Ámenor did not wake gently. He woke to movement, but not the violent drag of a body across stone or to ropes biting into his wrists, but rhythm, a slow, uneven swaying beneath him. Creaking wood and straining leather straps. His eyelids fluttered, heavy as stone. The world arrived in fragments, the sky first. A pale, washed-out sky framed by curved beams above him. He tried to move but pain answered immediately, his ribs flared, his throat burned and limbs felt borrowed, disconnected from his body. Voices echoed nearby. These voices flowed smoother. Measured. Like people who didn't fear being heard.
"…still breathing." "…barely."
He forced his head to turn. The movement cost him a white-hot explosion behind his eyes. He groaned, a dry, cracked sound. A shadow fell over him, layers of cloth. Sand-colored, but woven with subtle threads of indigo and copper. The fabric was worn, but practical and dignified.
A woman leaned over him. Her skin was weathered by years of sun, thin silver rings circled her wrists, chiming softly as she moved. "Stay still," she said. The accent was unfamiliar. He tried to speak. Only air came out. She pressed something cold against his lips, a damp cloth. Drops slid slowly into his mouth.
Ámenor's gaze drifted past her shoulder. He was lying on a low wooden platform strapped to the back of a massive dune-beast, larger than any camel he had ever seen, its pale hide marked by scars. Around it walked others. Five or six figures moving with steady, unhurried steps. Maybe travelers? he thought. A faint flicker of panic sparked in his chest. Are they going to sell me to the Grasslanders?
"Where…" His voice cracked.
The woman studied him.
"In between," she answered.
In between what? He tried to lift his arm. It trembled violently before dropping back to his side. A man walking beside the beast looked up at him. His gaze lingered, not out of curiosity. That was worse. Ámenor swallowed hard. "Who are you?"
The woman smile. "We are those who walk between the dunes," she said. "And you were not meant to die today." After that, the darkness pulled him under again.
When he woke the second time, it was night and cold had replaced the heat. The air tasted of ash and distant spices. He was no longer moving. Above him lay not the sky, but woven fabric. Thick and patterned. Dyed indigo with geometric lines he didn't recognize. He was inside a structure. A tent, but not like the crude field tents of the soldiers, a bittersweet memory of trying to pitch a tent with Kaséti flashed in his mind. This one was firmly anchored, its poles carved, the interior lined with rugs and small oil lamps burning with a steady, smokeless flame. He took a sharp breath. He tried to sit up. A hand pressed firmly against his shoulder. "You will tear your stitches."
Stitches? His gaze dropped. Bandages wrapped tightly around his torso. Sitting across from him was an elderly man. Ámenor hadn't heard him enter. His hair was white but not brittle, tied back in a loose braid. His skin was carved with lines that didn't weaken him, but rather sharpened his features. His eyes, however, were not old. They were sharp and measuring. They watched Ámenor the way a scholar studies a dangerous text.
"You are far from your tribe," the old man said calmly.
Ámenor's jaw clenched. "They are dead."
The man did not contradict him. "Some are," was all he replied.
Silence pressed into the space between them. Outside, Ámenor could hear muffled movement, low conversations, the shifting of animals, metal softly clinking against pottery. "Why am I here?" he asked.
The old man tilted his head slightly. "Because the desert does not bury what still belongs to it."
Anger flared, sudden and sharp. "I don't belong to the desert," Ámenor shot back, his voice weak. "I belong to…" He stopped. To what? To the ashes? To ghosts?
The old man's gaze did not waver. "You believe your people were forsaken by the Fonte," he said.
Ámenor's pulse hitched for a second. Fonte? What in the sands is that? His mind raced, trying to recall a word he had never heard.
"We have no such thing," he murmured.
The old man's expression shifted. It wasn't amusement. It was almost pity. "That," he said softly, "is what your father wanted the world to believe."
The air inside the tent seemed to shift. Ámenor went completely still. "My father was a soldier, a protector of our tribe."
"And the keeper of a silence older than the sand you are sitting on." The old man said, leaning forward slightly.
