And with one thing and another they arrive at the Dallol dig site.

Dallol mountain is on a broad expanse of colorful salt flats periodically interrupted by mineral pillars and brine pools. The immediate landscape is similar to what they have seen so far as they’ve traveled around Kolluli and Iron Point.

The squat Dallol “mountain” rises only about 150 feet above the plain, a stretched oval roughly two miles by one mile. The southwest side of the mountain boasts impressive salt canyons caused by slow erosion over the centuries.

He's circled back around to hating pillars. Hate hate hate.

A bird lands promptly on Oswald's head.

He barely registers this bird. He is too busy resting in place. The bird can rest with him.

................

“Oswald,” Sister Araari says, “There is a bird on your head.”

"...Oh. So there is." He attempts to wave it away but if it pecks at his fingers he is just going to go back to ignoring it.

They find a new crater not far from the mountain, which overlaps where Acuna told them the dig site is.

Just outside the walls of the 1926 crater, there is a small cairn for the dead, with the following carving on it.

"For my lusts, no penance is enough." He does not have enough energy for tones of voice. "I denounce now all flesh and shut my mouth. I pass now into the dream-somethinged halls of... Oloth-Waag? That sounds bad?"

"I thought it was 'renounce' but. Yeah. Sounds bad."

"It doesn't sound like just a tomb. It sounds... suicidal."

"Dream-scourged?"

“Oloth-Waaq. It also says ‘I renounce now all flesh and shut my mouth’.”

"Oloth-Waaq is a dream god that was worshiped by the obscure Carrom tribes that once lived in the area near Adua. The 'Dream-Scourged Halls' are a geological formation in the deserts near Adua, viewed with superstitious dread by a variety of local cultures. George was going to study there before--"

"........I think maybe he did."

Was that the exact wrong thing to say? HE DOESN'T KNOW. ALL HIS EMOTIONS ARE OFF.

Zoe bets that if Anemone were here, she'd recognize the handwriting. But she's not.

"Would you recognize his handwriting, on stone?"

“Whoever wrote this stone, I am—likely glad that they decided to shut their mouth, given the significance that mouths can hold, though I regret that they were driven to it.”

Zoe's recent interactions with mouths and flesh leave her inclined to shut her mouth as well.

Has nobody else remembered that Ayers didn't die in the explosion and his whereabouts afterwards were unknown. It seems really likely he wrote this and went and died in a dream place! 

He kneels and examines the rock closely. "Yeah. Yeah. That's... that's his." He looks like he is about to cry.

Lev is failing to process much of anything. He's touching the rock over and over again.

Not sure there is anything much he can do except carefully sit and stare at the crater and have a moment of silence.

Anything more concrete than that feels like it'd be more uncomfortable than comforting here in the hottest place imaginable, mysterious health or no.

Zoe's brain is not functioning enough to consider facts like Ayers maybe didn't die. There is a stone cairn with an epitaph and a bereaved loved one RIGHT HERE.

"What do you think. Happened to him." He is very carefully not using the present tense.

Zoe glances at her hand. She is very worried about what lusts might bring someone to renounce all flesh and shut their mouth. "It sounds like, maybe. He stopped eating?"

"Oh. That's. Not a good way to die."

"At least... if that's what happened... it was his choice?"