In the bloody sun’s rising, the desert was a sea of gore, the crack-riddled, barren earth between it and the ravening crags east and west a vitrified corpse. The fuming sun straddled the mountains, triumphant. Vanquished was the beneficent night. All creatures great and small scuttled for cover, lest the vampire in the sky suck them dry of life.

A dry wind sprang up out of the desert. From the southwest it came, driving the sand before it in great clouds. Red-dark up from the south met the dawn and devoured it: Deracou, the wind that devours, do the Parset people call such storms. Deracou stalked the cloaked figure. Sighing, groaning sand scoured the dead sea bottom until every crack was filled, making it again sea; roaring sea, sea of sand. Deracou claimed the waste, covered it, drowned it, and the high-tide wave of it made shore once more of the rocky place where the still form lay. I lay quiet as the desert, back turned to its courting. As it had claimed the cracked, wasted dead sea, so would Deracou claim me.

Out of caprice, it reached out its arm to me, when I thought I had escaped. The temptation was strong within me to sleep. To let my body be covered forever by the sand, to take the peace nature offered. I had, after all, fulfilled the chaldra of the mother. To fulfill the chaldra of the soil, to give back what I had borrowed, to die here upon Silistra — indeed, the temptation was strong.

The Shaper’s seal sign of my father, its great spiral, myriad points of light worked into my cloak’s back, glittered and twinkled before my sand-sealed eyes. My father, it said, did not deliver me home to Silistra, to the Parset Desert, to die. My father, it reminded me, had need of me. My father, Estrazi, it cajoled, would expect more from his daughter.

I lay, arms crossed over my head, with the cloak pulled close about me. When the south wind died away, all that could be seen of me was the scintillating spiral sparkling in the sand.

The receding wind bore the darkness with it, and the light of sun’s rising came again upon the land. It rainbowed the Shaper’s seal that was upon the cloak that my father had given his daughter.

Sensation consumed me. My eyes and nose and mouth were filled with grit. My swollen tongue was unable to give comfort to my cracked and blistered lips. My savaged feet throbbed and pulsed.

Surely, I told myself, my father had good reason for depositing me here. Doubtless, I comforted myself as I lay in the dark under my cloak, that reason would be made clear. My lungs burned and ached. They had been hard put to adjust to the thinner Silistran air, although it was Silistran air I had breathed for three hundred years, until my need to discharge the chaldra of the mother had led me to the Falls of Santha, to the cavern beneath them, and to Mi’ysten.

I thought of Mi’ysten, that world out of time, of Estrazi and Raet, child of the Shapers, while my body lay resting. I could not ask more from my tortured flesh, not now, with the heat of the day upon the land.

Estrazi, my father, for whom I had forsaken my position as Well-Keepress of Astria, for whom I had searched so long: it was he who had put me here. By his design was I created, in his hands was I pawn. On Mi’ysten had I given back to him his ring that I had worn threaded through my chald across the plain to Arlet, amid the mountains of the Sabembe range, below the Falls of Santha. Even in the solitary confinement of the crystal cube of Mi’ysten had I worn it; even while at the mercy of Raet had I retained it. To give it back to him. To discharge my chaldra, my responsibility and my duty to my dead mother, Hadrath, had I withstood Raet and met with Estrazi upon his world, Mi’ysten.

And when it was done, when the ring was removed by my hand from my chald belt of interwoven chains and placed in the bronze-glowing hand of my father, Estrazi, I had found myself, naked but for cloak and chald, upon my back in the Parset desert, looking up at the constellations of the night sky of Silistra. So many questions unanswered, he had delivered me home. I had lain a long while looking up at the sky. That the sand under me was Parset sand I had determined from the placement of the stars above me. Groistu, the stones-wielder, was only half-risen in the north. Wirur, the winged hulion, held court directly above Groistu’s head. The tip of his tufted left ear, where the north star Clous twinkled, was barely discernible upon the horizon. From no other place upon Silistra would the night sky so display herself.

I had wept for joy, to feel Silistra again supporting my flesh, to breathe the thinner, righter air of the planet of my birth. I had not thought, then, of what the desert day would bring. I had been so long away from the cycle of day and night, and from weather, and from nature herself, I had forgotten. But the morning sun taught me, after I had wasted the night cool in introspection. I quickly relearned my vulnerability. My Mi’ysten schooling did me little good. I had shaped water, creating a bare trickle with my limited power, and the desert sucked it away. As it tried to suck away my life in the three days that followed. By the north star Clous, and the crouching crags of the southernmost tip of the Sabembe range, did I set my course, northeast to Arlet.

I had, I reminded myself in the dark of my tented cloak, come far in three days. I blew breath hard out of my mouth, trying to spit the grit from my gullet.

In a little while, I would set out again. I was safe, in the heat of the day, from dorkat, the stalking carnivore, from slitsa, the slithering fork-tongued, from friysou, the leather-winged scavenger, and from all that scuttled and crawled upon the desert sands. In the heat of the day, the desert slept. Doubtless I could sleep, unmolested. Truly, I had no choice. My limbs would no longer obey me, and my dreaming mind would no longer hold a train of thought. I sank into the cool dark, where pain could not find me, nor heat, nor hunger, nor thirst.