.

second gift: the flames

The krookodile live further in the dunes than Baku had ever thought. Samira and her kind must have traveled much further than he and the sanhim, Baku realizes. She rips through the desert, her tail leaving a great serpentine trail that slowly collapses in on itself as the sand rushes to take its place. In the morning, a low, crooning sound leaks from her lips, almost incessantly; by noon, she's fallen silent and put herself headlong into the travel.

Eventually, Baku grows bored, and he lays himself along Samira's back. The sun beats down. By midatfternoon, Samira's back is a rippling mass of heat. Although it's stifling, he ends up wrapping himself in his father's cloak to hide from the scorching rays. The sky blurs by in a blue arc above. Baku traces over the dark embroidery in the cloak and vaguely wonder if it was red because of the krookodile, or if the krookodile trust the sanhim for wearing their colors.

Samira finally slows by nightfall. When Baku peeks out above her fins he doesn't recognize the landscape. The dunes faded into an indescribable mess a long time ago. She rumbles something, and belatedly Baku wonders if she's been trying to speak to him this whole time.

Then, before Baku can do anything else, she plunges deep into the earth. He almost gasps—but then sand rushes around him, threatening to flood his lungs, and it's the best he can do to hold his breath and wrap his arms around Samira's fins. He holds his cloak as tightly as he can as the desert turns to darkness and a deluge of sand swallows him whole.

Baku clutches. That's all he can do—clutch and wait for it to end. An eternity inside of a moment later, the air clears again, but the light does not return. Samira shakes beneath him, sand rolling down her sides, but no matter how many times he blinks he can't make himself see. There's only scent and sound and feel. She's moving again. The air here feels more damp somehow; faintly, over the sound of sand shedding from her tail, he can almost hear a trickle of water. But he can't see. His hands reach instinctively for a torch, but there's nothing. Samira presses on beneath him, unfazed, and when she pulls herself to a halt her breaths echo in the darkness. She hisses something.

The darkness hisses back. It must be an echo. Samira settles into place. Baku waits, feeling around on Samira's back, but in the darkness she's gone completely still. Minutes pass, perhaps hours. He can't see his own hand in front of his face. Eventually Baku realizes she must be resting. But the weight of the day presses down on him like a stone; there's nothing here but blackness and if he thinks about it too much it'll rise and choke him, tendrils of worry and shame around his throat—

The air is cold down here, colder even than the night air above. Father was right: the cloak will keep him warm. Baku clutches it close and falls into uneasy slumber.

Baku awakens in the darkness. Samira is moving beneath him—not traveling, he decides; it's not fast enough for that—and hissing fills his ears again. The echoes down here are louder than any cave he's ever been in.

Will she surface again? Baku waits for the deluge of sand, a warning, anything, but Samira slithers forward. They must have tunnels, he decides, and they must be enormous. Baku tries to imagine how big they are based on the echoes.

With his ears strained, he finally hears it—the hissing isn't symmetric. Samira hisses something; the darkness hisses something back. It is different.

Baku's eyes widen uselessly with the realization. This must be where all of the krookodile stay, he realizes. A conversation is chattering around him, and yet he has no idea what's being spoken, what's being decided. How many of them are even here? Eventually, Samira stills. Their words pepper the air around him unintelligibly.

"Hello?" Baku asks tentatively.

For a moment, the darkness hushes, and then the noise doubles.

Baku's heart thuds in his chest, and he clutches the cloak closer. They mean no harm, and yet. To hear a voice in the darkness with no body to place to it sets off a fear in him, one primal and ancient, one that he cannot control. If he could just understand what was being said here ...

"My name is Baku," he says, finally, when he realizes there's no understanding what they're trying to say.

What comes next is louder than a hiss; Samira's scales shift beneath him and the bass vibration rattles up his bones.

Baku's stomach rumbles in response. "I'm hungry," he says, trying his best not to sound plaintive. How long has it been since the campfire? He doesn't even remember, but the pangs in his chest suggest that he's simply forgotten about eating until now. "Could I have food?"

