The desert didn’t care if you lived or died.

  Silas learned that when he was sixteen — a green guard with a secondhand blade and no scars yet. His first caravan job was simple: haul iron plates from the outpost at Mongrel to a trader in Heft. Forty days’ walk, counting good weather and no raiders. Forty days across broken hills, black dust, and red suns that cooked your blood inside your bones.

  The raid came on the twelfth day. No warning. No demands. Just a scream, then crossbow bolts ripping through the sky like hornets.

  Silas moved the way they trained him — fast, low, blade out. It didn’t matter. Some fights you couldn’t win. Some fights you just survived.

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  He lost his left arm that day, torn from the socket like a butcher dressing meat. He remembered the moment it happened — the pull, the snap, the world going white.

  The medic told him later he screamed for a long time, but Silas didn’t remember that part. He remembered the cold. The blood freezing in the dirt. The way his saber slipped from his remaining hand, useless.

  They left him there. Too broken to carry. Too weak to save.

  The desert didn’t care.

  But Silas didn’t die.

  He dragged himself through five days of emptiness, eating dry grass and drinking his own sweat. When he found a junker town, he traded everything he had left — armor, weapons, his father's ring — for a second chance: a robot arm bolted to his ruined shoulder.

  It hurt worse than losing the real one. The nerves screamed for months. But it moved. It could block a bolt. It could swing a saber. And that was enough.

  The desert didn’t care if you lived or died.

  But Silas cared.

  And that made all the difference.