He doesn't remember his name, only the way the Red Moon stares.
It watches him. It always has.
The ruins stretch before him, drowned in its light-bloated, bleeding, like the sky has forgotten how to close its wounds.
The world beneath it is hushed, an endless graveyard where time itself has grown tired of keeping watch.
Sometimes, in the silence, he thinks he hears a voice.
Not words. Just the feeling of a promise, long ago and long broken. The air is thick with the scent of rot and dust.
The boy moves through the silence, tracing steps he does not remember learning, yet his body obeys as if the rhythm is etched into his bones. He does not know how long he has wandered. Years? Centuries? Forever?
He only knows the hunger.
A face he cannot remember. A name that claws at the edge of his mind.
And the feeling that something is missing.
Yet, he wasn't alone. There are things in the dark. They shift in the edges of his vision, pressing against the veil of the world, their forms half-seen in the moon's trembling light. They do not move toward him, but they are not still.
Walls shift when he is not looking, streets loop back upon themselves, corridors stretching into spirals that never end. The city is like a mouth, and it is closing around him.
Somewhere beneath the veil of time, the truth is buried.
Somewhere, within the forgotten rhythm of his own steps, the answer awaits.
And when the dance begins again, it will either set him free-
- or consume him whole.
He steps forward.
The city spills into the dunes like a corpse unraveling, stone turning to ash, memory fading into dust. It stretched beyond sight, dunes like the ribs of some great beast, shifting and breathing with each gust of wind. The sand is ash. Thick, cloying, clinging like the remains of something long dead.. Every step sank him deeper, as if the land itself wished to pull him under, to consume.
Above, the Red Moon throbbed.
It did not glow. It did not shine. It bled, its light pooling over the dunes in thick, arterial streams. The sky was not black but raw, open and weeping, as though something had torn through it, exposing the wound beneath.
His breath scraped against his throat. His body was hollow, a thing sustained only by motion, by the instinct that screamed louder than thought to move.
There were no stars. No direction.
Only the things behind him.
He could hear them, the way their limbs bent and cracked, folding the wrong way, their claws digging into the ash, dragging themselves forward. They did not chase as wolves did, swift and relentless.
No.
They waited.
For him to falter.
For him to sink.
The dunes whispered, shifting beneath him, opening into mouths. Gaping, lined with jagged, splintered teeth, yawning hungrily beneath his feet. He leapt, barely clearing one, but the ground was betraying him, warping, bending, the dunes shifting too fast, forcing him toward them.
For a heartbeat, everything was still. Even the things behind him stopped. And then the ground opened. A hand burst from the sand.
It gripped his ankle, fingers tipped in long, curved nails. It did not pull. It simply held. The boy screamed, kicking, thrashing, but another hand surfaced.
The Red Moon pulsed.
And the sand swallowed him whole.
The sky vanished.
He fell through layers of flesh and stone and shadow. Walls of flesh and bone surrounded him, twisting, pulsing with a heartbeat. The air reeked of iron, of meat left too long in the heat.
He hit the ground, his bones were screaming beneath his skin. His body refused to obey. Every inch of him ached, torn and bruised, his breath coming in shallow, wet gasps.
Then... Soft at first. A gentle, rhythmic tap against the floor and few after.
A chorus of teeth. The boy forced himself up.
The cavern stretched before him, lined with figures.
Thin, long-limbed, their bodies wrapped in stretched, translucent skin, with wide mouths. They had no eyes. Only hollow sockets, dripping with something black. They crouched on all fours, heads twitching at unnatural angles, jaws unhinging with each clicking noise.
They were smiling. Something in their smile felt familiar.
The first step they took toward him was slow.
The second was faster.
The third was a sprint.
The cavern twisted around him, tunnels curling in impossible spirals, the walls slick and breathing. The ground was made out flesh, shifting beneath his feet, making him stumble.
The clicking turned to chattering, a frantic, deafening sound, bone against bone, echoing, filling his skull, his ribs.
He turned a corner and saw himself. Hanging from the ceiling.
Skin peeled away, ribs cracked open like a book, his empty eyesockets staring down, the same Red Moon glistening inside his hollowed skull.
The things behind him screamed in laughter.
And the world swallowed him again.
Perhaps the sand does not swallow, but carries. Perhaps the things do not hunt, but wait to show him something deeper. Perhaps the Red Moon does not bleed, but weeps.