There is a lurching stab of movement as Samira slithers forward with him on top of her, and then a wet, slapping sound against her scales a few feet away from where he's sitting.

"Was that … was that for me?"

Another rumble. This one trails off into a hiss.

"Could you hiss twice if you're talking to me?"

Silence.

Baku's fingers clench involuntarily around her fin. "Samira?"

She hisses twice.

"Should I wait here?"

Silence.

Baku crawls forward on his hands and knees towards where he heard the sound. Blindly, he feels his way around on her back, biting back a scream as his palms collide with something soft and slimy. Curiously, he grabs onto it; it doesn't resist, and he pulls it closer.

"Is this for me?"

No response. It isn't fair. He was supposed to learn the desert tongue in his own time, with his own people. The sandile who'd rejected him was supposed to teach him patiently, Father by its side to translate, all the elders of the village to guide him. Not this.

Hesitantly, Baku pulls the thing close to his nostrils and inhales. It doesn't smell like anything he recognizes.

"Samira?"

She doesn't do anything else. Baku exhales slowly. In the dark and silence, he can feel his heartbeat throbbing in his ears. Even without words, he knows what she's trying to say. Father apologized for using the human tongue with her, and Baku should as well. It is a disrespect to flaunt the Dancer's tongue in front of those who cannot speak it.

"I'm sorry," Baku says. "I don't know the desert tongue yet."

No response. He imagines it instead: Then you must learn it quickly.

He exhales shakily. This is a lesson, he reminds himself. Not a punishment.

For now, his stomach growls louder than she does. Baku focuses back on the thing in his hands. There's nothing to lose, he supposes. Either she tried to feed him something inedible or he goes to bed hungry. It isn't reassuring logic, but it's all he can think about as he closes his eyes—stupid, despite the darkness, but he can't help himself—and bites.

Tiny stabs between his teeth, his gums. The taste of minerals on his tongue, quickly giving way to something softer and flaky. Baku chews, tries to swallow, but it feels like his mouth is full of pebbles. On reflex he spits it out, and with it the coppery taste of blood—his own. It cut him.

Not badly, he reassures himself before he can cry, using his spare hand to wrap Father's cloak closer. He isn't hurt. The taste is familiar, despite the pain, and it takes a few more shuddering breaths for him to place it. At the solstice. This is special food, ceremony food—and that's when he realizes belatedly that perhaps it was only special in the Southern Stones. But before, someone must have taken the scales off of the fish for him.

Laying out stones in the desert to bake breads and dry fruits. Carefully harvesting from the cactus fields with Nali by his side to delicately unpick the spines from his hands when he was too eager. These are not things they would do in the dunes, he realizes, thinking of Samira's gargantuan frame and maw.

What he wants to do is cry. But hunger calls louder, so silently Baku spits out more scales and begins carefully picking out bits of the flesh beneath the skin, where it's softer. It's hard to find the bones in the dark, but at the same time he knows Samira would not be able to help if he missed one. With no vision and nothing else to do, he's able to drown himself in the task, and his thoughts circle in a vortex as he picks the carcass clean.

Father told him a story once, of a beautiful pokémon with a voice so compelling that anyone who listened would believe her. She sang so beautifully, he explained, that everyone would immediately understand what she meant, and why she meant it. And eventually, through her generosity, the Dancer's tongue was passed on. That was the fourth gift that their village received, after the seeds, the flame, and the river. That one was special, because could be shared in only one way, and only to those who listened.

Baku shudders. Can he make himself believe that this is a lesson? Can he believe away the punishment that it seems to be? Despite the darkness he clenches his eyes shut. When he opens them he will have learned, he tells himself. He has the Dancer's tongue. With her voice, he can make his hopes reality.

He opens his eyes to darkness, and a silence he does not break.

On the moonless nights back home, he used to go out and trace stars with Father. This one was Venant, the Watcher, with his arms outstretched. There was the Thunderer prowling across the heavens. Each star had a name, and a story, and a place.

