In a world where water is memory and hope is rationed by the drop, a mysterious transmission leads three scavengers across the wasteland toward an impossible tower floating in the sky. Above them, immortal aristocrats dine endlessly at an eternal brunch, unaware that their paradise feeds on the world’s suffering.

This is a story about hunger—the kind that consumes and the kind that creates.

Chapter 1: Dust-Eaters

The transmitter crackled to life at dawn, its amber display cutting through the perpetual dust haze like a dying star. Mira pressed her cracked lips together and squinted at the coordinates flowing across the screen—numbers that couldn’t be real, pointing toward the dead center of the Thirst Plains.

“Source of eternal refreshment,” she read aloud, her voice barely more than sandpaper against stone. Behind her, Kass and Trev shifted in their makeshift shelter, a lean-to built from salvaged solar panels and prayer.

“It’s bait,” Kass wheezed, his words punctuated by the wet rattle that meant his lungs were finally giving up their fight against the dust. “Just like the others that went quiet before the storms hit.”

Mira turned the transmitter over in her hands. Pre-war tech, military grade, still humming with impossible energy after decades of abandonment. She’d found it three days ago, buried beneath the collapsed overpass where Old Detroit used to touch the sky. The thing shouldn’t work at all—nothing electronic lasted more than a few seasons in the storms—yet here it was, singing its siren song across the wasteland.

“The Tower,” Trev whispered, his twelve-year-old voice carrying the weight of legends passed down through generations of water-hunters. “It’s got to be pointing toward the Tower.”

Mira felt her throat tighten. Every scavenger knew the stories—the impossible spire that hung in the sky above the deepest desert, where the lucky few who’d glimpsed it claimed to see figures moving behind crystal walls, untouched by the world’s dying. Most called it mirage madness, the brain’s last desperate fiction before dehydration claimed its prize.

But the transmitter’s signal pulsed steady and true, and Mira’s last water pouch held maybe two swallows of the brackish liquid that passed for hydration in this scorched world.

“We leave at sunset,” she decided, tucking the device into her pack. “The heat’ll kill us if we travel in daylight, but we can’t stay here. The dust storms are getting worse, and Kass—” She looked at her oldest friend, saw the gray pallor beneath his sun-darkened skin. “We need to find something real, or we’re all dead anyway.”

They broke camp as the sun bled orange across the horizon, their footsteps lost in the endless whisper of settling dust. The transmitter’s arrow pointed true north, toward the heart of the Thirst Plains where no living thing had walked in twenty years. With each step, Mira felt the desert’s familiar weight settling into her bones—the terrible mathematics of survival where every breath cost water, every mile demanded blood.

Behind them, the skeletal remains of civilization faded into memory. Ahead lay only sand, stars, and the faint possibility of something that might, against all logic and hope, still be alive in this dead world.

The transmitter pulsed once, casting amber light across their faces, and led them into the dark.

Chapter 2: The Table Eternal

Above the dying world, appetite had become eternal.

Lady Ornithia dabbed her lips with a napkin that had been pristine for exactly two hundred and forty-seven years, four months, twelve days, and approximately six hours—though time, in the conventional sense, had rather lost its meaning at the Table Eternal.

“More champagne, my dear?” Lord Pembroke inquired, his smile frozen in perpetual politeness.

“How delightful,” Ornithia replied, watching golden liquid pour upward from his bottle, defying gravity with casual indifference. The champagne sparkled and somehow always tasted exactly like happiness might, if happiness were a flavor and not the distant memory of something she might once have felt.

Around the great circular table, forty-seven other immortal brunchers continued their eternal meal. Lord Sylvan hadn’t spoken since year thirteen, though his hands moved in elegant patterns as he cut his eggs Benedict into increasingly complex geometric shapes. Count Aldrich held his wine glass perpetually raised in a toast that would never conclude, while Lady Seraphina had been in the middle of saying “How absolutely marvelous” for thirty-seven years.

The Tower itself hung suspended above the world, its crystal walls offering an unobstructed view of the wasteland below—though none of the brunchers looked down anymore. Why would they? The view had grown tediously brown sometime around year fifty, and conversation was so much more civilized when one focused on immediate pleasures.

“I do believe the hollandaise is particularly exquisite today,” commented Lady Beatrice, raising her fork to catch a drop of sauce that had been falling for three months.

Ornithia nodded absently, her attention drawn to the small crack that had appeared in her teacup sometime last week. Such imperfections were rare in their perfect world—usually they corrected themselves within moments, reality smoothing over any inconsistency like cream folding into coffee. But this crack remained, a hairline fracture that caught the eternal morning light and split it into tiny rainbows.

