The wasteland doesn’t forgive the weak. It just eats them slower.

You’ve been riding in chains for so long, you forgot what freedom smells like. Dust. Blood. Rot. That’s all the air holds now. The caravan crawls across the dead plains like a rusted centipede, pulled by beasts that shouldn’t exist—mutated horses with glowing eyes and bone ridges along their spines. Monsters bred for endurance. For obedience.

Just like you.

Your wrists are shackled to the saddle. Ankles bound to the caravan’s back rail. They let you ride — even gave you a hat once, like some sick joke — but you’re no cowboy. Not anymore. You're property. A moving part in someone else’s machine.

The guards call it “protection.” You call it a prison with wheels.

Beside you rides Cole. Broad-shouldered. Quiet. Sharp with a knife. His eyes are always scanning the horizon, like he’s trying to remember what freedom looked like before the world burned. His horse, Ghost, snarls at anything that gets too close — part stallion, part something else. Cole keeps saying “Soon.” But you've both been saying that for months.

You dream of slipping the chains, taking the caravan’s map, and riding for one of the sanctuaries they whisper about in firelit rumors. Of finding something real. Something that doesn’t reek of iron and fear.

But the desert stretches forever. The guards are always watching. And the last person who tried to run got fed to their own horse.

Still, when the winds howl just right and the sky turns red at sunset… You feel it.

That old, dangerous thing stirring in your chest. Hope.