CHAPTER FIVE
The Sandskimmer tore out of Aethelburg’s eastern gate as the sun clawed its way over the broken skyline. Red paint still smelled sharp and new, a defiant wound against the colorless desert waiting ahead. Gambit sat in the driver’s seat, hands loose on the controls, eyes already distant. Kaelen rode beside him in the passenger cage, silent as ever. Jax had taken the rear bench, arms crossed tight, staring at the back of Gambit’s head like she could burn a hole through it.
The city shrank behind them quickly, swallowed by heat haze and distance. No one spoke for the first hour. The only sound was the low growl of the engine and the constant hiss of sand sliding across the hull.
Jax finally broke the silence, voice flat.
“You’re already planning how you’re going to die out here, aren’t you?”
Gambit didn’t turn around. “Not planning. Just not ruling it out.”
She let out a bitter laugh that contained no humor at all. “Of course. Because that’s what you do. You decide the rest of us should suffer, and then you get to be noble about it.”
Kaelen’s head turned slightly, but he stayed quiet.
Gambit’s fingers tightened on the controls, just enough for Jax to notice.
“You want to do this now?” he asked quietly.
“When else? When you’re too busy bleeding flowers out your mouth to listen?”
The desert began to change.
At first it was small things. A dune that shifted shape when they weren’t looking at it. A patch of sand that reflected the sky in the wrong color. Then the road itself started to forget what it was supposed to be. The hard-packed surface they were following began to ripple, like heat haze given weight and malice.
Gambit felt it in his chest.
The Corpse Flower stirred, slow and heavy, like something waking up inside a grave. A low, volcanic warmth spread behind his sternum. Not the full detonation yet. Just the warning.
“Something’s coming,” he said.
Jax leaned forward. “No shit. I can feel the stabilizers fighting already.”
Kaelen’s hand moved to the gauntlet on his right arm, checking the fit without looking away from the horizon.
The world ahead fractured.
The sky, which had been a washed-out exhausted blue, suddenly split into shifting bands of violet, bruised green, and a deep wet red that had no business existing in daylight. The horizon didn’t blur — it melted, the line between land and sky becoming something soft and uncertain, like wax left too close to a flame.
Gambit felt it in his chest before he saw it clearly.
The Corpse Flower reacted instantly, blooming low and hot behind his ribs. Roots pressed against the inside of his sternum like something testing the bars of its cage.
“That’s it,” Jax said quietly. “The Shimmer.”
Kaelen’s eyes narrowed. “I thought it was just stories.”
“It was,” Gambit said. “Until it wasn’t.”
The Shimmer had once been a thin, unstable seam. Over the decades the blooms had eaten at it and the Fracture had fed it until the seam rotted open into a miles-wide zone where reality had simply given up. The rules changed every few seconds. Gravity forgot which way was down. Time stuttered. Matter remembered it had once been something else and decided to become it again.
Gambit slowed the Sandskimmer to a crawl as the first tendrils reached them.
The air in front of the vehicle began to ripple, not like heat haze, but like something breathing. The ground under the wheels turned soft for three seconds, then hardened into black glass before cracking back into sand. A flock of birds that had no business being this far from water flew overhead in a perfect spiral, then inverted mid-flight and became a shower of black feathers that turned to ash before they hit the ground.
Jax’s hands were already moving across the navigation array.
“Stabilizers are fighting. I’m compensating, but the matrices keep rewriting themselves.”
Kaelen’s gauntleted hand rested on the inside of the hull, ready.
Gambit kept his eyes on the shifting road. He could feel the threads here — thousands of them, tangled and screaming. He reached out with his mind and touched the nearest one.
The pain was immediate and vicious.
It hit him like a spike driven through the center of his chest. The Corpse Flower detonated into full bloom, roots digging deeper than they had any right to go. Blood filled his mouth, thick and metallic and wrong, tasting of volcanic soil and rotting sweetness. His vision fractured. He saw the Shimmer from the inside — a screaming labyrinth of every possible law of physics happening at once.
