The Second Sun rose like a wound across the sky.
It had been three years since it first appeared, but no one had quite grown accustomed to it. The people of the South still called it a curse, an omen-a harbinger of the end times. And perhaps they weren't wrong. As its twin light pierced the heavens, the world had changed. It wasn't just the weather, though the storms had become fiercer and the seasons more erratic. It wasn't just the animals, though many species had either vanished or adapted in ways that defied nature. It wasn't even the earth itself, which had shifted and groaned as if waking from an age-long slumber.
It was the way the sky burned. How the air crackled with a charge of energy that hummed beneath your skin. How the world itself seemed to hold its breath in the seconds before the Second Sun's rays hit the earth each day, and in the moments after it vanished behind the horizon.
We were all waiting for something. A cataclysm. A rebirth. Or perhaps the final unraveling of it all.
But for me, in that small, sun-scorched village on the edge of the Dunes, waiting wasn't enough. I had seen the way the sun's light twisted the world around us-how it changed the people, how it turned the land to dust, how it sparked a fire in my blood that I couldn't ignore. The city of Erinal-our last bastion of power, knowledge, and wealth-had fallen silent after the Second Sun's first rise. The great monuments of our ancestors, their temples and towers, stood abandoned, left to the shifting sands and the slow crawl of time. The world's great nations had fractured, and in their place were kingdoms born of desperation, struggling to survive under the unblinking gaze of the twin suns.
And now. . . there was only us.
I stood at the edge of the Dunes, watching the second sun dip below the horizon, casting the sky in strange hues of violet and crimson. The sand shifted beneath my boots, dry and fine, like the ashes of a world that had long since been forgotten. Behind me, the village of Telyos was little more than a collection of half-constructed homes, tattered banners flapping in the wind, and broken spirits clinging to the hope that one day, the world would return to its natural order.
