CHAPTER 143: MECANIC SILENCE

The mountain was now just a blurred memory behind them. The forest too had melted into the mists of the past. Before them stretched the plain—an ocean of stones they’d been trekking across for hours.

A near-desert landscape of chilling austerity. The skeletal ground cracked under their steps, a dry sound amplifying the oppressive silence. Not a single silhouette on the horizon, not the slightest sign of life to prove they weren’t the last living beings on this thankless earth.

That day, the sun—their relentless enemy of days past—had veiled itself. The sky weighed on the world like a lid of leaden gray, uniform and threatening. Yet since dawn, not a drop had fallen. An unexpected truce, almost unnerving. As if the world itself held its breath, or finally granted them a meager favor.

Whatever newfound strength burned in their veins, whatever resilience forged in adversity, none of them—not even Élisa—would have dared claim they could have covered such distance under the usual scorching sun. The mere thought of that desiccating torture tightened their throats.

Despite the looming threat from the sky, they quickened their pace. The area was desperately barren: no bush, no crevice in the rock, not the simplest shelter to huddle in if the deluge finally broke. Only pebbles stretching endlessly, heated by a sickly light.

So they kept course, straight ahead, toward uncertain infinity. Élisa walked at the front, her eyes scanning the familiar horizon. Thirty years had passed, she’d said, yet this mineral desert hadn’t budged. Not a stone displaced, not a ravine filled. An immobility bordering on eternity.

Behind her, Dylan and Maggie advanced in silence. A heavy silence, woven from fatigue and caution. Every wasted word was a drop of water lost, precious energy vanishing into the dry air. Thirst already gnawed—a cruel reminder in this parched land where water was already a ghost.

——

Their progress became a litany of dull aches. Each step raised clouds of mineral dust that clung to their sweat-damp skin, coating their drawn faces in a grayish film. Under their soles, pebbles rolled with dry scrapes—sole witnesses to their passage in this petrified wasteland.

Suddenly, as if obeying some sinister joke, the sky began its betrayal. The heavy clouds, which had seemed laden with heaven’s wrath, fragmented into tattered shreds.

They slid toward the horizon like a routed army, leaving behind a canvas of hard, implacable blue. The sun burst forth in full violence, turning stones into blinding mirrors.

Heat hammered down on them, making the air above the ground waver.

"A farce..." Maggie rasped, her voice sandpapered by thirst. Her cracked lips bled faintly. The empty sky was just a trap disguised as respite—they’d marched through humid dread only to be caught in an oven.

Élisa tugged up the collar of her threadbare t-shirt, desperately trying to shield her nape. Her eyes, narrowed to slits under the murderous light, scanned the mineral infinity with new intensity. "Faster!" she called without turning. Her voice held the dryness of the surrounding stones.

The consequences were immediate:

The slanting light turned shadows into torture’s accomplices, grotesquely stretching their silhouettes as they danced over the pebbles.

Empty bottles slapped rhythmically against their hips, each clack a cruel reminder of their vulnerability.

Dylan stumbled on a flat stone, his hand slamming into the ground in a cloud of burning dust. "Fucking shit desert!" he spat before biting his lip, regretting the waste of precious air.

And Élisa—already the only one walking barefoot—was first to feel the rocks’ temperature shift.

A strange phenomenon then emerged from the furnace: mid-distance, the air began to shimmer like water. Floating shapes appeared and vanished—perhaps twisted trees, or the ruins of a shelter.

Élisa fixed these mirages with fierce concentration. "Over there... see?" Her trembling finger pointed toward the wavering horizon. "The dark line... it’s not an illusion this time."

Maggie squinted, trying to pierce the heat haze. "Thirty years... it might be gone," she ventured, fear knotting her dusty throat.

"Or worse," Dylan grunted as he stood, "changed." He wiped his scraped palm on his pants, leaving a reddish streak on the fabric.

They set off again, driven by fragile hope. Their shadows had shortened, chained to their heels. Each breath scorched their lungs, oxygen seeming to thin in the superheated air. Silence was no longer just economical—it had become vital, every word stealing precious moisture from their membranes.

Suddenly, Élisa halted so abruptly Maggie almost collided with her. The young woman thrust a hand southeast, where the mirage still danced. "Listen..." she whispered.

Through the furnace’s crackle, an incongruous sound pierced: the metallic screech of a weathervane turning on an invisible roof.

The sound repeated. Faint. Irregular. Like a sigh of steel in a world of stone.

*SCREEEch... SCRAAAnk...*

All three froze, arrested by this uncanny murmur. Too clear for an auditory mirage. Too real. And in this sterile expanse, there was something more terrifying than the absence of sound: the presence of one that didn’t belong.

Élisa took a step. Then another. She leaned forward, hand shielding her eyes, straining toward that stubborn dark smudge on the horizon.

"It’s real." She spoke like someone convincing themselves. "There really is a building over there."

Dylan followed, silent, eyes locked where the air seemed to split over an invisible edge. His thoughts spun fast—too fast for the heat. A roof. Maybe a well. Maybe a trap. Or all three at once.

Maggie, though, didn’t move yet. She sniffed faintly, with that animal wariness of veterans. "I don’t like it. That sound isn’t natural. It’s got a rhythm. Like breathing."

No one answered.

They resumed their march. Driven by thirst, wariness, and that indecent spark called hope.

The terrain shifted subtly underfoot. Fewer rocks. More earth. Cracked. Dead. But pliable. Each step raised brownish clouds that clung to their skin.

The mirage sharpened.

In fact, it wasn’t an illusion.

Not a mirage.

It was... a hamlet.

Or what remained of one.

A handful of collapsed buildings, split stones, gutted roofs. A central courtyard, sunken into the ground, where an old rusted weathervane turned lazily atop a crooked pole—screeching each time the wind (weak, but real) dared touch it.

The screeching grew louder, clearer.

*SCREEEEEch... SCREEEEEch...*

No birds in sight, no tracks, and no human sounds.

Only that weathervane, faithful as an artificial heart.

They stopped at the hamlet’s edge.

Élisa knelt in the dust, her fingers brushing marks on the ground. Footprints. Old. Human. But strange. Misaligned. As if the walker had limped. Or slipped. Or crawled.

Dylan eased his blade free, metal gleaming with a dull sheen.

"If it’s a trap, it’s ancient as hell," he said softly.

"Old traps are the worst," Maggie murmured. She’d drawn her weapon soundlessly.

Élisa stood, face pale but focused. She pointed toward the hamlet’s center.

"There. The well. It’s still there."

And indeed it was—half-buried, rimmed with time-gnawed stones, a cracked windlass whose rope hung like a dead tongue. At its base, an overturned bucket, rust-eaten.

But what froze them all wasn’t the well.

It was the silhouette.

Seated.

On the rim, back turned.

Someone—or something—was waiting for them.

Motionless as a painting on the world’s canvas.

Not a tremor, not the slightest gesture.

Élisa took a step back.

"That... wasn’t there before," she breathed, voice tight.

Maggie raised her weapon with precise intent.

Dylan, though, wasn’t looking at the silhouette.

He was staring at the weathervane.

It had stopped.

And the silence, in that hamlet, became total.