The desert sand still radiated the heat of the day when they found it.
Not far from the research team’s camp near the southern edge of the desert, something strange appeared—footprints. Perfectly aligned, evenly spaced, and slightly deeper than usual. The unsettling part: they only led away. There were no returning tracks.
“No signs of a return path… and no trace of wind erosion? How is that possible?”
Sakura, one of the team’s archaeologists, squinted through her binoculars, frowning. Even the local guides, usually stoic, refused to speak of it—calling it a “phantom.”
The tracks appeared at night and vanished by morning.
After observing the phenomenon for three nights, Sakura decided to investigate alone. Under the pale glow of the full moon, she followed the trail into the dunes.
In the stillness—no wind, no sound—it spoke.
“You must not return.”
The voice wasn’t heard with her ears, but echoed directly in her mind. Sakura stopped, but curiosity outweighed her fear.
“Who… are you?”
There was no reply. But the sand ahead trembled slightly. Dropping her flashlight, she knelt and began digging with her hands.
Moments later, her fingers brushed something cold—stone.
“…Man-made?”
Digging further, she uncovered an ancient stone tablet etched with strange hieroglyphs—and at its center, a large carved eye. Sakura recognized it instantly. It matched accounts of Shar=Nath, a legendary lost city mentioned only in ancient texts.
Suddenly, the ground gave way—and she fell.
When she awoke, she was in a vast underground chamber beneath the desert. Crumbled pillars, walls adorned with carvings—and in the center, a lone figure.
“Who… are you?”
The figure turned slowly, but had no face. A black, veil-like shadow shimmered where a face should be. A voice emerged from it.
“I am the guardian of Shar=Nath. Keeper of this place across time.”
He explained: the city had been sealed away millennia ago by a king who sought eternal life. In exchange, the city was cast into the void between time—erased from memory.
But now, the winds above were shifting. Forgotten memories were awakening.
“Why did you show this to me?”
“Because you are one who knows the past. But knowing is not the same as touching. If you return, your time may also begin to unravel.”
Sakura hesitated. Yet the symbols she’d copied in her notebook—the proof of the city’s existence—could rewrite history.
“I’ll remember. I won’t touch, I won’t destroy. I’ll simply pass it on.”
The shadow guardian nodded. Then the walls began to glow. A path opened.
Sakura awoke in her room at the camp.
A dream? A hallucination? But in her notebook were clearly recorded symbols and rubbings from the stone tablet.
The footprints never appeared again after that night.
Weeks later, at the end of her expedition report, she wrote:
“Shadows of time may sink into the sand, but they never truly vanish.”
As she wrote, the desert sunrise illuminated her eyes.
