The canvas snapped in Kai’s hands as the desert wind picked up, tugging against the stakes he was trying to drive into the ground. The ropes cut into his palms, leaving hot, raw burns that throbbed as sweat trickled down into them. He hissed and pulled harder, jerking the knot into place before leaning back on his heels. His shoulders ached from the long march, and sand coated his tongue, dry and bitter.

The tent was oversized—more pavilion than shelter, its heavy silk panels far too ornate for a desert camp. He hated putting the thing up. Every night it was the same fight with the wind, the ropes, the weight of the fabric. Every night his back bent until it felt like it might snap, all so that a pampered lord could sleep under velvet while the rest of them curled on mats with sand in their teeth.

“All set up for the King’s little bitch?”

Kai turned, teeth gritted. Reymond was leaning on a spear a few paces away, grinning like a wolf in the flickering firelight. The firepits scattered across the camp painted him in shifting golds and reds, the shadows lengthening across his smirking face. Reymond was broad-shouldered, hair cropped short, and always carried himself with a swagger that grated on Kai when the man was in a mood.

Kai tugged the final cord taut and answered with a crooked smile of his own. “Every damned night,” he muttered. “His Highness insists this monstrosity be built wherever we stop. A pain in the ass, but…” He shrugged, dusting sand from his knees. “What the King commands, the King gets. And if Zilo wants his lord to sleep beneath silk while the rest of us choke on dust, then so be it.”

Reymond chuckled low in his throat. “Why guard him at all? We haven’t even reached the outlands yet. Don’t tell me the great untouchable Zilo has a fear.” He pushed off from his spear, grin widening. “The man who stares down generals and kings alike suddenly needs a tent and twenty guards to soothe his nerves?”

Kai tied off the rope with a sharp jerk and straightened. He felt the grit grind between his teeth as he gave a humorless smile. “Of course he has a fear. Everyone does.” His eyes slid toward the pavilion. Its silken walls swelled and snapped in the wind, a gaudy bruise of color against the dunes. “But that isn’t what interests me. What interests me is why we’re out here at all.”

Reymond cocked a brow. “Orders are orders.”

“Yes.” Kai lowered his voice, feeling the words drag in his chest. “But think. The outlands? We’ve never been sent this far before. Never ordered to march beyond the border—only to ride patrols along the edge, and even those barely last an hour.”

The silence stretched. Reymond’s smirk softened into something almost pensive. He studied Kai for a moment, eyes glinting with firelight, before brushing it off with a laugh and a wink. “Don’t worry, Kai. We’ll find out soon enough.” He gave a careless wave and sauntered toward the nearest pit, where soldiers were already passing skins of wine and trading crude jokes.

Kai stayed behind.

The wind sharpened, carrying with it a sting of sand. It hissed across the camp like a whisper, burrowing into armor joints, eyes, mouths. He pulled his cloak tighter around his shoulders and turned toward the border city’s lights in the distance.

Beyond those walls stretched the outlands: endless miles of barren earth, scorched ruins, and stories mothers told their children to keep them from wandering too far. A place of rebels. A place of ghosts. A place no one returned from.

He hated his rounds outside those walls.

The city itself clung to life like a dying man clung to breath. He could see it even from here: a patchwork of crumbling roofs and half-lit alleys, smoke curling from cookfires that burned more straw than wood. The people were gaunt, faces carved with hunger and grief. Children scurried barefoot through the dust, their bellies hollow, their eyes too large for their faces. Mothers carried jars of brackish water, their shoulders stooped. Men leaned on broken tools, backs bent from labor that never paid enough to eat.

Every time Kai patrolled those streets, he felt the weight of it pressing down on him. It wasn’t the smell of waste or the silence that sickened him most—it was the despair. A despair so heavy it clung to the walls, the air, even the children’s laughter, when they managed to find any.

He wished—gods, how he wished—the royal family would look beyond their jeweled walls. Do something. Anything.

Instead, they paraded in silks, feasted on platters groaning with fruit, and obsessed over their damned reptiles.

Kai’s jaw tightened. He turned back toward the pavilion, eyes narrowing.

Dragons, the royals called them. Sacred creatures. Gifts from the gods themselves. The bond between dragon and bloodline was supposed to prove their right to rule. Proof of divine choice.

He nearly spat.

They were beasts. Great, scaled beasts that could be tamed and ridden—dangerous, yes, but animals all the same. The palace draped them in gold and pearls, fed them on whole calves while people starved, and called it holy. He saw only delusion.

He remembered the first time he’d been dragged to one of those ceremonies. The pit had been filled with firelight, the dragon coiled in the sand, wings spread wide like sails. Its eyes glowed like molten metal as the young Prince approached, his hand trembling when he laid it against the creature’s snout. The crowd had erupted in tears and cheers, bowing so low Kai thought they’d scrape the skin from their foreheads.

He had felt nothing. No awe. No reverence. Just pity—pity for the blinded people, pity for the boy who thought the monster loved him, pity for a kingdom obsessed with scales while its citizens wasted away.

The wind snapped the pavilion’s silk panels hard enough to crack the stakes in their sockets. Kai cursed softly and pressed the nearest one deeper into the sand with his boot. The desert wind would tear the whole damned thing down if it wanted to. He almost hoped it would.

Bootsteps crunched behind him, steady and practiced. One of the sentries nodded in greeting as he passed, on his way to relieve the watch at the north edge. Kai returned the nod and stayed where he was, cloak pulled tight, eyes locked on the horizon.

The desert stretched into nothing. No trees, no water, no movement. Just endless dunes rolling into the dark. And yet he couldn’t shake the feeling that something was out there, watching. Something waiting for them.

Orders were orders. But no commander had ever sent them this deep before. No battalion had been ordered to the outlands without reason. Whatever they were here for, it wasn’t Zilo’s comfort or the King’s peace of mind.

Something was hidden in the wastes. Something worth the risk.

Kai told himself he didn’t care. He was a soldier. He followed orders. But the thought gnawed at him like hunger.

He rubbed the raw rope burns on his palms and tilted his head back to the sky.

The stars blurred behind a thin veil of dust. The night stretched empty, dull and cloudless. And then he saw it.

The moon.

It hung lower than it should have, pale and swollen. But it wasn’t its size that froze him—it was its color. Not white. Not silver. Not the faint gold of harvest moons. No.

Tonight the moon was pink. A muted, rose-tinged glow that bled across its edges, staining the night like a wound behind a veil.

Kai frowned, his stomach tightening. He blinked once, then again. Still pink. Still wrong.

The desert wind howled, rattling the stakes, dragging grit across his skin. His men laughed around the firepits, trading crude jokes, their voices distant, hollow. But Kai stood rooted, his gaze fixed on the uncanny sky.

A pink moon.

He had never seen anything like it.

And in the hollow of his chest, he felt the first stirrings of unease.