Date: October 14, 2026
Attendance: Sandy, Lucia, Thalan, Elunia
Morning on the salt flat came clear and warm, and with it two empty patches of ground where Korath’s and Varys’s tents had stood. There were no tracks. Nobody had heard anything. The camp’s alarm line was untouched. And while the others were still staring at the bare salt, a figure came walking in out of the desert: Thalan, sunburnt, dry-mouthed and footsore, who had got up one night to relieve himself somewhere far behind them, and had been walking ever since. He couldn’t say how long it had been. He had simply wandered, and the valley had brought him to their fire. Where’d you guys go?
The others caught him up. North, east, south and west were not to be trusted here; they moved. Look up now, and six hours later north would be a different north. The birds avoided the place because it scrambled their sense of direction. There were mirages, and rocks hanging in the air, and seams in the ground that looked like cracks into somewhere else. It looked, Thalan was told, like the site of some magical apocalypse. They had also found people asleep in crates in a warehouse in Bitter End, stacked like cordwood, and had decided, uneasily, that the job came first. Thalan gave that the look it deserved.
The verse had brought them three legs toward the dawn and two toward the star. Three toward the dusk came next. The sun was rising in the south that morning and the North Star stood in the east, so the party settled it simply: dusk is where the sun goes down. They would watch the sun and walk toward its setting, wherever that turned out to be.
Glass in the cracks
Elunia took the lead. She meant to keep the line, she truly did. But the badlands were full of small quick desert creatures, and they were very cute, and one of them was a fox. Somewhere in the chase the party turned down a side valley without quite deciding to, and came out of it into open desert where the ground was split by long cracks glowing an unnatural pink.
Sandy was walking out on the flank, watching the ground ahead, and she saw what Elunia didn’t. In one of the cracks, eight eyes were looking out. The fox was trotting straight for it, and Elunia was right behind the fox with her hands out, trying to catch it and pet it.
Stop!
Elunia stopped. In the crack there was a little puff of something like fairy dust. Then a second crack split open directly under the fox, a pair of fangs rose up through it, and the fox was pulled down under the sand with a small yelp. The crack sealed. Behind Thalan, the air went bamf, and he turned to find a spider the size of a horse standing on the sand where nothing had been, its body shimmering like blown glass. Lucia, against all reason, liked it at once. It looked like glass. Thalan assured her she would not like it for long.
Sandy could see one of them; the other two were only eyes, staring out of cracks in the ground. She went for the one she could see, and her blade opened it up. Elunia laid her patron’s curse on it and sent two bolts of eldritch fire into the wound, and it burst like a dropped decanter into a thousand glittering pieces.
Thalan, who knew his scripture, understood what they were facing: the spiders were not fully in this world. They lived half on another plane and stepped through at will. He tested it anyway with a column of holy fire on the place where one of the eyes had been, and the flame broke harmlessly against the bare rock. Annoyed, he did what Thalan does. You’re really annoying. Come fight me. Kord wants us to fight. Then he planted himself in front of Elunia, because she was squishy, and so were they all, except Lucia.
Chittering answered him. The eyes vanished, and new cracks opened all around: two beside Thalan and one behind Sandy, with spiders coming out of each. Their bites drove deep and burned with poison, though Sandy’s armour turned the worst of it. Lucia went into her rage at last (time ran strangely there, and between one blink and the next the spiders were simply beside her), and her hammer came down on the one savaging Elunia, once and then again. Thalan’s spirit wolf, which he called Freaky, loped from one wounded friend to the next and licked them, and the wounds closed. Clerics of Kord get a wolf, Thalan explained, with complete confidence.
Then a crack opened in the empty air above one of the camels, and another above Elunia, and from each a web of crystal shot down like an egg sac to wrap its prey and haul it up into the light. Elunia ducked, and the web smashed into the sand beside her and zipped back up into its hole. The camel was not so quick. It thrashed in a crystalline net as it was dragged up toward a glowing bluish-purple seam in the sky.
Sandy had two javelins in her hand, and she threw. The javelin snapped the web with a lovely little tinkle of falling glass, and the camel dropped onto its side in the sand, grunting, plainly not grateful in the slightest. Sandy turned her next throw into a charge and took a great chunk out of the spider attacking Elunia, splattering crystal blood across the sand.
Elunia’s answer to that spider was something the others hadn’t seen before. Her nails grew long. Her teeth went to points. Her eyes turned black and veined, and she lunged and bit the thing, and her teeth broke on its crystal hide. It wasn’t much more than a kiss. Lucia watched her lick a glass spider with deep misgivings: every ominous feeling she’d had about Elunia, which had eased a little lately, came back at once. Then Lucia’s hammer did what Elunia’s teeth couldn’t, and the spider shattered.
