The wind howled across the wasteland, biting and merciless, carving through the crumbling ruins like a vengeful spirit. Atop a fractured pillar of concrete and steel, a lone figure clung to existence. His body, gaunt and burned by the sun, shuddered beneath ragged robes stained with dust and old blood.

Brother Elias had been here for twenty days.

Twenty days since the Sanctified dragged him from the trenches of the faithful and branded his forehead with the mark of the eye. Twenty days since they bound his wrists and forced him to climb the crumbling remnants of an overpass bridge, leaving him to stand, kneel, and suffer beneath the open sky.

"To doubt is to invite chaos," Magnus had declared, his iron mask glinting in the firelight of the ceremony. "And chaos must be purged."

So they had sent him upward, as they did with all who faltered. To watch. To repent. To endure.

To suffer.

The first few days had been the easiest. Elias had clung to his faith like a drowning man to driftwood, whispering prayers to the Watcher, reciting the sacred verses to block out the gnawing hunger.

"The eye sees all. The strong endure."

The fourth day, thirst became unbearable. His lips cracked, his tongue swelled. The small canteen they had given him was emptied on the first night, and the dry air left his throat raw. Below, he could see figures moving among the ruins—other Sanctified, watching, waiting. If he begged, if he cried out for relief, they would hear him.

They would know he was weak.

So he stayed silent.

By the seventh day, he had begun to hallucinate.

Shapes in the distance took on strange forms. The shadows cast by the ruined buildings stretched unnaturally, shifting in ways they shouldn't. The sky, once an endless dome of dull gray, seemed to pulse, darken, breathe.

Then there were the voices. Whispers slithering through the wind. Some were familiar—his own, distorted, questioning his resolve. Others were strangers, ghosts of the dead, mocking, laughing.

"The eye sees all," Elias muttered to himself, gripping the jagged edge of the pillar to keep from swaying. His own voice sounded alien in his ears. "The strong endure."

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A dry chuckle came from the shadows below. "Do they?"

He froze, his body stiffening. That voice—it was real.

Elias peered over the edge, his vision blurring from exhaustion. A man stood in the ruins beneath him, cloaked in a scavenger’s patchwork of leather and cloth, his face hidden by a mask of bone. Not one of the Sanctified.

A wastelander.

"You don’t look strong to me," the figure said. His voice was rough, but amused. "You look like a man waiting to die."

Elias swallowed hard, his throat aching. He should have shouted a warning, should have called down to the others, but the words wouldn't come.

The wastelander tilted his head. "They put you up there for what? Doubt?"

Elias said nothing.

The man chuckled. "I’ve seen others like you. Perched like birds, waiting for enlightenment. You know what they get instead?"

Elias closed his eyes, willing him away. The eye sees all. The strong endure.

The man’s voice was closer now, just below him. "They get forgotten."

The tenth day, the fever set in.

Elias's world became a cycle of heat and cold, fire and ice. He drifted between consciousness and nightmare, reality and hallucination. He saw Magnus standing at the base of the pillar, arms crossed, his iron mask expressionless.

"You are weak," the Watcher said.

"I am faithful," Elias croaked.

Magnus tilted his head. "Then why do you suffer?"

Elias had no answer.

By the thirteenth day, the wastelander was gone. Or maybe he had never been there.

The Sanctified had returned to check on him, their red-robed figures distant and uncaring. One had tossed a new canteen up to him. Elias had caught it with trembling hands, gulping the stale water until he nearly vomited. They would not let him die yet.

Not yet.

By the fifteenth day, the hunger was unbearable. His body was eating itself, muscles wasting, skin stretched thin. His thoughts became fractured, broken. The wind spoke in riddles. The shadows in the ruins beckoned.

He saw another figure atop a distant building—a Stylite like him, hunched over, unmoving. He watched for hours, waiting to see if the figure would move. It never did.

When the sun set, he realized it had been a corpse all along.

A warning. A prophecy. A mirror.

By the eighteenth day, he had forgotten his own name.

He was not Brother Elias.

He was Watcher.

The wind whispered secrets to him, and he listened. The distant lights in the ruins flickered, forming patterns only he could see. The hunger, the thirst, the pain—these were illusions, trials meant to break lesser men.

But he was strong. He had endured.

The eye saw him, and he had seen the eye.

On the twentieth day, the Sanctified came again. This time, they climbed to meet him.

Brother Jace led the procession, his jagged smile framed by his scarred face. "You still breathe," he mused, crouching beside Elias. "I’d have bet against it."

Elias—Watcher—did not respond.

Jace tilted his head. "You have seen, haven’t you?"

Watcher blinked slowly.

Jace grinned. "Then come down. The Watcher has use for you."

They led him down the crumbling pillar, his legs weak, his body trembling. The Sanctified whispered as he passed, their eyes filled with a mix of reverence and wariness.

"One who endures the trial sees the truth," Jace murmured. "You are no longer a brother. You are a Seer."

The meaning of the words drifted past him, meaningless. It did not matter.

He had seen the truth.

The eye watched. The eye was.

And now, he was too.