Love in the Wasteland: A Romance Beyond Survival

The crimson sun hung like a dying ember against the ash-gray sky, casting long shadows across the desolate landscape that had once been the thriving kingdom of Aethermoor. Maya pressed her back against the crumbling stone wall of what had been a watchtower, her heart hammering as the sound of scavenging beasts echoed in the distance. The Blight had taken everything—the green fields, the crystal rivers, the laughter of children playing in meadows that now lay barren and twisted.

She adjusted the worn leather pack on her shoulders, feeling the weight of the precious water vials within. Three days' worth, maybe four if she rationed carefully. The settlement of Haven's Rest was still two days' journey through the Thornlands, assuming she could avoid the roving bands of Shadowkin that hunted anything with a beating heart.

Maya had been surviving in this wasteland for three years now, ever since the Great Corruption had swept across the realm like a plague of darkness. She had learned to move silently, to find water where others saw only dust, to read the signs that meant safety or death. But she had never learned to stop hoping that somewhere, somehow, there were others like her—people who remembered what the world had been before the magic turned sour.

As she peered around the stone corner, scanning the horizon for movement, a flash of silver caught her eye. Someone was moving across the distant ridge, and they were moving fast. Too fast to be entirely human. Maya's hand instinctively went to the curved dagger at her hip, a relic from her father's forge that had never failed her. She squinted against the perpetual twilight that had settled over the land since the sky cracked open three summers ago.