𝐙𝐇𝐈𝐋𝐀𝐍 𝐖𝐎𝐔𝐋𝐃 𝐋𝐈𝐊𝐄𝐍 it to a candle that is snuffed out, how sudden a shift the world around him takes. At once, gone are the watercolor trees and whimsically-sized garden vegetables. The sky itself seems to wail, the soil beneath his feet begins to sink as if to swallow him, and as reality itself bends—
darkness gives way to sand.
The air instantly becomes cold and dry, the sunlight overhead not returning even as his surroundings finally stabilize. Standing small in the shadow of a dune, his recognition is hindered by confusion: are these Sumeru's deserts or is he still in Spirale, somehow deep in the belly of the Land of Burnt Umber? He searches the horizon for the telltale orange glow of King Deshret's Mausoleum, and once finding that the sky is as black as ink he decides it doesn't matter. Wherever this is, it is not anywhere he wants to be. So he clambers through the sand, away from the dune, in search of escape.
How long he wanders, he isn't sure. Time feels inconsistent here, this personal nightmare of his. He measures it instead by the ache in his legs as he fights against the resistance of the dust underneath them, and it's at some indistinct point where the chill in the air has already sunk bone-deep that the clouds start to emit faint, vermillion light.
The buildings that appear with it are like a mirage at first. Nonphysical distortions of shelter in the distance, only that they don't betray him with their realness and solidify themselves into being the closer he gets. They are dilapidated things with strangely urban architecture, weathered and beat and visibly abandoned for possibly over a decade, but to Zhilan they are a temporary distraction from the unease that tends to grip him while in the desert. He ducks into one, backing up as the wind whips and howls around it. Yet he neglects to realize that it is already occupied, discovering this by abruptly colliding into them back-first.
He swings around in an instant, the sharp tip of his polearm pointed at them having been manifested into his hands from thin air. Their identity is a belated arrival to his senses, but once they truly lock eye contact the name leaves him sharply, startled.
❝ —— Wang yi? ❞