In the middle of it all a larger piece dropped into the sand, and Elunia went to it as if time had stopped around her. It was a gem the size of a coin, a fat piece of amber, and when she picked it up she heard stone crushing, rock falling. Then she was simply at Thalan’s side again, with the stone in her hand. The last spider was hanging half out of a crack at shoulder height when Lucia’s thrown hammer smacked it out of its hole onto its back, and came home to her hand like a thunder god’s, and the second throw scattered it in spider legs across the sand.
Sandy said nothing at the time. But when Elunia had turned to look at her after the fury, with the claws and the fangs, Sandy could have sworn she saw a second set of eyelids, vertical ones, slide closed over Elunia’s eyes for a moment. She hasn’t seen it since. No one else saw it at all.
The talk afterward was mostly about teeth. We don’t chew face spiders, Thalan said. At the monastery they had learned not to put strange things in their mouths; Elunia, it seemed, had been homeschooled. Sandy recalled the warding sign in the bookshop in the capital, the one Elunia couldn’t bring herself to go near, and wondered aloud what sort of god a person worships when a sign like that repels her. Lucia didn’t know the sign, but Elunia’s claws reminded her uncomfortably of the wererat. Elunia, for her part, was having a wonderful time.
Where the last spider had died, Thalan found a second gem: a diamond, and when he held it he heard the heavy rush of the north wind. Glitter dusted the sand where the spiders had broken. Lucia called dibs on their legs. They were the first thing the party had fought that wasn’t disgusting: no wererats in a rubbish heap, no orcs on a butcher’s table. A glitter spider. She took four legs, and Elunia asked whether they could eat them, and they could.
With the spiders gone, most of the glowing cracks closed up. The party went on. They did not get far before they admitted it: they were lost.
The long way round
It was noon. Thalan looked back along their own trail, which ran away to the south behind them, and decided to keep it there and walk the other way, toward where the sun would set. It can’t be any worse than following a fox. It was much better. By the time evening came the sun was going down directly ahead of them, and they were back on the verse’s line.
They camped in the badlands. Lucia pitched the camp, tucked out of sight in the rocks. Elunia strung her bells and her cans. Sandy walked out to mark the morning’s way, walking dead straight, she was sure, until she smelled boiling spider and found herself coming back into the same camp from the other side, half an hour later, by a direction she had never left by.
Thalan cooked. He had, he said, seen something like this done once, and he turned the four glass legs into a spider fricassee that was the best thing any of them had eaten in the desert. It cooled them, settled their stomachs and put heart into them, and as they ate they all felt something else, too: a sense that tomorrow, once or twice, they would be able to slip sideways out of the world into wherever the spiders came from, and back.
The sun set, the air cooled, and the night passed quietly.
Worm sign
In the morning the sun rose in the east, as it is supposed to, for the first time in days. One leg to the dusk remained. Before they set out, Lucia ran her stick over the two gems, and it told her what they were: gems of the resplendent genie. Break one, and a genie comes to your aid. The amber held a dao, a genie of earth. The diamond held a djinni, a genie of air. Once broken, a gem is spent. Elunia was sure nothing bad could come of her making a wish to a genie. They weren’t wishes, she was told. Just help. She kept the amber. Thalan, who has a habit of giving his things away, didn’t want the diamond.
Elunia took the lead again, steadied by Thalan’s blessing, and again the desert got the better of her. The badlands had given way to rolling dunes with a few rock formations standing far off, and she became convinced there was a pattern in the dunes, one that changed with the light, and that if she followed it she couldn’t go wrong. Then there was a cat. Everyone was looking at the cat.
Everyone except Lucia, who heard something like sand running through an hourglass, and turned round. Behind them one of the dunes was slipping downhill, and the sand on its crest was trembling. The longer she watched, the bigger it got. It was following them.
Guys. You know how Elunia’s guiding us by the sand dunes? I think the sand dunes are moving.
The noise grew. The air began to smell, very strongly, of cinnamon. The dune had been much further away than any of them had thought, because it kept getting bigger, and it was very loud now. They backed toward the rocks in the distance, on the theory that rocks, at least, don’t move. Then the thing came up out of the sand.
It was purple, and cylindrical, and fifty yards across. It landed on the surface, and its mouth opened like the petals of a flower, and its throat was lined with hundreds of thousands of knives of bone. The cinnamon was overwhelming. It began to roll toward them across the sand. From one of the rock outcrops, someone was screaming at them to run. Faster! Faster! Like your life depends on it!
They ran. Thalan, who had no intention of fighting a thing like that (“we are going to violently run away”), picked Elunia up and threw her onto Freaky’s back. Elunia turned in the saddle and tried to fill the worm’s mind with a phantom, and it ignored her. She offered Thalan one of her capes to get himself clear, and he waved it off; there was no time to make it his. Sandy simply ran, powerfully, outpacing the rest.
