[Fifth Era – Year 1257 of the Divinity War; remains of the First Star, ruins of Arkand]

  Nazrin shook Jestil from the memory. “They’ve come.”

  Liminal veils of thought parted. Jestil recalled his pulsing blood, the sensation of joints and limbs, the desolate taste of the desert air.

  His skin tasted of warm flesh and salty sweetness. Feeling refreshed and alive from remembrance, my sand had inadvertently crept over his hand. Yet I thirst for knowledge, memory.

  Sunlight had climbed the sky and with it, heat. Shadows had fled to stubs of darkness. Wind, however, persisted, and darkness grazed the horizon.

  Jestil’s senses nettled, not merely dread, but actual physical pain.

  A hawk soared over them as the five riders now crested a dune. It seemed one of the cloistered had been modifying sea creatures, for the beasts that scuttled across the sand looked like serfgorths modified into desert mounts. His nerves curdled at their approach.

  From their auras, he could tell that each of them either matched or outclassed him in terms of self-assurance. Outnumbered and outmatched, he and Nazrin had little recourse.

  The many fiery veils braided into Nazrin’s blonde tresses obscured her face until she turned into the wind. She spotted a fallen stone, a fragment of the ruins, a little larger than her fist. With a deft hand, she untied the sash at her waist. Grasping one side of the cloth with the last three fingers, she pinched the other end with her thumb and forefinger and cradled the stone in its loop.

  By the time the riders reined in, the pain was far beyond unmistakable. A visceral torment in his flesh. What was causing him such pain, which seemed to grow as the riders neared?

  Nazrin began swinging her makeshift sling in a circle on her right side, building momentum. The riders halted, two women and three men, garbed in the loose robes of desert dwellers. Once halted, both groups studied one another. But Nazrin’s sling only gained momentum.

  Jestil’s pain seemed to radiate from the leftmost rider, a girl with a sunburst scar surrounding her right eye as if by some small explosion while her eyes had been protected by goggles. Her hair flowed like molten copper in the wind while she swayed uncomfortably in her saddle.

  She glared darkly upon him, ignoring Nazrin and her deadly sling. Why do some faces seem so familiar, as if sand could conjure dreams he’d never known? A clever tilt of her eyebrow, a sudden simper of her lips would have suited her. Instead, her glare harrowed his flesh.

  Why was she doing this to him? How was she causing this pain? Who was she? Thoughts caressed memory. In desperation, he grasped a strand, yet it frayed.

  Anger piled onto Jestil’s rising sense of panic.

  Jestil leaped between Nazrin and the riders, hands splayed. Pain flared. “Peace. We are gentle travelers. You can’t harm us, and we won’t harm you.” He slowly lowered his hands in a soothing gesture, offering them a mystic grin while signing for Nazrin to stop her sling. “Remember the soul covenant. You don’t want to corrupt your soul with their blood,” he mouthed the words.

  Soul covenant. Those words sent shivers of memory unspooling through my sand. A world on fire. No, a world of fire and light, shining out across the endless blackness. Upon the world a kiln, no, a home—my home. And within the home, an intricately sculpted child of lifeless clay. I pushed a finely etched parchment inside the yawning maw and up onto the roof of his mouth. Slowly, he transmuted and awoke. Moraithe? I called out for Moraithe, but none could hear me.

  Jestil dominated the space between Nazrin and the riders, fearless—as he had stood against Thom’tor, as he had climbed from infinitesimal reaching to infinite, as his voice still resounded into the infinite silence.

  My sand reached out for him. A child I had raised from clay. My child? “Jestil!” But I had no voice.

  The sunburst-scarred girl, the source of Jestil’s pain, spurred her mount forward. “They think we have come to harm them.”

  The anger in her glare became hooks in his nerves. His flesh knotted in agony. What was this strange numen she used to torment him?

  “Oh,” a rider in green said the words to her own mount, “perhaps we are robbers, waiting for unsuspecting travelers.” She turned her mount’s head to whisper to it, the words too silent to be heard.

  “Or maybe they are the thieves,” the burly man in the center said. “That’s what we’re wondering.” That beard and that mustache, were they sculpted?

  Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

  Jestil waved his hand. “But you’re the ones who chased us across this desert.”

  “Father,” Jestil’s tormentor, the green-eyed girl, interjected.

  The burly man with the oddly magnificent mustache looked at her and nodded.

  “You appeared to us as strangers to this place. We came to warn you.” The girl, Jestil’s tormentor, stopped glaring at him long enough to glance at Nazrin. “Can’t you read the wind? The earthstorm is coming. But there is shelter nearby if you will follow us.”

  Jestil retreated to Nazrin’s side and noticed my sand pooled there, exposed to the storm. My sand could be scattered across the desert if they didn’t do something. Jestil knelt and unlaced his boots, shielding his actions from the riders by his cloak. He began scooping my sand into his boots, and I strained to help, vibrating my sand deeper inside.