The world did not stop. It only broke further.
The laughter clung to his skin, buried itself in his chest, rattled his ribs as if something inside him was coming apart. The chattering, the clicking, the whispering dunes... none of it compared to the laughter.
It chewed at his bones, peeling him from the inside, stripping thought from his mind until there was nothing left but the movement, the frantic need to escape, though there was nowhere left to go.
The howl.
It settled inside the world, crawled through the marrow of the ruins, through the folds of flesh that had become his path, through the hollow places inside him where fear had long since carved its throne.
The Red Moon responded.
It wept.
Thick, arterial rivers of blood poured from the sky, gushing, flooding, rushing down the walls, turning the streets into veins bursting open. The scent was suffocating, clogging his lungs with rust and rot. The walls pulsed. The caverns writhed. He heard them skittering at the edges of his vision, laughing as they watched him stumble through the rising rivers of moon-blood.
Then he saw a mirror.
Standing alone in the rushing crimson,.
He did not hesitate.
He crashed through it.
The world shattered.
The moment he landed, another mirror stood before him.
One after another.
A corridor of black glass stretched in every direction, reflecting not just him but many versions of himself. Some stood still. Some twitched. Some moved before he did.
He turned.
The things from before had not followed.
But something else had.
The howl came again.
The mirrors shook.
Cracks spiderwebbed across them, thin at first, but growing, splintering outward, distorting the reflections into screaming shapes.
The boy ran through the next mirror. Each one opened a new world.
Each one was worse than the last.
He saw himself impaled upon spires of glass, his mouth stretched in an eternal, silent scream.
He saw a sky made of hands, fingers twitching, grasping, reaching for something unseen.
He saw a tower of flesh, its surface shifting with the imprint of faces, whispering things he could not understand, but could feel sinking into his skin.
The wolf was coming.
The air was growing thick with pressure. A unseen force pressing down on him, pushing him toward the next mirror, forcing him forward like a puppet with severed strings.
And then, he saw it. It stood on the horizon, where the ruins met the endless dunes.
A wolf. Its body was formed from the night, a shadow stitched from the void where no stars dared to burn. Its eyes were two gaping holes, not empty, but consuming.
" I know you..." he whispered
Wolf watched him. It opened its mouth. The howl came, but this time it was everywhere.
It shattered the mirrors around him.
It split the world open.
And the Red Moon screamed.
The boy fell to his knees.
Blood poured from the sky in waterfalls, drowning the ruins, rushing into the empty streets, swallowing the city in rivers of black-red hunger. The laughter of monsters from before had turned to wails, as if the howl had ruined even them, as if they too had never been meant to hear it.
His bones cracked under the weight of the sound. His veins burned as the light of the Red Moon poured through him.
The world pierced him through, threaded into his skin like hooks pulling him apart.
He stopped breathing heavily and simply stared.
The wolf did not move toward him.
It only watched.
The blood rose around him.
And in its reflection, he saw his own face with hollow eyes and open ribs.
The Red Moon burning inside his chest.
Everything stopped.
The rivers of blood froze mid-fall, thick streams suspended in the air, hanging like veins severed but refusing to spill. The laughter cut off as if a great mouth had finally snapped shut. The ruins, the dunes, the shifting corridors of flesh all fell silent.
The wolf did not vanish.
It remained on the horizon, its hollow eyes locked onto him.
Above, the Red Moon loomed, no longer weeping, no longer pulsing, only staring down at him, an unblinking god carved from the marrow of eternity.
The boy fell to his knees. Tired.
So tired.
It had been years. Centuries. Eras.
The boy knelt in the ash, with closed eyes. The world did not move. The ruins did not shift. The mirrors did not splinter. The Wolf did not howl.
Only the Red Moon circled above, a great lidless eye, watching him.
Time or whatever mockery of it existed in this place, did not stop. It only changed.
"What is my name..." he whispered, feeling how the ash was curling into his lungs.
His skin stretched, his limbs lengthened, his body expanding, pressing against the fabric of his tattered clothes until they strained, tore, fell away like dried petals in the wind. His shoulders broadened, his hands roughened, his breath deepened.
And still, he knelt.