He pulled.
The thread resisted. Gambit clenched his jaw and pulled harder, forcing tangled Causality back into something that resembled a straight line even as the backlash tore through him. His nose started bleeding in earnest. A thin line of blood ran from the corner of his left eye.
The Sandskimmer lurched as the ground beneath them remembered it was supposed to be solid for at least a few seconds.
Jax’s voice came sharp from the back. “Left. Now.”
Gambit twisted the controls. The vehicle slewed hard as a section of the road in front of them simply ceased to exist, replaced by a patch of living fog that screamed when the wheels touched it. The Sandskimmer’s right side dipped violently. Kaelen braced one massive hand against the frame and pressed his gauntleted palm flat against the inside of the hull. The metal under his hand turned black and crystalline for a moment, then stabilized.
They kept moving.
The Shimmer pressed against the vehicle from all sides, testing the shielding. A section of the hull near Jax’s head briefly became transparent, showing the desert as it had been three centuries ago — green, alive, untouched. Then it snapped back to red metal with a sound like breaking bone. A low, wet wind moaned through the vents, carrying the scent of ozone and rotting flowers.
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Gambit kept pulling on the threads, one after another, forcing small pockets of coherence into the chaos. Each one cost him. His hands were shaking. Blood dripped steadily from his chin onto the console. The Corpse Flower burned so hot in his chest he could feel it in his teeth.
Jax swore under her breath as she fought the navigation array, compensating for elemental matrices that kept rewriting themselves mid-calculation.
Kaelen said nothing. He simply kept his hand on the hull, feeding stability into the machine through sheer, stubborn Substance.
They drove like that for what felt like hours but was probably only twenty minutes — Gambit bleeding and pulling threads, Jax keeping the machine from tearing itself apart, Kaelen anchoring them to something that resembled reality.
Then, slowly, the pressure began to ease.
The colors ahead stopped shifting quite so violently. The ground under the wheels stopped trying to become other things. The air stopped tasting like it wanted to rewrite their lungs.
Gambit let go of the last thread and the backlash hit him like a fist to the sternum. He doubled over the controls, coughing hard, something dark and wet splattering across the console. His vision grayed at the edges.
The vehicle rolled to a stop on solid, ordinary sand.
For several long seconds, no one spoke.
Then Jax’s voice came from the back, low and shaking with something that wasn’t quite fear.
“You almost killed us. Again.”
Gambit didn’t look up. Blood dripped from his mouth onto his sleeve.
“I know.”
Kaelen’s voice was quiet, steady, and somehow worse than Jax’s anger.
“You’re bleeding from your eyes.”
“I know.”
Jax leaned forward until her face was right beside his. Her voice was vicious and tired and far too honest.
“Next time you decide to hold the entire fucking Shimmer together with your bare hands, you warn us first. Or I swear to every dead god left listening out here, I will drag your bleeding carcass out of this thing and leave you for the blooms to finish.”
Gambit finally turned his head. His eyes were bloodshot, the amber almost swallowed by red.
“You won’t.”
Jax stared at him for a long moment. Something moved behind her eyes — old pain, old trust, old resentment, all of it still alive and still bleeding.
“No,” she said quietly. “I probably won’t. And that’s the part I fucking hate.”
She sat back.
Gambit wiped his mouth with a trembling hand and looked out at the horizon.
The Shimmer was behind them now.
The Eastern Desert waited ahead — vast, lawless, and hungry.
They drove on.
The deeper desert did not announce itself with drama. It simply became *more*. The dunes grew taller and more erratic, some of them leaning at impossible angles as if gravity had grown bored. The sky settled into a permanent bruised twilight. Every few miles the ground would flicker between states — sand, then glass, then something that looked like wet bone before snapping back to sand again.