If Baku squeezes his eyes shut, he can pretend to feel hands on his shoulders, someone carefully pointing his arm up to the eastern horizon. In the summer, the six stars that form Little Sister rise across the mountains. She shimmers against the milky glow of the starry river, somehow brighter than all of the stars around her; on those warm nights, she is the first to appear, and she guides her shimmering brethren on their path across the horizon.

Now he can almost hear Father's voice. In the winter, she rests. This is when she holds Sun Sister close, when the skies lose their warmth. Little Sister sinks with the sun and hides behind the mountains.

Baku raises his hand uselessly in the darkness and counts. One to six. There is Little Sister. May she journey far and return the sun to us one day.

Although he knows it's foolish, Baku hopes that halfway across the desert, Father is doing the same, and the stars guide him safely home.

Samira resurfaces at night. Baku isn't sure which night. He traced the sky, and later he'd grown hungry and she'd fed him—ten times, he reasons. Perhaps more. He stopped counting.

She'd shifted beneath him, stirring him from his slumber, and that was the only warning he got before she plunged bodily into the sands. He was almost washed off—he reached blindly for her tail, screaming, before he felt it smack him in the face and he managed to wrap his hands around it on reflex.

The world around him burns his eyes. The moonlight is silver and it hurts. How long were they underground, without seeing?

Krookodile do not mind the dark. That much Baku knew even before this. Most hatchlings do not see the light of day; they live safely underground in their broods until their scales harden—that is why the solstice celebration must happen at night. He thinks underground he heard three different registers: the sandile, the krookorok, and the krookodile. The krookodile are the deepest. The knowledge is hard-earned, from endless hours spent in the dark, straining, categorizing, trying to understand.

Now the mountains, silhouetted in the silvery glow of the moon, cut across his vision like a spear. Baku doesn't bother saying anything—Samira will not answer him if he speaks, and he doesn't know what else he'd tell her anyway. Surely she must know that he is not like the rest of the brood; that his eyes were not made to piece the subterranean darkness and that when he lives among them he lives blind. This was part of her lesson, not her punishment.

Baku blinks rapidly to help adjust. On reflex, he tries to see if he can recognize the mountainshapes here, if he feels any closer to home now that he's above ground. He doesn't. The horizon is a stranger.

Samira begins to move, slowly, methodically. Baku can tell in the way that she travels that this time she's doing it differently, although he can't tell why or for what purpose—but before, she seemed to surge through the sands; now, she moves almost lazily. He's reminded of how he used to lounge in the river in the summertime, letting the warm waves carry him along. In time, the movement in his peripherals becomes distracting: down, in the underground caverns that the krookodile called home, the world was quiet and still. There were occasional hisses, tiny shifts in movement. Sometimes Samira would shake until Baku slowly climbed off of her, and then he would sit huddled in the darkness until the rasping of her scales against the cool sandstone announced her return.

An unfamiliar sound assaults his ears—it's like the creek, but louder, and then all at once the dunes give way to a massive deluge of water that winds through them, white-crested rapids gleaming in the starlight. Baku inhales sharply. The river in the Southern Stones flooded sometimes in the summer, but never like this; the water seems to stretch on with no end, ripping mightily in the center and then lapping along the banks.

Baku has one moment more to appreciate the sight, and then Samira leaps into the water.

There's no time to scream. It's nothing like diving into sand, not for him. The water slams into his chest and flings him off of her immediately, and then he's floating, free, sinking, tumbling—

Beneath the surface the water churns. Father's cloak fills immediately and wraps around his limbs like rope, and no matter how much he flails he can't propel himself upward again. Panic seizes him when he looks down and can't even see the bottom. The river at home was no deeper than he was tall, and Father was careful to keep everyone clear if it ever flooded. Baku's never been submerged like this before, and the sensation of weightlessness combines with the massive, crushing force of the waves around him.

