Sage Hunter Alexa !!top!! -

She stood, dusted her knees, and followed the invisible scent of rain across the desert.

"Lesson one," she murmured to the empty wind. "Even knowledge bleeds. And I am very, very thirsty."

Alexa smiled, sharp as a shard of glass. She unspooled a thin copper wire from her wrist-compass, touched it to the stone, and let the thought sing through her bones. Other hunters would sell that whisper for a fortune. She would use it to track the living sage who had once studied here—the one who had left a piece of their soul behind.

The dust of the Glimmering Wastes tasted like crushed mica and old secrets. Alexa pulled her goggles down, the leather straps creaking against her temple. Around her, the ruins of the Veridican Conservatory leaned into the sand like tired old scholars.

She wasn't here for relics. She was here for what the relics remembered.

"Sage," she whispered, pressing her palm flat against a fractured obsidian plinth. The word wasn't a title. It was a flavor. A texture. In her nine years as a hunter, she'd learned that sages didn't just die—they leaked . Their final lessons bled into stone, wind, and bone. Most hunters chased the obvious: grimoires, staff-cores, bottled starlight. Alexa chased the silence between those things.