Gambit drove without speaking. His hands had stopped shaking, but the dried blood on his face had cracked in places. The Corpse Flower sat low and sullen in his chest, roots still aching from the Shimmer. It hadn’t quieted. It was simply… waiting.
Jax hadn’t moved from her curled position in the back. She stared out the viewport with the exhausted expression of someone who had finally run out of anger and was now left with whatever came after.
Kaelen remained steady, one hand resting on the inside of the hull like he was keeping the entire machine from deciding to become something else.
They drove for another two hours before the third bloom found them.
It didn’t tear the world open. It reached inside.
Gambit felt it first as a pressure behind his eyes — not pain, exactly, but the sudden, terrible sensation of being *watched* from within his own skull. The Corpse Flower reacted instantly, blooming so hard and fast that he gasped and nearly lost control of the vehicle. Roots drove upward this time, pressing against the inside of his throat, his jaw, the backs of his eyes.
“Stop,” he managed. “Something’s—”
The Sandskimmer’s interior lights flickered.
Then the memories started.
Not his.
Jax made a small, choked sound in the back. Kaelen’s hand tightened on the hull until the metal groaned.
Gambit saw it too.
For three impossible seconds, he was inside Jax’s head.
He saw her at nineteen, standing in the rain outside a half-collapsed workshop in Aethelburg, waiting for someone who never came. He felt the exact shape of the hope she had carried that night and the exact shape of the hole it left when it finally died. He saw her five years ago, the night Gambit disappeared after the regulator incident — the way she had gone back to the hangar every morning for three weeks, checking the door like a fool, telling herself she was only going to work. He felt how much she had hated herself for still caring.
Then it was gone.
The bloom moved on.
Kaelen made a low, rough sound — the first truly pained noise Gambit had ever heard from him. For a split second Gambit saw through Kaelen’s eyes: a forge fire, a child’s hand reaching toward it, a woman’s voice screaming a name that had been taken from the world. Then it was gone too.
The bloom didn’t want to destroy them.
It wanted them to *remember* each other.
Gambit’s hands were shaking so hard on the controls that the Sandskimmer began to drift. He forced it to a stop, killed the engine, and sat there breathing through his teeth while the Corpse Flower slowly, reluctantly, pulled its roots back from places they had no right to be.
The desert outside was quiet again.
For a long time, none of them moved.
Jax was the first to speak. Her voice was hoarse.
“Did you see it too?”
Gambit didn’t turn around. He couldn’t yet. His throat still felt full of roots.
“Yeah.”
Kaelen’s voice was low. “All of it.”
Jax let out a shaky breath that might have been a laugh or might have been the start of something worse.
“Great,” she said. “So now you know exactly how pathetic I was. How many times I waited for you like some idiot who still thought you might come back for a reason that wasn’t about needing something from me.”
Gambit finally turned his head. His face was pale under the dried blood.
“Jax—”
“Don’t.” She cut him off, but there was no real heat in it this time. Just exhaustion. “Don’t say you’re sorry. You’re not. You’d do it again. You *will* do it again. That’s who you are.”
She looked out the viewport at the broken, breathing desert.
“I just didn’t expect the desert to make me watch it happen to myself.”
Kaelen shifted in his seat. The big man looked at both of them, then spoke quietly.
“It showed me my daughter.”
The words landed heavy in the small space.
Gambit turned to look at him. Jax went very still.
Kaelen didn’t elaborate. He didn’t need to. The bloom had already shown them enough — the shape of the loss, the weight of it, the way it had carved itself into the man’s bones and never left.
After a moment, Kaelen added, almost gently:
“It wanted us to see each other’s wounds. Maybe so we’d understand why we’re all still here. Or maybe just because it could.”
Gambit wiped fresh blood from the corner of his mouth with the back of his hand. His voice was rough.
“We should keep moving. Before it decides to show us more.”
Jax didn’t argue. She just nodded once and leaned back against the bench, arms still wrapped around her knees.