His lungs burn. He inhales; water floods his nostrils; he coughs on reflex and water fills his throat. Overhead he can just make out the glimmering of the moon, suddenly obscured by a four-limbed shadow descending. Baku flails desperately for her, the last bubbles trailing from his lips, but the eddy currents that she creates send him spiraling out of her grasp. Samira lunges for him but her swing goes awry; her claws rake a gash in his arm. Blearily, his throbbing vision focuses on a thin ribbon of blood trailing towards a surface he can't reach, and then Samira's tail collides with his ribs with bone-crushing force, flinging him upward.

The surface of the water breaks against him, and he barely manages to inhale a greedy, damp breath, desperately churning his legs to keep himself from being forced under again. But he can't; his strength left him long ago. Baku barely registers the feeling of slick scales beneath him, and by then Samira is gently depositing him onto a reedy shore with her tail.

Baku lays on his side for a moment, curled up as small as he can before a spasming cough unfolds him. One enormous, black eye watches with a look that he can parse as concern. A hiss cuts across his labored, damp breaths, and Baku startles when he realizes: the sound is familiar. He's heard this intonation before. Not in the desert tongue, but it sounds like—

{Alright?} she's asking, fixing him with a burning gaze.

Baku splutters for a moment, shaking the water from his hair.

{Alright?} she presses, and the rest of her words are unfamiliar. He sees the hesitation burning at her; her muscles are tensed but her eyes are fixed on the bloody water that's dripping down his arm.

"I'm ..." But he cannot answer in the Dancer's tongue if he wants her to listen. That fact cuts through even his panic and his pain. But he doesn't know what other words he can say. {Alright,} he echoes weakly.

The trip back is colder and far less wondrous. His arm throbs. The cool night air is only made worse by the dampness of the cloak around him, but he holds fast to it, too tired to look at the new landscapes rushing by, petrified by the thought of it floating away in the breeze. Eventually she pulls Baku back beneath the surface, and he's almost grateful for it—he doesn't have to feel guilty for wasting his precious surface time on tears.

Baku's lying soggily on her back, eyes closed, sleep eluding him, when suddenly the thought strikes him and he sits upright. There's nothing to see down here, where the krookodile gather to sleep during the day. But there's something to hear.

Baku listens.

There's a pattern in the hissing around him, if only he could figure it out. He strains to replicate that brief moment of clarity, back when he'd finally understood for a fleeting moment what Samira was trying to say, but this time it doesn't come. The sounds of their language wash over his ears, and eventually exhaustion overtakes him.

The next sunset, Samira stirs Baku awake with a familiar hissing sound. He's heard this one before; she always seems to ask it before she moves him. Curiously, he echoes it back.

She freezes beneath him, and then after a pause she repeats it. There's something different here, something Baku can't quite place or replicate—it echoes in a more sibilant way and the pauses feel less protracted.

"Ready," he croaks. His vocal chords twinge with disuse. "That's what you were trying to ask me, right?"

This time he understands the difference in her response. A question, waiting for an answer. {Ready?}

{Ready.}

His father was right: there are many beautiful things to witness out in the dunes at night, sights Baku never dreamed of. He grows to crave these moments, each of them wondrous in their own way, but he treasures each of them for what he learned.

With Samira he watches the glowing red lines of darmanitan troop steadily cross the northern plains, little more than motes of glowing light from a distance. At first he takes them for stars, but he quickly learn that the orange glow sets them apart from the rest. "Darmanitan?" he queries, and she repeats it back to him in the desert tongue. {Darmanitan.}

(He wonders briefly if the darmanitan have the tale of Little Sister, if in their culture the First Darmanitan is held in the same high regard as she is for the Southern Stones. He hopes so, but when he poses the question to Samira, he must use the Dancer's tongue, and so she offers no response.)

They fish again. This time he's safely tucked to one side as she gathers an enormous treasure trove of fish in her jaws, and he learns many words for thanks.

She takes him to enormous spires of sandstone, weathered into layers and with as many colors as the cloaks he used to help weave, towering even taller than him and her stacked together. There, she introduces him to the vulture queen, a young but proud mandibuzz who pecks curiously at his skull before a warning hiss sends her scooting back.

