We keep the Ferredons at a walk. Slow, deliberate, each stride placed soft on the sand. Nobody needs to explain why. The vibration of a gallop is an invitation, and we've already RSVP'd to one Worm attack today.
The silence between us has texture now. Not the comfortable kind from before the ride. The kind that forms over a wound—thin, fragile, functional.
Minutes pass. The tower grows.
What was a silhouette on the horizon is becoming architecture.
The twisted coral helices reveal detail with every hundred feet we close—fossilized ridges spiraling upward, grooves deep enough to park a Ferredon inside, the bioluminescent pulse stronger now, rhythmic, slow.
The whole structure rises from the desert floor with the obscene confidence of something that was never meant to be questioned.
It's the size of a small skyscraper. Maybe bigger. Scale is hard to judge when nothing around it offers comparison—just flat sand and the fake stars above.