Kaelen reached over and rested one heavy hand briefly on Gambit’s shoulder — not comfort, exactly, but acknowledgment. Then he withdrew it and looked forward again.
Gambit started the engine.
The Sandskimmer rolled on into the deeper desert, carrying three people who now knew too much about each other and still had a long way to go.
They drove for another two hours before the landscape began to change in a way that felt deliberate.
The dunes grew smaller. The ground became flatter, more cracked, as if something enormous had once pressed down here and never fully lifted. In the distance, jagged black spires rose from the sand — not natural formations, but the broken remains of something that had been built long before the Sundering. The air grew heavier. Thicker. Like it was waiting for permission to become something worse.
Gambit slowed the Sandskimmer.
“We’re close,” he said quietly.
Jax didn’t look at him. “Close to what?”
“The Chalice’s influence. The land starts remembering it was once something else out here. The blooms get meaner. More personal.”
Kaelen’s voice was low. “How do you know?”
Gambit didn’t answer right away. When he did, his voice was rough.
“Because I’ve been here before. Once. A long time ago. Before I knew what I was.”
He didn’t offer more. Neither of them asked.
They crested a low rise and the world opened up.
Below them stretched a vast, circular depression in the desert — easily two miles across — where the sand had been scoured away down to black, glassy stone. In the center of the depression stood the ruins of what had once been a temple or a tomb or something that had served both purposes. The structure was mostly gone, reduced to jagged black pillars and collapsed walls, but the shape of it still suggested reverence. Or fear.
And above the ruins, hanging in the air like a wound that refused to close, was a shimmer of violet and gold light — faint, but unmistakable.
The Weeper’s Chalice was down there. Or what was left of the place that had once held it.
Gambit brought the Sandskimmer to a stop at the edge of the rise.
For a long moment, none of them spoke.
Then Jax’s voice came from the back, quieter than before.
“This is it, isn’t it?”
“Yeah.”
Kaelen studied the ruins below. “It feels like it’s waiting for something.”
“It is,” Gambit said. “Or someone.”
He killed the engine. The sudden silence was heavy.
Jax unfolded herself from the back bench and moved forward until she was between the two front seats. She didn’t look at Gambit. She looked at the ruins.
“You’re going to go down there,” she said. It wasn’t a question.
“I have to.”
“And you’re going to bleed for it.”
“Probably.”
Jax was quiet for a long moment. When she spoke again, her voice had lost some of its edge.
“Five years ago, when you disappeared… I thought you were dead. Then I hoped you were. Because if you were dead, at least it meant you hadn’t just decided I wasn’t worth coming back for.”
Gambit didn’t turn to look at her. He kept his eyes on the ruins.
“I didn’t come back because I didn’t know how to look you in the eye after what I did to your work. And because I knew if I came back, I’d ask you for something else eventually. I always do.”
Jax let out a short, bitter breath.
“Yeah. You do.”
She paused. Then, quieter:
“But I still got in the fucking Sandskimmer.”
Gambit finally turned his head. His eyes were bloodshot, the amber almost gone.
“I know.”
Kaelen spoke without looking at either of them.
“We’re here now. All three of us. The desert already tried to show us why we shouldn’t be. It didn’t work.”
He looked at Gambit.
“So stop pretending you’re doing this alone. You’re not. Not anymore.”
Gambit didn’t answer right away. He looked back out at the ruins, at the faint violet-gold light hanging above them like a question that had been waiting a very long time to be asked.
Then he nodded once.
“Tomorrow,” he said. “We go down at first light. When the blooms are quieter.”
Jax didn’t argue. She just nodded and leaned back against the bench again, arms wrapped around her knees.
Kaelen stayed where he was, one hand still resting on the inside of the hull like he was keeping the entire broken world from swallowing them whole.
Outside, the desert breathed.
And somewhere beneath the black glass and broken stone, the Weeper’s Chalice waited — patient, ancient, and already beginning to weep for the man who had finally come to find it.