Chapter 1 The Shatterlands

POV: Phoenix Kade

The setting sun bleeds across the Shatterlands like an open wound.

I wake to the familiar gnaw of hunger, that old companion who has been with me since I drew my first breath in this godforsaken place. The pain twists through my gut, sharp and insistent, reminding me that if I don't find something to eat tonight, I won't see tomorrow's dawn.

Tomorrow. What a strange word that is out here. The other scavengers don't think about tomorrow. Tomorrow is a luxury we can't afford, a dream for men with full bellies and safe walls around them.

I crawl out of my burrow, and the scorched ground burns through the rags wrapped around my feet. The ruins stretch out before me, ancient and broken. Crumbling walls jut up from the sand like broken teeth, and everywhere there are bones. Some human, some not. The buildings that once stood proud here are nothing but rubble now, buried under sand and time and the weight of all that's been forgotten.

The wind howls through my tangled black hair, and I'm so thin, so damned thin, that I feel like it might just pick me up and carry me away. My skin is rough and scarred, marked by fourteen or fifteen years of surviving in a place that wants me dead. But my eyes are sharp. I've kept them that way because the moment they go dull is the moment I become like all the others, and then I'm as good as dead already.

I think of the old man.

He was still breathing when I fell asleep last night. Barely, but breathing. I told myself that meant something. I told myself he'd be there in the morning, same as always, complaining about the heat and muttering to himself in that low, steady voice that used to drive me half mad and now I'd give anything to hear again.

He wasn't there.

I found him curled on his side, one hand tucked under his cheek like he'd just drifted off to sleep and decided not to come back. His face was peaceful. Out here, that's rarer than water.

The last thing he said to me was three nights ago, when the fever had him talking in circles. He grabbed my wrist with fingers that still had surprising strength in them and looked at me with those pale, cloudy eyes.

"Don't let them make an animal of you, boy," he said. "That's what they want. That's what this place wants. You keep that thing inside you, that human thing, you keep it breathing no matter what."

I didn't know what to say to that. I never did with him.

So I just said, "I will."

He let go of my wrist and closed his eyes, and that was the last real conversation we ever had.

I buried him this morning, which makes him luckier than most. At least he won't end up on some meat merchant's hook, his flesh cured and smoked and sold to the desperate and starving. I used my hands and a flat piece of broken stone and I dug until my palms bled, and I put him in the ground properly, the way he once told me people used to do it in the First World.

He was the one who taught me to read the script of the First World. He told me stories about the time before everything turned to ash and blood. He collected things nobody else wanted, books with faded pages, paintings where you could barely make out the colors anymore, tools whose purposes had been forgotten. I was the only one who cared to listen to him, and he was the only one who cared whether I lived or died.

Now he's in the ground and I'm alone, same as always, except now it feels different. Before, I was alone with someone waiting back at the burrow. Now I'm just alone.

Out here in the Shatterlands, people will do anything to survive. They'll eat anything. I've seen it, and I understand it, even if the old man tried to teach me different. He said that when mankind throws away its last shred of decency, that's when we're truly damned. Maybe he was right. Maybe we're damned already.

I stand over the mound of dirt for a moment, not praying, because I don't know how, but just standing. Giving him that much at least.

Then I pick up my sharpened metal shard, tuck it into my belt, and walk.

The hunger makes my legs shake as I move through the ruins. I'm fourteen, maybe fifteen years old, and I feel like I'm a hundred. The scavengers picked this place clean long ago. Finding food is like finding water in a sandstorm, possible, but not likely.

I sit down hard after an hour, my strength gone. The sun is sinking below the horizon, painting everything red. A hawk circles overhead, riding the wind currents, free and wild.

That's why I chose the name Phoenix. I wanted to be like those birds, soaring above all this misery. But that was just a child's dream, wasn't it? Just another stupid hope in a world that crushes hope like boots crush beetles.

The old man used to say hope was the only thing worth carrying.

I'm starting to think he was wrong about that too.