The lamp's flame flickered. Ámenor's heart began to hammer, not out of a fear of dying, but from the recognition of something he didn't yet understand. "Did you know him?" he asked. "My father, I mean."
The old man studied his face, his bone structure, his eyes, the tension in his jaw. "I knew the secret he was guarding," he replied and pause.
The word landed heavily. Secret. Vague memories surfaced, conversations overheard in childhood. His father's posture stiffening whenever emissaries crossed distant territories. "What secret?" Ámenor asked, his voice barely a rasp.
The old man reached down and pressed his palm flat against the rugs beneath them. "Tell me," he spoke in a low voice, "when you were dying out on the Flats… did the earth feel empty?"
Ámenor froze. He remembered. The vibration. The rhythm coursing through the ground. The sensation that something had answered even before the footsteps approached.
The lamp's flame tilted slightly toward Ámenor, as if drawn by a breath.
This old man is crazy, Ámenor thought, feeling a flare of frustration at the strange man's cryptic way of speaking.
Outside the tent, somewhere deep beneath layers of sand and stone, something moved, as if it were listening to their conversation. Both of them froze, straining their ears as though trying to enhance their hearing through some unknown magic, but they heard nothing else. The old man stood, walked to the flap of the tent, and peered outside. When he turned back, his expression remained completely unchanged.
"You are still weak," he said. "And the desert teaches one lesson before all others."
The old man made a slight gesture with his hand. "First, you survive. Then, you understand." Snuffing out the candle near Ámenor, he spoke in a calm, steady voice. "Rest now."
And that was exactly what Ámenor did.
The journey took a few days. Ámenor had no real sense of the route. Most of the time he lay on the platform, drifting between fever and wakefulness, catching fragments of conversation and watching the sky bleed through different colors. But on the second day, he noticed a shift.
The wind. It died down.
The dunes were no longer wide, rolling expanses; they began to narrow. The terrain grew jagged, not towering mountains that would draw the eye from afar, but broken ridges, rocks like broad ribs jutting out of the sand. Natural formations that looked too mundane to arouse suspicion. Yet, inside them, the air changed.
When they slipped through a narrow passage between two sheer stone walls, Ámenor felt it. Coolness, moisture, life. It was hidden. Shielded by natural angles and shadows that only existed at certain hours of the day. Anyone passing a few miles away would never suspect there was water inside.
And where there is water… there is permanence. When he was finally helped down, his legs nearly buckled. Two of the travelers supported him without unnecessary force, like people holding something that needed to remain whole. Then, he saw it. It wasn't just a camp. It was a community.
Structures half-buried in the sand. Low buildings made of pale stone mixed with clay. Stretched canvas creating shaded corridors. Symbols carved into the walls: spirals, lines radiating from a center and expanding outward. Everything converged toward a point further back, where the vegetation grew dense. Where the water caught the light as if it were breathing.
A strange tightness gripped his chest. Where are we? Ámenor thought.
The community members did not carry themselves like soldiers. They moved like devotees. Men and women in simple robes, marked by discreet embroidery, the same symbol he had seen in the old man's tent. A spiral bisected by three descending lines. Ámenor noticed that everyone touched the ground as they passed the center of the place. Some murmured words too soft to catch.
The old man walked beside him.
"We do not control the Fonte," he explained calmly. "We guard it."
"Guard it… from what?"
The old man cast him a brief glance.
"From men who confuse power with right."
The answer was too clear. Grasslanders.
Ámenor looked around. "Is this place that Fonte you talked about?"
The old man let out a genuine laugh. "Do not play the fool, boy." He paused, perhaps weighing whether he should reveal more. "The ancestors say it is the heart of the desert."
After a brief pause, he continued. "We are the Order of Arcanum, and we protect the heart of the desert."
"So we are at the heart of the desert, and in this place, something you also call the 'Fonte', which is the secret my father kept, is guarded," Ámenor said, still deeply confused, trying to make sense of all this nonsense. "But that doesn't explain how you found me, or how you know who my father is."
