The sun was a white eye in a sea of fire. Sand peeled off the dunes like smoke, the heat rising in waves so thick it hurt to breathe.
Leo, Aria, and Theo were running.
Their boots pounded the burning sand, each step heavier than the last. The bunker behind them—now half-swallowed by shifting dunes—had become a deathtrap. Their rations were nearly gone. They hadn't had clean water in two days. And now, the monster that chased them before had returned—with another.
"They're gaining!" Aria yelled, glancing back. The massive, black-limbed creature bounded over dunes like a spider on fire, its skin slick and wrong, its twin heads screeching in broken stereo.
"No one look back!" Leo shouted. "Eyes on the tower!"
Ahead, the jagged spire jutted from the desert like a needle piercing the sky. Black, ancient, cracked by time. But it was hope. Maybe the only hope left.
Theo stumbled on a loose stone. "I swear—if I survive this, I'm never going hiking again!"
"This isn't hiking!" Aria snapped, dragging him up. "This is dying creatively!"
They reached the base of the tower just as the shadows of the creatures loomed over the dunes behind them.
"DO SOMETHING!" Theo screamed, slapping the black surface of the tower.
"Wait—wait!" Aria fumbled with her light, then slammed it against the wall. "I saw something—right there!"
A pulse. The wall shimmered. Lines of alien script flickered across the stone.
Then—crack. The ground beneath them rumbled. A seam split in the base of the tower, and a spiral staircase slowly revealed itself, twisting upward into darkness.
Leo shouted, "Inside, now!"
They rushed in as the monsters screeched, clawing the outside. But the tower's stone sealed shut behind them with a boom, sealing them in thick silence.
For a moment, no one breathed.
Then—crack.
The floor beneath Leo gave out.
"Leo!" Aria screamed as he plummeted into darkness.
"NO!" Theo reached out, but the hole sealed up again, as if nothing had happened.
They stood frozen, staring at the spot where Leo had vanished.
"He's alive," Theo whispered. "He has to be."
"We need to find him," Aria said, her voice cracking.
Theo nodded. "Then we climb. Maybe the answer's up there."
And so they climbed—step by step into the tower's throat, the walls whispering with forgotten echoes, the weight of fear and sand still clinging to their skin.
Somewhere far below, Leo was alone.