“What did they ask?”

Zoe starts to ask how someone could do something like that to themselves, then immediately swallows the question.

"She'd burned her hands, badly, and someone said 'it was a sacrifice, wasn't it, you can tell the truth here', or something like that anyway I didn't write it down until afterwards and a lot of things had happened and - sorry, I'm rambling -"

"All the more reason not to tip him off."

To Mordred: “It’s alright. Recent events have been—much. Thank you for the information.” To Oswald: “So, we should continue as planned?”

"I think so. Yes." Even though making the active decision to move is painful to him. Mentally and physically.

The man continues to openly watch them, remaining at a distance of more than a half-mile, until it becomes clear where they are going, at which point he leaves.

With her hand the way it is, Zoe is not capable of much more travel; they make camp and she rests for a day.

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.