A DESERT! I have been to a desert! I had never been to one and I want to tell you immediately that a desert is far stranger and far more UNSETTLING than anyone had prepared me for, and I have SO much to tell you about it.
Thoral led us through the sand elf city of Al Janat — a SAND ELF CITY, which I did not know existed until I was walking through it, and I had at least four questions about that before we had cleared the far side — and beyond it we came into the dunes. A sand sea. That is the phrase that was used and it is SO much better than anything I managed that I stopped and wrote it down on the spot while everyone kept walking.
And then: EMPTINESS. Red dunes to the horizon and, I was assured, far beyond it. We were the only living things the entire way. No water. No trees. No bugs. I want to be clear that I did not simply take this on faith — I got down and checked for bugs, twice, and I am aware that this is not what the others consider reconnaissance, and I did catch Toes watching me do it, but an ABSENCE IS A FINDING and I will not be embarrassed about recording one properly.
The senses play tricks out there! We saw a forest — mirage. A lake — mirage. And then a small black figure on the horizon, almost a dot WITH ARMS, and I asked immediately whether that one was a mirage too and NOBODY COULD TELL ME, because it simply stopped being there. I do not have a category for a thing that is a dot, and has arms, and then is neither, and I have started one.
Then the SMELL. Rust and molten iron, and a coppery taste that sits on the tongue. We were advised that, quite apart from all the sand we had breathed in, we should probably not have been breathing THAT in either, which is exactly the sort of thing one prefers to be told BEFORE rather than DURING, and I said so, loudly, to anyone still listening.
And the WIND. There is a wind you cannot feel that pushes you in a direction. It was explained to me like walking beside someone on a footpath who keeps drifting into you, oblivious, until you are off the edge of it — and that is exactly what kept happening, all of us drifting the same way, all of us apologising to nobody. There was a dust cloud risen out of the sands off to the right and that was where the pull wanted us. We walked past it. And the further from Myrridian we went, the weaker it got, until it let go entirely.
Do you see it? The pull is not IN the desert. It belongs to the CITY. The city WANTS.
Myrridian, when we reached it, was ruins. Sandstone, and SUBSTANTIAL — this had been a large city. There is a dry riverbed alongside it and between us we had enough history to know it once wound down out of the mountains that ring the sand sea, and that most of its length is long since blown over, and that this was one of the few stretches still showing itself.
And then I learned the thing I have not stopped turning over since. Myrridian was once home to a very large population of desert cat KINDREDS. An entire PEOPLE. Their decline and the abandonment of the city came before our lifetimes, likely before our parents’ — perhaps a grandparent remembers it — and the height of that civilisation long before even that. And their decline lines up with the rise of the sand elves in Al Janat.
THEN Myrridian was lost. LOST! For decades! Presumed swallowed by the sand, with nobody much minded to go looking. And it has only been found again in the last twenty or thirty years — which lines up with the Sand Kings stirring back into activity.
TWICE. Two alignments, and both of them handed to me with the words “just one of those coincidences,” which I wrote down exactly as spoken and then underlined and then drew an arrow between, because a coincidence that happens twice in the same story has stopped being a coincidence and become a SHAPE, and I would dearly love someone to tell me what the shape is.
I had expected a fortress. There WAS a fortress — a central bastion with the city grown up around it in the old style, which is a perfectly ordinary arrangement. But when we got close enough we understood it was not a military holding at all.
It is a NECROPOLIS. And oh, reader, I nearly forgot to be frightened.
Because the buildings have FUNCTIONS. Preparation rooms and chambers. Short-term storage rooms and chambers — SHORT-TERM, which implies long-term, which implies a schedule, which implies someone kept it! Structures for farewell. Structures for remembrance. Structures for last rites, filed SEPARATELY from farewell and from remembrance, which means these people distinguished between three different things I had always assumed were one thing. And then tombs. Mostly tombs. An entire city laid out as a working taxonomy of how to let someone go.
And here is what I did not expect at ALL. There was none of the WRONGNESS. None of that pressing against the natural order that a graveyard gives you. It sat easily. For this place, in this climate, this simply IS the natural order, and things are returning to it.
It was very obviously a place that once held a strong amount of DESIRE, in a home sort of way, as opposed to a casino and glutony kind of way. I have written that down and I decline to improve it, because I do not think I can.
No economic value, we were told. No mobs, no gangsters. Nothing there to want.
We walked down into it anyway.
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