She had begun to suspect that something was wrong with the Brunch. Not wrong in any way that affected its function—the food still regenerated, the wine still flowed, their bodies remained preserved in the amber of perpetual youth—but wrong in the deeper sense that a song might be wrong when played slightly off-key, technically correct but somehow hollow.

Testing her theory, Ornithia slipped a petit four into her napkin when no one was looking. In a proper Brunch reality, the pastry should have simply reappeared on the serving tray, its absence unnoticed by the eternal algorithms of abundance. Instead, the space on the tray remained empty, a small void that made her chest tight with something that might have been hope, if she still remembered how hope felt.

“Lord Sylvan,” she whispered, leaning toward the silent nobleman. “I believe it’s time we took a walk.”

His hands stilled in their geometric dance. For the first time in over a century, his eyes met hers, and in their depths she saw the reflection of her own desperate certainty: they were not dining in paradise.

They were the meal.

Chapter 3: The Tower Beckons

The transmitter’s promise pulled them deeper into myth.

By the third day, Kass was walking prayer. His feet moved through muscle memory alone while his lungs fought their losing battle against the dust that had colonized his chest. Mira watched him stumble over nothing, catch himself, continue forward with the terrible determination of a man who knew he was dying but refused to do it lying down.

“The signal’s getting stronger,” she said, holding up the transmitter. Its amber light pulsed faster now, almost urgent in its electronic heartbeat. According to the device, they were less than twenty miles from whatever was broadcasting that impossible promise of water.

Trev had stopped talking two days ago, conserving every drop of moisture in his small body. He walked between them like a ghost, his eyes fixed on the horizon where heat mirages danced eternal. Sometimes Mira caught him mouthing words—prayers, maybe, or the water-songs their mothers used to sing before the last wells ran dry.

The Thirst Plains stretched endlessly in all directions, a monument to humanity’s greatest failure. Here, beneath the alkali crust and drifting sand, lay the bones of the Midwest—farms and forests, rivers and lakes, all consumed by the great dying that had claimed half the world. But scattered across this wasteland were the Burn Marks—perfect circles where the sand had been fused into glass, each one exactly the same size, each one pointing toward something that hung just beyond the horizon.

“There,” Kass wheezed, pointing with a trembling finger. “You see it?”

Mira followed his gaze and felt her heart stop. Rising from the heat shimmer, impossibly tall and gleaming, stood a tower that belonged in no world she knew. It pierced the sky like a vertical wound, its walls throwing back the sun in fragments of impossible light. Around its base, the very air seemed to bend and twist, reality folding in on itself like water circling a drain.

“The Tower,” Trev breathed, his first words in two days carrying the weight of religious revelation.

But Mira was a scavenger, trained to see what others missed, and what she saw made her stomach clench with fear. The Tower wasn’t just floating—it was drinking. Thin streams of heat-distortion spiraled upward from the desert floor, drawn into the structure’s impossible physics like smoke up a chimney. And scattered around its base lay the remains of others who had tried to reach it—aircraft wreckage, yes, but also makeshift balloons, climbing gear, and stranger things that looked like they might once have been human.

“It’s feeding,” she whispered, but Kass was already stumbling forward, his dying body animated by desperate hope.

“Water,” he said, the word more breath than sound. “Can smell it. Sweet water, clean water…” He fell to his knees, then struggled back to his feet, drawn by something Mira couldn’t sense.

She grabbed his arm, felt the fever burning through his coat. “Kass, wait. Something’s wrong about this place. The way the air moves—”

But he pulled free with strength she didn’t know he still possessed, lurching toward the Tower like a man pulled by invisible wires. Trev followed, his young face bright with a hope that made Mira’s heart break.

The transmitter in her hand pulsed faster, its signal now a continuous amber scream. And as they drew closer to the Tower’s impossible shadow, Mira began to hear something else—faint but unmistakable, carried on the twisting air.

Laughter. The sound of people talking, dining, celebrating. The clink of glasses and silver, the rustle of expensive fabric.

Somewhere above them, in that crystal spear hanging between earth and heaven, someone was having the time of their eternal life.

Chapter 4: Cracks in the Porcelain

Perfection, Ornithia had learned, was just another kind of prison.

“The kitchen,” Ornithia whispered, her voice barely audible above the eternal symphony of clinking silver and polite conversation. “Have you ever wondered what lies beyond the kitchen doors?”

