It's the end of the second day after Kasamir found his lost sheep - a young, gangly thing with bright eyes and bounding legs, always the first to step out of the fold to graze, fearless and curious.
He hasn't found his way back.
He ran out of water shortly before he found the sheep.
There are things in the sand.
Eventually, perhaps after some tortured sleep, perhaps not, the light of the third day dawns.
It's blisteringly hot already.
He can see that it's light, but that's all.
He falls to his knees, and admits it at last.
The lamb is dead.
He breaks the creature’s neck. Tears into its flesh with the knife he uses for wolves. Presses his lips— so dry, so dry— to the wound.
Drinks.
The blood of the lamb pours down the shepherd’s chin, down his chest, staining his shirt, staining the sand. He drinks. He drinks.
And he chews.
He gags. He retches. He sobs without tears.
He keeps it down.
He skins it. Uses the hide for some kind of covering. Takes the bones in case he needs to chew off more meat like an animal.
The creature was dead anyway.
It was dead anyway.
He had no foresight.
With some energy and makeshift protection from the elements, he keeps going. Perhaps if he can make it to the top of a sand dune, the tallest one, over there, he can pinpoint the way home.
He reaches it.
In every direction, sand dunes roll away. Up here, the sun is like a furnace.
There's nothing to distinguish any direction from another.
No.
There has to be a way home. There has to be.
He walks again, he walks, he walks, he stumbles and rises, he finds another dune, taller this time, and begins the exhausting climb.
Dawnfather. Hear me. I am in your heartlands.
Help me.
He climbs until his limbs tremble, and his ears pop, and each breath he takes feels thin.
And then suddenly he emerges, and the dune falls away to reveal something like the desert stretched out before him like a living map.
It's hard to see, with his dry scratched eyes. Like looking through gauze.
Over there, distant, a field of twisted things like huge crumbling knobbly bones, tangled together and flaking death; beyond it a city that lies on the plain like a tumour; over there, a land of bubbling garish vomit-colours, strange vapours and boiling lakes of sulphur; over there, a great black citadel that pains him to look upon; over there, a ravening thing bleeds poison ichor into the great river; an eyeless city older than history broods in the deep desert; uncounted ruins among the sands, of cities each greater than any that survives today; the lost treasures of the old world glinting in blasted valleys; the three Reclaimed Cities he has heard travellers whisper of, gleaming palaces perched atop a gnawing abyss; in the far distance, an island in green where elves play.
And the great city he visited once, briefly, where all men cross paths and he could find his way home. Impossibly distant, days and weeks of a march through the desert.
He shields his face, but it is too late. It is in his lungs, in his throat — in his eyes, and he can’t see.
He loses his footing, his strength, and he falls.
No energy to call for help. His voice is a dry croak.
He lies there, in the well of the great dune.
His parents are never going to know what happened to him.
Nobody is going to find him, out here. No body to bury. One of countless lost to the desert.
From out of blue smoke there comes a figure, strange of face but noble, and before Kasamir's eyes it stands resplendent in something like moonlight. It stands behind a thin gossamer veil. Smaller blue figures cavort about it.
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