The Invisible City

Vana had been trudging along this road for a very, very long time—so long that she could no longer remember when or why she had embarked on this seemingly endless journey, so long that she had forgotten where she had set out from, and then forgotten the purpose of her travels.

She only knew that this world was barren. All she ever seemed to see on the road was yellow sand filling the sky, along with Lost Cities crumbling and collapsing across the Gobi and ancient relics buried beneath the dust. She passed through those ruins steeped in desolation, as though traveling upstream through forgotten time. Occasionally, she would stop among the ruins for a while, but she would soon leave them behind—when the sun rose the next day, she would forget what those ruins had looked like, remembering only vaguely that she had passed through them and seen broken, fallen walls.

The wind blew in from afar, howling across the desert. Yellow sand danced through the air, and between the boulders it produced sharp, terrifying sounds like the shrieks of ghosts. Amid that piercing howl, Vana heard another sound, one she had always heard during this journey:

"Clink... clink... clink..."

It sounded like metal striking stone, or activity from a blacksmith's forge.

Vana stopped in the middle of the sandy road and narrowed her eyes at the distance. She knew that whenever this clinking sounded, it meant there were new ruins or relics nearby.

But she did not know why that was, nor where the sound came from.

A vague silhouette of buildings abruptly appeared against the sand-filled sky, just like countless sights she had seen throughout this journey.

Vana stared at the suddenly appearing cluster of buildings for a while. After a brief daze, she started toward it,