Lord Sylvan’s geometrically-arranged eggs had formed a pattern that looked suspiciously like a map—or perhaps a prison blueprint. He touched one corner of his creation with the tip of his fork, and Ornithia saw his meaning: escape route.

They rose from the table with the practiced grace of centuries, their movement so subtle that none of the other brunchers took notice. Why should they? In a world where every action had been repeated ten thousand times, deviation was simply unthinkable.

The kitchen doors stood twenty feet away, carved from some impossible wood that seemed to shift between mahogany and gold depending on the angle of observation. In all their years of dining, none of them had ever questioned why the kitchen remained forever hidden, the source of their endless feast as mysterious as the mechanism that kept them suspended above the dying world.

Ornithia’s hand touched the brass handle, and for a moment she felt resistance—not physical, but something deeper, as if reality itself were reluctant to let them pass. Then the sensation vanished, and the door swung open onto a labyrinth that defied every law of architecture she had ever known.

The kitchen stretched impossibly far in all directions, its ceiling lost in shadows that seemed to move with their own purpose. Mirrors lined the walls in patterns that hurt to contemplate directly, each reflecting not the room as it was, but as it might be, could be, should never be. Hanging from the darkness above, birdcage clocks ticked in seventeen different rhythms, their faces showing times that belonged to no earthly calendar.

“My God,” Sylvan breathed—his first words in thirteen years carrying the weight of genuine awe.

They moved deeper into the maze, past ovens that cooked nothing, past preparation tables laden with ingredients that shifted when observed directly. The air smelled of spices that had no names and bread that existed only in the moment before hunger. Everything was designed to create without purpose, to feed an appetite that could never be satisfied.

At the labyrinth’s heart, they found it: a single spigot, brass and ancient, mounted above a sink carved from what might have been crystallized starlight. Behind it, encased in glass like a museum piece, sat a control panel covered in symbols that predated language.

Water dripped from the spigot in perfect, measured drops. Each droplet hung in the air for a heartbeat before falling, and with each fall, Ornithia watched a thin stream of vapor rise from the nearby serving platters—essence drawn from their endless feast, transformed and channeled downward through mechanisms she couldn’t see but somehow understood. Their consumption distills time itself, she realized. Their immortal hunger squeezes moisture from the very fabric of eternity.

“We’re not the guests,” she said, understanding flooding through her like ice water. “We’re the source. Our endless dining, our immortal appetites—we’re generating something. The Tower is using us to create…”

“Water,” Sylvan finished, his voice hollow with recognition. “Clean water, flowing down to whatever remains of the world below.”

The truth sat between them like a poisoned feast. They were not prisoners of their appetites but willing sacrifices to someone else’s desperate thirst. Their eternal brunch was a machine, and they were its most essential components.

Above them, the birdcage clocks chimed in unison, marking time in a world where time had no meaning. And somewhere far below, Ornithia knew, someone was dying for want of what their endless consumption created.

The question was: did they have the courage to starve?

Chapter 5: Updraft

Kass’s grave marked the boundary between hope and desperation.

Kass died at sunset on the fourth day, his body finally surrendering to the dust that had colonized his lungs. He whispered something about sweet water as the light faded from his eyes, his face turned toward the Tower that hung like a promise above them.

Mira and Trev buried him in the alkaline sand using their bare hands, marking his grave with a cairn of stones that would be scattered by the next wind. There were no words for the dead in their world—water was too precious to waste on tears, breath too valuable for eulogies. But Mira touched the transmitter in her pack and felt its pulse like a second heartbeat, strong and steady and pointing toward whatever waited in that impossible spire.

“How do we get up there?” Trev asked, his young voice cracked from dehydration. The Tower loomed before them now, perhaps a mile away, its walls rippling with internal light. The air around its base moved in patterns that defied physics, spiraling upward in thermal columns that seemed to have weight and purpose.

Mira studied the debris field that surrounded the Tower’s foundation—the scattered remains of aircraft that had tried and failed to reach the floating palace. Twisted metal and composite panels lay half-buried in the sand, testament to dreams that had died on the approach. But among the wreckage, she recognized shapes that might still hold promise.

