the world die. It scrubbed it."
He looked up.
Even the sky was featureless. No clouds. No celestial bodies. No gradient. Just... more of that same eternal pallor.
It was starting to gnaw at the edges of his mind. The absence. Not threatening, not overt. Just... relentless.
James stopped beside him. "I've detected a distortion," the golem said. "Approx. 2.7 kilometers northeast. Not mana-based. Not material. Possibly... metaphysical."
Alaric's eyes sharpened. "That's something."
He nodded once and resumed walking, the windless world swallowing the sound of his steps before they could echo. Even the act of breathing felt subdued, like his lungs weren't fully convinced there was air to work with.
As they crested a shallow rise—if one could even call it that—Alaric finally saw something.
A crack in midair.
A single, jagged fracture in the otherwise untouched terrain. Like someone had split glass with a chisel. From it, light bled—not bright, not warm. Just a faint, flickering pulse of gray-blue, like moonlight refracted through oil.
Alaric stopped at around 12 meters of distance of the fissure, staring it down.
"Sir..." James said, voice suddenly hushed, even for him.
"I see it," Alaric whispered.
In the depths of that crack... something moved. Slowly. Patiently. Not like a creature, but like a thought being remembered. An impression.
It wasn't alive. Not in the way he understood it.
But it noticed them.
The Vault pulsed once—then again. Urgently. No meaning. Just a warning.
Alaric stepped back. Just one step. Not out of fear—out of respect.
"This isn't just a broken world," he said. "It's a memory of one."
He turned to James. "Mark the location. We're coming back."
The golem nodded.
"But not in the near future," Alaric added, eyes still on the glowing fracture. "I need to know what kind of being has the power to wipe a world clean and leave only a whisper behind."
And with that, they turned and walked back into the dust. The sky never darkened. The silence never broke.
But behind them, the crack pulsed once more—just enough to suggest that it, too, remembered.
They walked in silence.
There was no sunset – it stayed in the same place since he entered this place, but Alaric felt time pass — like a weight in his bones, not marked by shadow or rhythm, but by the slow crawl of awareness pressing down on his shoulders. His mind wandered, something about that fracture they left behind them kept gnawing at him, like it had slipped an idea into his mind when he wasn't looking.
The Vault had not pulsed again since the warning.
That alone told him something was different.
"James," he said as they crested the crestless horizon again, "bring up our dimensional anchor log. Timestamp everything we just saw. Assign it as 'Ash world.' I want a return protocol in place."
"Logged," the golem replied, its voice tinny against the unending quiet. "Dimensional marked as structurally stable but ontologically uncertain."
Alaric didn't answer. His thoughts were still in the crack.
A memory of a world.
That's what he had said.
But now, walking further and feeling the nothingness cling to his robes like dry snow, another word took root in his mind:
Warning.
This world wasn't just dead. It was proof. Evidence of something — or someone — with the power to unwrite entire realities and leave behind only ambience. He had seen decay before. Destruction. Rot.
This wasn't that.
This was intent.
He stopped suddenly.
The ground beneath his boots shifted. Not deeply, not violently. Just... slightly.
Like it was adjusting for him.
He looked down. The white dust had taken on a strange sheen—barely visible. Barely real. His boots didn't sink. They hovered.
"James," he said quietly, "check our dimensional footing. Are we still fully anchored?"
"Confirming..."
A pause. Long. Too long.
Then, James replied.
"Unknown. Reality signature is present, but partially refracted. We may be walking through a filtered layer — a low-resonance dimension. Possibly... dreamlike."
Alaric hissed through his teeth.
Of course.
He knelt and tapped the dust again, this time infusing a tiny pulse of mental magic into the contact.
The world didn't react.
But he did.
The dust vibrated against his magic like a mirror. And in that moment — not vision, but impression — Alaric saw something.
A shape.
A glyph.
A circle.
It wasn't in the dust. It wasn't physical. But it was beneath this place, imprinted like a metaphysical scar — a ritual so vast, so absolute, that it had erased the memory of matter.
He stood sharply, breath held.
"That crack back there... wasn't a fracture," he muttered. "It was a leftover. A place where the erasure slipped. Like a leftover word from a page that has been removed by an eraser."
James, unblinking, shifted his stance. "Do you wish to return, sir?"
"Yes," Alaric said firmly. "I don't want to poke too hard at a sealed scar without knowing what made it."
He looked up again at the blank sky.
"This place is a grave," he whispered. "And whatever buried the world here might still be watching."
He raised his hand and drew a short glyph in the air — a tracing marker, anchored to his own magical thread. It shimmered briefly before vanishing.
"We'll come back," he said again. "Later. Prepared."
They began their return march to a safe distance from the fracture, the dust crunching like dried bones beneath their feet.
As they walked, the Vault pulsed once more — and this time, it whispered something in response to the glyph embedded in Alaric's mind:
"Here lies Thought."
Alaric shivered.
And for the first time in a long while, he felt like he was walking on the edge of something so much larger than himself that even knowing its name might cost him more than he could afford.
He didn't stop walking.
But he didn't forget that phrase, either.
"Here lies Thought."