Date: October 14, 2026
Attendance: Sandy, Lucia, Thalan, Elunia
The party woke on the salt flat to find Korath’s and Varys’s tents gone, with no tracks leading away. In their place Thalan came walking out of the desert, tired and thirsty, with no clear idea of how long he had been wandering or how he had found them. The sun was rising in the south, and the North Star hung in the east. Three legs to the dusk remained, and the party agreed to follow the sun down wherever it went.
Elunia led, and it went wrong almost at once. She kept losing the line to chase the small creatures of the badlands, and in the end she followed a desert fox down a side valley and out into open desert scored with cracks that glowed an unnatural pink. Sandy, scouting, saw eight eyes looking out of one of the cracks and shouted for Elunia to stop. A second crack opened under the fox, fangs came up through it, and the fox was dragged under. A moment later a spider the size of a horse, shimmering like glass, appeared behind Thalan with a soft thump of displaced air.
There were several of them. They stepped in and out of the world through the cracks, attacking from one side and vanishing before a blow could land; Thalan’s holy fire burst harmlessly on the rock where one had just been. Sandy cut the first one apart and Elunia’s eldritch fire shattered it into a thousand pieces of glass. Thalan’s spirit wolf ran among the party licking wounds closed. When a web of crystal dropped out of a crack in the air and hauled one of the camels off the ground, Sandy snapped it with a thrown javelin, and the camel fell back to the sand, ungrateful. In a fury Elunia grew claws and fangs and bit one of the spiders, and broke her teeth on its crystal hide. Afterward Sandy alone saw a second set of vertical eyelids slide closed across Elunia’s eyes. Lucia’s hammer finished the last of them. Two of the spiders left gems behind, an amber that sounded like falling rock when it was held and a diamond that sounded like the north wind. Lucia later found that each holds a genie who will answer once if the gem is broken. The party took four of the glass legs for dinner.
By noon they knew they were lost. Thalan took the lead, kept their own tracks at his back, and by evening had the sunset in front of them again. That night he cooked the spider legs into a fricassee so good that everyone woke with the feeling they could step sideways out of the world, briefly, if they needed to. Sandy went out to mark the next day’s trail and walked in a perfect circle back to camp.
In the morning the sun rose in the east, as it is supposed to, for the first time in days. Elunia led again, following a pattern she was sure she could see in the dunes, until Lucia heard sand running like an hourglass and saw a dune behind them moving. The air filled with the smell of cinnamon. A purple worm fifty yards across burst out of the sand, opened its mouth like the petals of a flower on a throat full of bone knives, and rolled after them. Someone on a rock outcrop ahead was screaming at them to run. Thalan threw Elunia onto his wolf. Lucia crushed the diamond, and the genie inside agreed, after some offence, to help her go faster. He blew her end over end through the air, with both camels, all the way to the rocks, where she knocked over the soldiers who had been shouting. The worm reached the rock, closed its mouth and dived.
The soldiers wore sand-caked armour of a style none of the party had seen, and torn black banners, and spoke Common in a strange old accent. They asked which sibling the party fought for. They marched, they said, for the Black Queen, who liked to call herself the Obsidian Empress. They had been sent across the Divine Desert to cut off the Red Prince’s forces. The last news they had was that the king and queen were gone and the war between the siblings had just begun. Elunia spoke into the party’s minds and told everyone to give nothing away. The soldiers shared their food; it turned to sand in the party’s mouths, while their own sorceress tasted Elunia’s rations and asked where on earth they had come from. Among the soldiers’ supplies Lucia recognised potion bottles made in her own family’s house of glass in Orbonne Tagliapietra’s day, a thousand years ago. Thalan suggested to the sorceress that the party came from their future. She laughed at him.
One soldier, a cheesemaker before the war, showed Lucia a painting of his children. It was so yellowed and faded that he could not make it out, and it crumbled to dust in his hand. He sat down slowly, and the wind took him away as sand. Then the rest went the same way, one after another, and the party was left on a ledge in a camp a thousand years dead: bones, rusted armour, spoiled food, shattered vials, and fifty gold in a rotted coffer, stamped with the face of a stern queen. The others turned on Elunia over the voice in their heads. She said she had been able to do it since the library.
The only safe-looking way off the rock was down a dry riverbed. Thalan sent his clockwork spider ahead and it found nothing, so they took it, and made good time on the hard flat floor. Thalan smelled salt and thought of his mother. Then the rumbling came, and they scrambled out just before a wave rolled down the wadi: not water but the memory of it, cold and damp, full of ghostly fish, with a small boat riding it that sank before it passed. Thalan put his hand through into the other side of the world and drew it back wet. Above the riverbed lay salt flats, and on them the ribs of something huge. Following the dusk, they found the salt-crusted ribs of an ancient ship, and an iron anchor etched with a name for the capital older than the Sibling Wars.
When they turned around, the river was gone. When they turned again, so was the ship, and the salt ran out to the edge of the world in every direction. When they turned a third time there was a cave mouth in the salt. They had lost the count, and could not say where they had been. They were already in.