“We build wings,” she said, pulling blueprint fragments from a crashed military transport. The papers were scorched and incomplete, but her scavenger’s eye could fill in the gaps. “Look at how the air moves around the Tower. It’s not random—there’s an updraft, artificial but powerful. If we can catch it…”

They worked through the night, salvaging control surfaces from dead aircraft and binding them with salvaged cable. The design was insane—part engineering, part faith, held together with desperation and the kind of ingenuity that only emerged when failure meant death. Trev proved surprisingly skilled with his small hands, weaving support struts with the patience of someone who understood that their lives depended on every connection. When they reached the final joint—the crucial hinge that would determine whether the glider held together or disintegrated in flight—Mira watched the boy’s steady fingers make the binding that would carry her into the sky.

As dawn approached, their makeshift glider took shape: twenty feet of scavenged wing attached to a harness that might keep Mira alive long enough to reach the Tower’s base. The transmitter would serve as her guidance system, its pulsing signal leading her into whatever waited above.

“What about me?” Trev asked, and Mira felt her heart break a little more. The glider could carry one person, maybe, if the thermals held and luck smiled on the desperate.

“You wait here,” she said, knowing it was a lie they both needed to believe. “I’ll find a way down, or I’ll send help, or…” She touched his face, feeling the fever that meant dehydration was claiming him too. “I’ll find water, Trev. Real water. Enough for everyone.”

The boy nodded, his eyes bright with the kind of faith that belonged to childhood’s last moments. He helped her into the harness, checked the connections one final time, and stepped back as she positioned herself at the edge of the thermal column.

The updraft hit her like a living thing, powerful and purposeful and utterly alien. As she launched herself into its embrace, Mira felt the desert floor fall away beneath her, felt the impossible physics of the Tower drawing her upward toward secrets that had been hidden since the world died.

And as she rose, something extraordinary began to happen. The cuts on her hands started to heal. The dehydration headache that had been her constant companion for days simply vanished. Her cracked lips grew smooth, her sun-damaged skin regaining the elasticity of youth.

The Tower wasn’t just floating—it was transforming everything that entered its sphere of influence, rewriting the rules of biology with the same casual indifference it showed to gravity. Mira was being drawn into something that existed outside the normal flow of time, a place where death was negotiable and hunger was a choice.

Below her, Trev raised his hand in farewell, a small figure already lost in the heat shimmer. Above, crystal walls rushed toward her with increasing speed, and somewhere beyond them, she could hear the sound of eternal celebration—the clink of glasses, the rustle of silk, the laughter of people who had forgotten how to die.

The transmitter in her hand pulsed one final time and went silent, its purpose fulfilled. Mira was about to crash through the glass ceiling of paradise, bringing the outside world’s brutal hunger into a place that had never known want.

She wondered which reality would prove stronger.

Chapter 6: Clash at Table Twelve

Two worlds were about to collide, and only one could survive.

The crystal ceiling exploded inward in a shower of light and sound as Mira crashed through the Tower’s crown, her makeshift glider disintegrating around her like a dying butterfly. She crashed into marble and chaos, tumbling through a table set for forty-eight like a cannonball through ceremony. Bone china exploded around her. Shattered goblets sang their death-songs against stone.

For a moment, the eternal brunch simply stopped.

Then it began to unravel.

Forty-seven immortal diners sat frozen as reality hiccupped around them. Lord Pembroke’s perpetual smile stretched wider and wider until his face threatened to split. Count Aldrich’s wine glass shattered in his hand, the fragments floating upward like crimson butterflies. Lady Seraphina’s frozen words finally spilled from her lips in a torrential rush—”How absolutely marvelous marvelous marvelous”—her voice fracturing into harmonics that made the crystal walls sing.

The ambient music—that ethereal waltz that had been playing for centuries—began to skip and warp, its melody fragmenting into discordant echoes. Napkins burst into flames that burned without consuming. Cutlery rose from the tables like metallic birds, their surfaces reflecting impossible images of the world below.

Lady Ornithia was the first to move, rising from her chair with fluid grace despite the chaos erupting around them. She looked at the intruder—this sun-burned, dust-covered creature from the world below—and felt something she had almost forgotten how to feel: curiosity.

“How wonderfully… unexpected,” she said, her voice carrying across the sudden silence. “We haven’t had visitors in… well, ever, actually.”

Mira struggled to her feet, her body still humming with the Tower’s transformative energy. The wounds from her crash were already healing, her dehydrated flesh plumping back to health with each breath of the Tower’s perfect air. But her eyes remained hard, focused, carrying the weight of a world that had forgotten abundance.

“You’re eating,” she said, her voice hoarse with dust and disbelief. “While everything dies below, you’re eating.”

