The Surveyor's Warning

The world came apart in silence. One heartbeat you were checking your bearing against the noon sun, the next the stone beneath your boots groaned like a dying beast, and the desert floor simply dropped away. You hit the slope of a ravine that had not existed a moment before, tumbling through a haze of dust and gravel, your surveyor's case spinning out of reach.

When you came to rest, the silence was absolute. You lay on your back, staring up at a crack of pale sky far above, and the weight of it—the wrongness of it—settled into your bones. The Empty Quarter did not shift. It was rock and sand and merciless heat, and you had mapped a hundred miles of it in the last month alone.

You pushed yourself up. Your crew was gone. Not scattered—gone, swallowed by the earth as if they had never been.

Stumbling to your feet, you found their tracks ending at a wall of raw stone. And there, carved with a blade's edge into the rock, was a sigil: the Crown's survey mark, quartered and struck through with the previous expedition's counter-sign. Decades old. Impossible.

Beneath it, in fresh-cut letters that made your blood go cold: You're still alive. Good. Don't trust the marks ahead.