His skin sagged, his back curved, his breath grew heavy. His hair withered, silver turned to dust, his fingers curled like dying branches. His spine collapsed. His ribs caved in. His flesh dried, cracked, peeled away in strips until only brittle bone remained, bleached and fragile, swallowed by the silent dunes.
The bones crumbled, dissolving into the ash, the wind carrying him into nothing, spreading him thin across the endless expanse.
************************************************************************************************
They sat in silence.
The boy, the young man, and the old master. Side by side on the banks of a quiet mountain lake. The water was still. The surface did not ripple. The wind moved the trees in gentle waves, but the grass at their feet did not stir.
Now and then, a fish broke the surface with the softest sound, but it left no ripple behind, no mark to say it had ever passed.
The lake didn't reflect the sky that day. It reflected nothing at all.
For a long while, no one spoke.
Then the master turned to the boy.
"Do you know what Qi is?" he asked.
The boy tilted his head. "It's energy… right?"
The old man smiled.
"Yes. But not only energy. Qi is the pulse beneath all things. The breath between thoughts. The rhythm inside stillness. It's in the stone. In the fire. In your blood. And in mine."
He looked then to the young man beside him.
"Show him."
The young man stood. His shadow did not move with him. He exhaled and closed his eyes.
His body moved. His arms rose slowly. One foot shifted over the moss. The first few motions were simple.
But something shifted.
He reached too far in a turn. His spine pulled tight, and his elbow cut a line through the air that wasn't part of the rhythm. The movement bent wrong. Too sharp. Like a dissonant note in a perfect song.
The master noticed. But he said nothing.
The boy leaned forward, drawn by the current, unaware of the misstep, as most are when they are still new.
"This is the Dance," the master said.
The boy whispered, "It looks like prayer."
"It is."
The young man came to rest. He breathed heavily. Just for a second, a flicker of pride crossed his face.
The boy stood.
He mimicked the stance. He wobbled immediately. His feet unsure. Arms stiff. His face scrunched in focus.
The master rose. His body groaned under the years, but he moved without hesitation. He stepped beside the boy, adjusted a hand, shifted the hips, tilted the chin just so.
Then he nodded to the young man.
"Help him."
The young man moved behind the boy. His touch was gentle. A hand at the spine, the other guiding the arm.
The three of them began to move together.
"Dao is not something to study," the master said. "Not a truth to memorize. Dao is the shape the world takes under your feet. And the shape you take in return."
The boy asked, "Is it the same for everyone?"
The master shook his head.
"Does the river flow the same way twice? Does every flame burn in the same shape? No. Dao is not a rule. It is a way. Your way."
The boy hesitated. His arm faltered in mid-turn.
"I don't know mine yet," he said.
I can only tell you this much… the one who spoke of the Dao does not truly understand it." Old man spoke.
Then the young man stepped forward.
"You do, as moon knows its way on the sky."
The master glanced at him. Just briefly. Something unreadable passed behind his eyes.
The young man stepped forward.
"But the Dao is not a mystery," he said. "It doesn't wait to be found. It is motion. It is action. To hesitate is to betray it."
The boy looked at him.
"To doubt," the young man continued, "is to step off the path. You must move forward. Always. Whether the step is yours or not."
"Stillness is death," he said. "Only the relentless rhythm is truth. Everything else is illusion."
The boy nodded slowly, trying to follow. His eyes never left the young man.
The master said nothing.
His face, weathered and still, was unreadable. He simply watched.
Then something changed.
A ripple touched the surface of the lake.
Only one.
It grew, not outward but inward, as if something beneath the surface was shifting.
More ripples began to make waves… and something in the ground, in the breath of the trees, in the boy's chest, shivered. Red Moon slowly crept into reflection of the lake.
The vibration crept upward. Into their bones.
A howl.
It rolled across the mountains and pressed against the lake like a hand on water. The trees stilled. The fish vanished. The air grew thick.
The young man turned sharply toward the sound.
His movement shattered the rhythm.
The master eyes never left the boy.
Tears slipped down the deep lines of his face, catching in the white of his beard, falling without sound.
The boy looked at him. Then at the young man. Then again.
His feet were stuck.
He tried to move, but his body wouldn't obey.
His arms strained against something unseen.
His breath hitched, and still the master said nothing.
Until he gently spoke.
"Don't listen to false Dao. It's dogma. You need to wake up."