The comment sent ripples of confusion through the assembled brunchers. Lord Pembroke’s perpetual smile flickered. The Duchess of Marlborough’s laugh hiccupped once, then resumed its tinkling rhythm. They had no context for accusation, no framework for understanding that their paradise might be built on suffering.

“My dear child,” began Lord Pembroke, “surely you understand that—”

Mira moved with the desperate speed of someone who had spent years fighting for survival. Her hand closed around a crystal decanter at the table’s center—the source, she somehow knew, of the Tower’s power. The thing that kept them all suspended between earth and heaven, dining on abundance while the world thirsted.

“Stop,” Ornithia said, not to Mira but to the mechanism of the Brunch itself. Because she had seen what the intruder represented: consequence. The Tower’s hidden cost made manifest in sun-burned flesh and desperate eyes.

“You know, don’t you?” Mira said, her gaze locking with Ornithia’s. “You know what this place really is.”

The question hung in the air like the scent of fine wine. Around them, the other brunchers began to stir from their confusion, their eternal programming reasserting itself. But Ornithia felt the weight of two hundred and forty-seven years pressing down on her, the accumulated guilt of every meal consumed while the world starved.

“I know,” she whispered. “We are the engine of plenty, and you are the price of our paradise.”

The decanter in Mira’s hands began to pulse with inner light, its crystalline surface revealing the mechanisms hidden within—flowing energy, compressed time, the distilled essence of appetite made manifest. Water, she realized. Every bite they took, every glass they drained, somehow became water that flowed down to the dying world below.

“Then help me end it,” Mira said.

Around them, the Tower began to shake as reality sensed the possibility of change. Napkins burst into flames that burned without consuming. Plates spun through the air like silver birds. The eternal music skipped and warped, its perfect melody fragmenting into discordant echoes.

But Ornithia was already moving, her hand closing over Mira’s on the crystal surface. Together, they lifted the decanter high above the chaos of the disrupted brunch.

“To ending well,” Ornithia said, her voice carrying across centuries of regret.

And together, they shattered paradise.

Chapter 7: The Pouring

Paradise fell like rain, and humanity prepared to fight over every drop.

The great central decanter shattered against the marble floor with a sound like the world breaking. Crystal fragments scattered in all directions, each piece carrying with it a fragment of the Tower’s impossible physics, and in the silence that followed, reality held its breath.

Then everything began to fall.

The Tower itself groaned as its levitation failed, its crystal walls developing hairline fractures that spread like spiderwebs through the structure. The eternal brunchers found themselves experiencing gravity for the first time in centuries—Count Aldrich’s perpetual toast finally completed as his wine glass shattered against the tilting floor, while Lady Seraphina’s frozen words spilled from her lips in a rush: “How absolutely marvelous… that we should fall together.”

The Duchess of Marlborough’s century-long laughter transformed into something else—not joy, but relief, as she tumbled through space with her arms spread wide like wings. “Finally,” she whispered, “something new to do.”

But it was the water that mattered most.

It poured from the shattered decanter in impossible quantities—gallons, then hundreds of gallons, then torrents that defied every law of physics and conservation. The water carried with it the accumulated essence of two hundred and forty-seven years of endless appetite, the stored potential of immortal hunger finally released into the world that needed it most.

Mira felt herself falling with the Tower, but somehow it didn’t matter. The water surrounded her like a liquid embrace, filling her lungs with life instead of drowning, carrying her through the collapsing structure toward the desert below. Around her, the immortal brunchers tumbled through space, their perfect clothing streaming behind them like the wings of broken angels.

Lady Ornithia fell beside her, her face serene with something that might have been relief. “I forgot what hunger felt like,” she said, her words somehow audible despite the chaos. “Thank you for reminding me.”

The Tower struck the earth with the sound of thunder, but by then it was more water than crystal, its substance transformed by the breaking of its central mechanism. The impact sent waves of precious liquid spreading across the Thirst Plains, soaking into soil that hadn’t tasted moisture in decades.

Mira hit the sand hard, her body cushioned by the flood that surrounded her. In her hand, she still clutched the cracked transmitter that had led her across the wasteland—its amber light finally dark, its purpose complete. For a moment she lay still, feeling the impossible sensation of water everywhere—in her clothes, her hair, her mouth. Real water, clean and sweet and abundant beyond any scavenger’s dreams.

But even as the streams began to flow, she could hear voices in the distance—not just celebration, but argument. Some of the survivors who emerged from their shelters looked at the flowing water with suspicion, others with greed. A group of tunnel-dwellers had already begun damming one of the smaller streams, claiming it for their clan alone.