Lucia had the diamond. She crushed it between her fists. Wind rushed out of it, and the djinni within took one look at the situation, said How can I— nope, and vanished. A moment later he was back. Perhaps he had been a little hasty. What was it she wished?
Can you make me go faster? More faster?
He clapped his hands. Your wish is my command. Lucia was bowled clean off her feet and went head over heels through the air toward the rocks, and both camels went with her, sailing across the sky behind her.
The others floundered on through the loose sand, the dry heat of the worm on their necks. None of them dared look back. Up on the rock now they could see figures in armour, caked with sand and grit, under torn black banners. Get up here! Lucia was already there; she had landed on several of them. She apologised, and thanked them warmly for breaking her fall. They told her she was welcome, and stared at her clothes. Then the rest were scrambling up, the wolf with Elunia on its back, Sandy, and Thalan. The worm sensed the rock ahead of it, closed its enormous mouth, and drilled back down into the sand. It was a good half hour before the desert’s surface was still again.
The Black Queen’s soldiers
The soldiers hauled them up and looked them over, and their Common came out oddly shaped, the right words in the wrong music. Who are you? Which sibling do you fight for?
Elunia was quickest: We are lost adventurers. Thalan said he fought for Kord. Kord, the soldiers agreed, was a noble god, and some of them followed him too; they could have a good brawl about it later. Lucia said she had met somebody’s sister once and liked her better than the other sister, so, sibling-wise, she supposed it depended. We march for the Black Queen, their leader said. Who do you march for? Why else would you be here?
The Sibling Wars. It came back to them from old histories: millennia ago, when the Auric King and the Argent Queen departed, their children went to war over what was left. And then Elunia was talking inside everyone’s head at once, very fast. Pay attention. Hear me out. Don’t say anything about any of the siblings. Act like we’re lost. Don’t pledge allegiance to anyone. Thalan stared at nothing as if he were having a seizure. Lucia began to hear voices, and to say so.
The Black Queen, the lieutenant added with a shrug, liked to call herself the Obsidian Empress, and could be a little full of herself about it. Thalan explained that they came from an unaffiliated part of the world. Unaffiliated? What part of the world is untouched by the war? The soldiers were turning the party’s clothes over in their hands. They had never seen such styles. We’re from an island, said Sandy. Ah. An island.
They had been sent, the lieutenant said, across the Divine Desert to cut off the Red Prince’s forces. How long ago? It seemed like forever. The last news they’d had from home was that the king and queen had perished, the war between the siblings had begun, and the Black Queen meant to take Godshome. Elunia sent it round the party again: They’ve been stuck in here this whole time. Don’t give them any outside information.
The soldiers had food, and they shared it gladly. When they opened their supply crate, Lucia saw that among the rations were potion bottles she knew at once: work from her own family’s house of glass, from back in Orbonne Tagliapietra’s own day, before the family lost his secrets. A thousand years old, at least. The party sat down to eat with the soldiers, and the food turned to sand in their mouths. What’s wrong with your food? Lucia blamed the spiders.
Thalan asked which of them was the cleverest, and a woman in black with a staff stood up: their sorceress. Did she know anything about time magic? Not very much, she said. Elunia offered her some of the party’s own rations, and she bit into them and her eyes lit up. This is delicious. Where did you get it? Lucia watched her closely and didn’t think she was the one doing whatever was being done here. It was the land.
Thalan brought out his pocket watch and woke it, and it unfolded into a little clockwork spider. Have you ever seen something like this? Never, the sorceress said; where had he got it? At a fair, he said, in the capital, and he gave the capital its ancient name, the one it would have had in their day. Then he told her that he thought the party came from their future, and that they came from the party’s past. She laughed. Why would I believe that? Elunia’s imp, invisible, was judging him. Elunia asked whether any of them had heard talk of an Ascension. That, said the sorceress, sounded like something for kings and queens. A plant that looked like it could bite? There were all kinds of predators in this desert. They had lost soldiers to a spider, and half their number to the worm that had chased the party in.
The sand stayed calm. If you stay on the rock, the worm doesn’t get you. If you leave it… those who had tried hadn’t come back. Which way had they come from? The lieutenant looked around, and the sorceress looked around, and neither of them could remember. They were getting uneasy now. Lucia sang them the Mad Monk’s verse to a tune she made up on the spot, to see if any of them knew it. None did. Sandy explained that it was by her band. They hadn’t broken out yet. They were going to be huge.
Then Lucia went to find the man she’d landed on, to thank him properly. You caught me real well. You’re super strong. What’s your day job? He had been a cheesemaker, before. He took out a picture to show her his children, a little painted miniature. But it was so old and faded that he could no longer tell what it showed: a yellow, crumpled scrap of paper, which turned to dust in his fingers as he looked at it.
