The sun reigning over Xelinac is a different entity than the god the Larynthians worship – stronger, sharper, a heat that would draw the moisture from your lungs even before you felt the thirst. Drair did not remember her homeland. Her mother had fled the country when she was just a babe, the last remains of their civilization crumbling into dust. We all return to the sand, her mother had once told her.

  Drair stands in the midst of the easternmost village of Xelinac, the first settlement to feel the swords of the Larynthian soldiers. It is a collection of shattered stucco and lonely quiver trees, a gateway to the dead, and she feels guilty to be laying eyes on it, one of the few of her kind that could. The other Xelani she had sailed with are clutching flour sack bundles of whatever supplies Drair could afford in the markets of Izevel, picking through the wreckage.

  She walks quietly through the main street, little more than a tattered roadway for carts and foot traffic, trying to feel something for a place she couldn’t remember. The breeze is sharp. Sand settles into every crevice of her clothes, her hair, her boots. There is a hush to the land that only the pelting wind could break. Even the westernmost portions of Larynth’s deserts do not have the teeth that this land bears.

  She looks for the old man the group had appointed as their interim leader, a thin, scraggly-bearded man with a hacking cough, and finds him sitting on the stoop of a small hovel, its door ripped from the hinges. He stares into the sand at his bare feet.

  “Where do we go from here?” Drair asks, reaching up unconsciously to fiddle with the strap of her eye patch that is no longer there, a phantom limb.

  The elder takes a deep breath, clearing his throat. They’d acquired enough water to get them through to the last livable settlement, but the group had been raised in the desert, and water conservation was their default.

  “To Saima,” he coughs. “It’s a little further inland. But last I was there, it had a reliable water source. It was well-hidden against the bluffs, became a refuge for some.”

  Drair nods, peering into the hazy heat at the edge of town.

  “Denand’s scouts raided it, purged most of us,” the old man continues, brushing sand from his trousers. “Guess we don’t have to worry about that now, eh?”

  He looks up at her, his eyes small, irises the color of wood ash. Drair looks away to squint into the sun, chewing at the flesh of her cheek. “I don’t believe so.”

  The group gathers in the middle of town, showing their fellows the items they’d found, some of them smiling and laughing. Drair feels an emptiness span her chest. These people, though of her blood, feel unfamiliar.

  The Xelani move through the desert on blistered feet, headed inland for Saima. The callouses they’d developed before their capture were gone, but each insisted on remaining barefooted. Drair’s boots leave foreign footprints next to theirs in the sand. She ties her scarf around her mouth and nose and follows the group, the sun beating down on their shoulders.

  As they approach Saima, Drair spots a windmill, its wood vanes cracked and crumbling, spinning listlessly. They crest a rise and the bluffs come into view, vast red sculptures shaped by the wind. Beneath them are countless adobe homes, huddled together under the sun. A haze of heat settles around them, and a large main road leads to the center of town, where campfire smoke rises above the rooftops and dissipates into the wind. It is the only sign of life.

  You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

  Her companions seem to breathe easier as their refuge emerges from the shimmer. The elder, leading the group with a sprightly gait, stops short of the town’s perimeter, his ragged clothes fluttering around his narrow frame. Drair meets him, removing her scarf.

  “There are Xelani here?” she asks.

  The term feels strange. When her mother had died, Drair was only six. They were living in a storehouse, abandoned near the outskirts of the province of Cale. Her mother’s skin was lighter than most of their people, a soft caramel color, and she had received paid work at one of the outer farms without suspicion. They lived on stolen produce and hunted game, and her mother made the arduous trip into town once a month to buy grain and lard. She spoke little of their people, and Drair thought perhaps that ignorance had been another protection her mother had afforded her, despite the palpable distance it put between her and the man standing next to her now.

  “Yes,” the old man replies, gazing into the distance. “I was taken from here over a year ago now. After each raid, we developed new ways to stay hidden, and some survived.”

  Drair nods, silent.

  “You’re welcome to stay as long as you like,” he adds, following the others. “This is your home, too.”

  Drair hums, blinking into the sun. Her right eye, the one bearing the Lynac’s mark, is weak and sensitive. Looking through the haze now, she closes her left eye, testing its partner. Bitterness crawls through her as her vision blurs, leaving the red-sand bluffs a bleary, rust-colored mass. She grimaces, opening both eyes, and shuffles up the hill after her companions.

  She drifts through the town, watching these people greet their only remaining family, a collection of destitute eremites herded into the last habitable settlement of their kind. Walking through the hardened roads, Drair makes her way to the bluffs, each growing taller the closer she gets. Houses are hunkered beneath them, a few with curtains pinned to the open windows, others with decaying facades. Her eyes move upwards to a towering archway connecting two hulking bluffs, its shadow cast upon the clearing below it. In the sand below, there are mounds of rocks, countless in number.

  To her right, she hears a raspy voice – an old woman sitting on the stoop of a tiny adobe shanty, her knobby knees pulled up, and her wrinkled arms wrapped around them.

  “Most of ‘em don’t even have bodies,” she croaks. “The others we lost to starvation and sadness.” The woman is peering fixedly into the shadow of the archway. “Forty-three, last I counted.”

  Drair drags her eyes over each marker, some adorned with ribbons or pottery. She had never buried her mother. She’d left her there, in that storehouse, her body stiff and heavy. When Drair had touched her mother’s chestnut skin that morning, it was cold, and she’d fled on sandaled feet through the fields of Cale until she’d collapsed at the edge of Sawir Lake, four miles from their home.

  Drair bows her head to the older woman. “May I add one for my mother?”

  The woman only bobs her head, lips pursed, waving a bony hand in the direction of the shadow.

  She picks a spot in the sunlight, just outside the shadow of the archway, as the sun moves westward. Drair pulls each stone from the edge of the bluff, walking them through the sand and into the light, piling them several inches high to match its neighbors. When she is finished, she stands at the foot of her mother’s marking stones, the sun pelting her shoulders. She waits until the shadow of the archway covers her and her mother’s cairn, her feet aching, then turns back toward the center of town.

  The old woman is sweeping the sand from her floors when Drair meets her again. Her gray hair, stiff as straw, is pulled back to the nape of her neck, the way Tygoh wears his. Seeing Drair, she props herself up with her broom, one hand resting on her narrow hips. Drair bows in response, avoiding eye contact, her feet shuffling over the hard-packed trail.

  “We all return to the sand,” the woman calls after her. “Welcome home, lass.”