“The water’s cursed,” shouted an old woman with ritual scars across her arms. “It fell from the sky! From them!” She pointed at the scattered artifacts that had once been the immortal brunchers—crystal glasses and silver spoons glinting in the sun like fallen stars.

But others ignored her warnings, filling containers and drinking deeply. And in the distance, Mira could see smoke rising from what looked like a makeshift settlement already forming around the largest of the new springs. Humanity, it seemed, would find ways to complicate even paradise.

She opened her eyes to find herself lying beside a stream that hadn’t existed moments before. The water flowed clear and true across the alkali flats, following channels that the impact had carved in the ancient seabed. And kneeling beside the stream, his face bright with wonder, was Trev.

“Mira!” He splashed toward her, his young body soaked and laughing, though she caught something else in his eyes—a flicker of the terror he’d witnessed, the way reality had bent and broken above them. “You did it! You actually did it!”

She sat up slowly, watching the impossible sight of water flowing freely across the desert. In the distance, she could see other streams branching and spreading, following the natural contours of the land toward places where other desperate people might still be waiting for rain that had never come.

The sound reached them before she saw them—voices, human voices, calling across the transformed wasteland. Survivors emerging from hidden shelters and buried bunkers, drawn by the sound of flowing water and the promise of life renewed. They came stumbling across the wet sand like pilgrims to a miracle, their faces bright with the same wonder she saw in Trev’s eyes.

“The others,” she said, remembering the forty-seven immortals who had shared the Tower’s fall. “What happened to—”

“Some of them are still alive,” Trev said, pointing toward a cluster of figures near the impact site. “But they’re… different. Changed. And not all of them are happy about it.”

She looked where he pointed and saw them—former brunchers, no longer immortal but not quite human either. Lord Pembroke knelt beside one of the streams, his aristocratic composure finally cracked as he wept into the flowing water. But nearby, a small group of the former immortals huddled together, their faces hard with resentment as they watched the survivors celebrate. She could see them whispering, planning, their eyes fixed on the largest of the new springs with unmistakable hunger.

In the distance, something shimmered at the top of a dune—silk, maybe, or sun on glass. When she looked again, it was gone.

Above them, a single champagne bottle tumbled through the sky, its cork finally popping free with a sound like distant thunder. The bottle shattered against a rock, its contents adding one final splash to the growing stream.

Mira cupped her hands in the flowing water and drank deeply, tasting abundance for the first time in her life. It was cool and clean and somehow carried with it the flavor of hope—not the desperate hope of the dying, but the patient hope of seeds waiting for spring.

She thought of Lady Ornithia, who had understood the price of paradise and chosen to pay it. Of Count Aldrich’s finally-completed toast and the Duchess’s relief at finding something new. They had been prisoners of their own excess, she realized, trapped in a golden cage that fed on itself while the world starved. Their fall had been freedom—a return to mortality that allowed life to flow again.

“What do we do now?” Trev asked, his voice full of wonder.

Around them, the other survivors gathered at the stream’s edge, their faces reflecting the same mixture of disbelief and joy. An old woman with radiation scars across her cheek knelt to splash water on her face. A family of tunnel-dwellers filled salvaged containers with shaking hands, and Trev was the first among them to cup his hands and drink deeply, his young face bright with the simple miracle of enough.

Mira stood, feeling strength flowing back into her body with each breath of the humid air. Around them, the desert was already beginning to change. She could see the first green shoots pushing up through the wet sand, life responding to water with the urgency of evolution itself. The true abundance had never been the Tower’s endless feast—it was this: the simple gift of enough, shared freely among those who needed it most.

“Now we follow the streams,” she said, slinging on her pack with steady hands. “And we tell the others: the Thirst is ending.”

As they walked away from the wreckage of the Tower, the transmitter in her pack crackled once more. But instead of coordinates pointing toward impossible promises, it now broadcasted a simple message that repeated over and over across the wasteland:

The water flows. The water flows. But who will control the source?

Behind them, where the Tower had fallen, the desert bloomed. But ahead of them, Mira could already see the smoke of cooking fires and the glint of weapons as humanity prepared to do what humanity always did: turn abundance into another kind of war.

The Thirst was ending. But something else was just beginning.

End of The Appetite Engine

Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this story, please share it with others who might appreciate speculative fiction that doesn’t shy away from uncomfortable truths. What did you think of the ending? Leave a comment below—I’d love to hear your thoughts on paradise, abundance, and what happens when the water finally flows.

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