Thalan reached out with Kord’s sense. There was nothing celestial here, nothing fiendish, nothing undead, but the air around them was thick with strange, unnatural energies.
The cheesemaker looked up at Lucia and sat down, very slowly. A strong wind picked up, and his body turned to sand and blew away. The others looked at the sorceress, and at the place where he had been, and then, one by one, where they stood, they turned to sand and blew away too.
The party was alone on the ledge, in a camp a thousand years dead. There were piles of bones, ancient rusted armour, crates of food long spoiled, and shattered vials. They had been talking to bones. I told you not to talk to them, said Elunia. Let’s talk about the part where you’re talking in my brain, said Thalan. How long had she been able to do that? Since the library, she said, the second time. It was handy: if they got separated they could still talk. Thalan wanted to know whether she had put something in them.
Lucia sifted the ruin for anything that didn’t belong to its thousand years, any anchor holding the memory there, and found nothing. Sandy dug through what was left of the camp and found a coffer rotted down to a few iron fittings around a pile of gold, about fifty pieces, each stamped with the face of a stern queen none of them had ever seen. One of the siblings. Elunia picked up a shard of the broken glass because it was shiny.
The memory of the sea
The worm’s sand had gone quiet, and there was one way off the rock that looked safe, or safe-ish: down into a wadi, a dry riverbed. Thalan woke the clockwork spider and set it on the sand and sent it down the riverbed, and it skittered off and came back a quarter of an hour later, chirped, and folded itself back into a watch. Nothing out there. They went.
The riverbed was flat and hard and they made good time. Then Thalan began to smell salt, and with it came memories: his childhood, his mother. Lucia heard a loud rumbling, different from the worm’s hourglass hiss, and once the others listened they heard it too, and smelled it: not just salt but a dock, fish and weed. Smell the ocean? The rumbling became impossible to ignore. They climbed. Thalan went up the bank like a man who has been running rooftops all his life, and Elunia copied him.
From the top they watched a wave roll down the wadi. It was translucent, more the memory of water than water, full of ghostly fish and drifting creatures, and on it rode a small boat that went down under the waves as they watched. Cold air came off it, and the smell of the sea was overwhelming. Elunia reached out and touched it. It didn’t feel wet. Only cold, and damp. Thalan slipped sideways out of the world, the way the spider dinner had promised, and pushed his hand through into whatever lay on the other side. There it was wet and cold, and when he drew his hand back it was dripping, as if the water had come from somewhere else. It smelled like home. This is very weird. This is nowhere near the ocean.
Lucia dropped one of Elunia’s mystery potions through it to see whether it sank like something falling through water. It fell straight through and shattered on the riverbed. A flower bloomed up out of the stone, ripened into a fruit, and the fruit fell and rotted, and out of it stood up a tiny imp that ran toward them crying Mama! before it grew old and shrivelled and died. Elunia had no idea what that potion was. Well worth the money.
Above the riverbed lay salt flats, and in the distance something stood up out of the ground: a row of great curved ribs along a spine, like the bones of some enormous beast. Elunia would really rather not fight ghost dinosaurs. But the bones lay toward the dusk, and they had one leg to the dusk still to walk, and when they looked up the sun seemed to be circling around their heads. Lucia settled it: Who cares? Go toward the bones.
They weren’t bones. As they came close across the hard-packed salt they saw that these were the ribs of a ship, crusted white with salt and dried out until they had been preserved. Beside it lay a heavily corroded iron anchor. The whole flat had been sea, or a great lake, once. It reminded Thalan of home, though he couldn’t think why. Home wasn’t salt. He barely remembered it at all: going to the beach with his mother, and her painting while they were there, and cliffs above the sand. Elunia poked her head out of the far side of the hull and told him that what he didn’t remember was still real.
Sandy and Elunia searched the wreck for anything that might tell them where it came from. Etched into the anchor was a name: the old name of the capital, the same ancient name Thalan had given the sorceress. No, older even than that. The name on the anchor predated the Sibling Wars.
When they turned around, the river was gone. The land behind them had changed completely. When they turned again the ship was gone, and they were standing in the middle of a salt flat that ran off into infinity on every side.
When they turned a third time, there was a cave.
Nothing in the verse had mentioned a cave. Lucia had been humming her made-up tune the whole way, and now she hummed cave, cave, cave. Then she read the second half of the verse again. Close your eyes on the moon and sun. Lose the count of the steps you’ve run. When you can’t say where you have been — look up, lost one. You’re already in. The fox and the cat and the pattern in the dunes, the sun circling overhead, the river that wasn’t there: every wrong turn had been the right one. They had got properly lost, and that was the way in.