The old man stopped walking, his dark eyes fixing onto Ámenor's. "We did not go looking for you, Ámenor. We simply felt the tremor of your fall. When you were dying, the sand told us a shield had fallen."
Ámenor was growing tired of the old man answering questions he hadn't asked, with his frustration finally boiled over. With a nervous edge to his voice, he demanded, "What is this Fonte? How does it work?"
The old man answered with quiet honesty. "We know how to honor it."
That wasn't the same thing, Ámenor realized. They weren't users of whatever this was; they were its protectors. Its monks. Its watchmen. But not its heirs. That thought made something inside him tremble. Ámenor gave up on trying to get any real answers out of the crazy old man, but as that night, settled into a small, cool stone hut, he couldn't sleep. The silence here was different from the open desert. It was deep. Alive. He closed his eyes and felt it. Not a vibration this time. An echo. Distant. As if the ground itself had a memory.
And then… A sound. Outside the hut. Footsteps. Too light to be the guardians. Too careful to be casual. Ámenor opened his eyes slowly. The flame of the small oil lamp flickered. He held his breath. The sound stopped. But the sensation didn't. Someone was there. Watching. Not with reverence. Not with devotion. With calculation.
Outside, among the shadows of the rock formations sheltering the oasis, a figure stood motionless, partially obscured by the jagged stone. The cloak they wore didn't belong to the Order members. It was finer. More structured. And beneath the fabric, pinned to a belt, a small metallic seal caught the moonlight for a fraction of a second. A symbol that did not belong to the desert. The figure didn't approach. They merely watched the center of the oasis, where the water seemed slightly restless. Then, they melted into the darkness.
Inside the hut, without fully knowing why, Ámenor placed his hand flat against the floor. The stone was cold. But beneath it… something pulsed. Faintly. The canvas flap of the tent was still swaying behind him when Ámenor took his first step outside. The night air hit him like a cold, dry breath, heavy with the scent of sand and sun-baked stone that was now radiating its heat back into the dark sky. He inhaled deeply, ignoring the ache in his chest. The world out here wasn't the vast, empty desert he knew. It was contained.
Walled in. The mountains weren't high enough to be true ramparts, but they formed a jagged ring of dark, weather-beaten stone. From a distance, they would look like hardened dunes or ordinary desert ridges. But inside, protecting this space, they felt like silent sentinels. And in the center, nestled below, he saw the gleam. A true oasis.
Its surface mirrored the moon in shimmering silver, ringed by date palms and low brush. Small mud and stone structures were scattered around it, arranged with a care that bordered on ritualistic. This was no makeshift village. It was ancient. Deliberate. Built to remain unseen. Low torches burned. Figures walked in silence. There was no loud laughter, no shouting. It was as if everyone here knew they were hiding something, and the weight of that secret shaped the very way they breathed.
Ámenor took another step. The ground beneath his feet was firm, unlike the shifting sands of the open wastes. He still felt weak, but something inside him, that same instinct that had kept him alive when he thought he was dead, was pulling him forward. Calling him. It wasn't the water. It was something deeper.
He limped slowly down a natural path winding through the rocks. Every step made his vision swim, but he refused to turn back to the tent. He needed to understand.
That was when he felt it. He didn't hear it first; he felt it. A prickle at the nape of his neck. As if someone was standing very close. Watching.
The wind shifted. The brush to his left rustled. He stopped. His heart began to hammer far too fast for a man who could barely stand.
"Who's there?" his voice came out low and raspy.
Silence. But not an empty silence. He took two steps back. The sound came again, clearer this time, the soft crunch of sand under a carefully placed boot. Not an animal. Too deliberate. His hand instinctively reached for a weapon he didn't have.
A shadow detached itself from between two date palms.
Tall. Slender. And for a fleeting second, the moonlight brushed across a face. He didn't recognize the features at first. He recognized the stare. And that was what froze the blood in his veins. Because that stare didn't belong to the open desert. It belonged to the village. To the nights around the fire. To the time before the slaughter.
"…Dagma?"