  “And what assurance can you give us that this earthstorm is so dangerous?” Nazrin’s sling lost some of its momentum. “How can we trust you?”

  The girl frowned. “Suspicion causes more trouble than any other malady that has passed between men.”

  “Is it suspicion or the need for it?” Nazrin said. “Is it not lies and deception which are the diseases that plague all societies?”

  “Or does suspicion engender mistrust, and mistrust lead to lies? Some think they are wise, so they set wisdom aside and fail to trust the great wisdom that whispers inside their hearts. Does a circle have a beginning? If you will not show me trust, how can I prove my worthiness of it?” The tormentor girl looked to the west. A wall of sand and rocks gathered hundreds of feet tall. “It is coming. Decide. Now. Or we will leave you to it.”

  “I will keep the sling at the ready. But we will follow.”

  “Then hurry. You must outrun the storm on foot. It will not be easy.”

  They raced behind the riders, but Jestil lagged. Nazrin took his hand to pull him along, yet he fell.

  “What has your feet glued to the dunes? Hurry.”

  “It’s the sand.” Jestil struggled to his feet. “I took as much as I could, filled my boots.”

  “Get up. We must go.”

  The storm was howling behind them. The wall of sand rushed on like some immense morthel consuming all in its path.

  Falling behind, Nazrin tried to pull him along, but the sand and rocks swallowed them, and he fell. He was lost in the sand. It blasted his skin, scratched at his eyes, and clogged his nose and mouth as boulders pummeled him with lightning force. Gratitude healed him, but it did not stop the pain and disorientation. He pulled the excess cloth of his kajin robe over his face and struggled forward.

  It wouldn’t kill him. He had more than enough gratitude, but he had already lost Nazrin. And who knew what she would suffer without him. The sand had disoriented him, but pain could be his guide. It could guide him to his tormentor.

  He strove toward it, making little headway with boots full of sand. Then, as the pain intensified, he realized he’d been traveling faster than he’d imagined. No, she must have circled back for him. Why?

  An eye glared at him within a sunburst scar. His tormentor cried out, “Take my hand.”

  He was in pure agony when he reached out to take it. But her touch was a blistering fire filleting his nerves. He writhed uncontrollably.

  His grasp refused her, like trying to hold onto red-hot iron. His hand began to slip. Though he trembled, he redoubled his grip, and hers tightened as well. She pulled him up behind her.

  Any separation, even the cloth of their robes, was a relief compared to the agony of any contact with her flesh. And yet, he could only marginally restrain himself from weeping.

  She called back to him, something unintelligible, yet he thought he caught the word pain. “Why?” Was all he could ask? Why come back for him? Why torture him? What was she trying to do to him?

  When she turned her head, he swore he saw the tracks of tears through the dust on her cheek.

  A bolder slammed into their mount, nearly knocking them all over. But something, the remnant of a memory, an instinct, told him he could protect them. He held the gratitude inside him, and he pushed it outward to envelope them. The rocks and sand pinged off the edges of his shield with a grinding sound, loud pops, and occasional booms, but his shield held firm. It was all he could manage under the weight of so much pain.

  Something glinted like water ahead, occasionally peeking out between the dunes. Without warning, they were riding along some kind of dry river bed that snaked along a swath of firmer earth, land stripped bare of sand, as if the wind had already taken it.

  His tormentor shouted and spurred their mount. The sand seemed to part when he spotted the oasis, eyes burning from the sand still in them. Their mount was beginning to struggle, but neither storm, nor mount, nor rider stopped. They rode on straight into the water.

  Jestil held his breath as they plunged in. Yet the only relief was not from water, but separation as he lost his grip on his tormentor and floated away from her, his pain easing with distance.

  The water was deeper than he’d expected. And when he opened his eyes, there was an underwater cave ahead. His tormentor and her mount were swimming toward it. He followed the pain and rushed after them, but it vanished. The torment vanished.

  He basked in the sweet feeling of painlessness until his lungs began to burn, begging for breath. Finally, he followed, swimming into the cave and up. He fought the desperate instinct for breath until he broke the surface. And with a pain that slammed him to his knees, the torture resumed.

  As he drew breath, he stared up at that strange sky. No sandstorm blotted out these heavens. And yet, neither did anything else. Torches lit a path through a blank night, devoid of stars. Somehow, it was suddenly night, but no moon greeted him, only pain.

  His tormentor awaited at the water’s edge, glaring at him through that sunburst scar. “Despite what you’ve done to me, I have saved you. You don’t know what it cost, what I endured for you out there. How can you delight in tormenting even your savior? Pray, end this curse.”

  “My curse?” Jestil was bewildered. “You’ve been torturing me.”

  “Me!?” Her brow furrowed, then softened as realization dawned. “You’re not doing this?”

  “I don’t even know you. Why would I want to torture you? Why would I torture myself?”

  “What could cause … Clearly something unaccounted is at work.” Her sunburst-scarred gaze firmed. “A mystery for later. Follow.”