{Caution,} Samira says, to both the mandibuzz and to him. And then, just to him, on the way home: {Your father's-sister was injured in this way.}

(Aunt Livari hadn't mentioned this, but once more he has no words to ask the question, so he buries it away for the time being.)

In the nights he travels with Samira and sees great things. Most of the time she swims through the desert, her tail churning through dried earth, him on her back. She seems to seek no destination, no company. During these times the world is peaceful; she's so large that at her full speed her body barely rocks, and if he doesn't peer over the edge of her back he'd barely know she was moving at all. But during these times the rush of wind on her back is so loud that when he speaks, she can't hear, and he's left to his own thoughts as the world rushes by. At night, he wishes he could ask her purpose during these journeys, but he doesn't have the words.

During the days he rests with them underground. Samira holds council. As he learns more and more words he realizes how important she is to them—she is a sanhim of sorts, although he struggles to follow the conversations. He clings to her scales in the darkness and tries to guess at what they're saying, gradually piece together a slapshod vocabulary made up of things he's heard them say. At first it's slow. These words he gathers and hoards greedily—greetings, ways to count fish, descriptions of traverses across the desert—but no matter how hard he tries, he cannot form the question he wants to ask.

Am I learning what you want?

The nights begin to blur together interminably. Halfway through the summer, when the days grow long—he and Samira must spend most of his time under the sands—he finds himself longing for the sensation of harsh warmth on his skin, the tingling feeling of imminent sunburn, soft light against his closed eyelids. He misses the others, of course, and above all his father, but he'd learned to miss them in the quiet nights spent alone. He'd expected that feeling of loss, and learned to codify it, and treasured their faces carefully so that he could still hold them tight even when he went far. But he'd forgotten to hold fast to the simpler aspects of his old life, and now he can only catch the sun on the edge of each night, a red orb peering over the horizon while Samira runs further away.

He spends many starlit nights with Samira. She's quite talkative for a krookodile of her age, he learns. After a few centuries, many of them simply burrow their way underground, far enough away from the young ones who still disturb the earth. And Samira certainly loves to answer his questions, so long as he asks them in the desert tongue.

{Do you have many …} he trails off. "Children?" he asks. "Hatchlings?"

{We call our young hatchlings,} she says in response, carefully churning through a dune before plunging the two of them down. Tonight there is a soft, warm breeze. {And yes. I have many. All of them are older than you.} She pauses to consider. {Most of them are older than your father.}

He struggles to think of the right phrasing. {Is that uncommon?}

{Perhaps. Krookodile have children when the desert can bear it. We live long. It would not do if there were too many of us.}

He thinks that through while she swims through the sands. {What is that word you call me? What is its … meaning?}

A low rumble shakes her, one that he's come to associate with amusement. {I forget how quickly hatchlings become distracted. Always something new for you. Very well. Your name is hard to pronounce without the Dancer's tongue. Because of who we are—we take great care to ensure that there is never more or less of our number each year—our names are passed down. When we lose one of our own, the new hatchling takes that name. Thus we remember our burden, and what our burden is to the desert.}

He understands where Samira's going with this. {But whose name would I take?}

{There was not one for you. There was not one for your father's-sister, either. I named her Fangkeeper, for she had teeth like us, though they were not in her jaw.}

{My father had a name for me. As a parent. To make me feel like his.} The sentence is difficult; Samira has yet to teach the words he would need to encompass those feelings. He understands Baku has no translation, but he tries to string together the words: {Small Snow. You could use it if you want.}

{Small Snow.} She rolls it around, thinking, and then she rumbles the word she's called him before. {Your father's name is one he made for you. I will not steal it from him.} She chuffs the sound that he think is his name again. {So I made one. You are so named because you have no fangs.}

He waits expectantly.

{I am old, but all the desert's children had their place by the time I was born. Rarely in my life do I have to name something. I consulted the other krookodile and they though this name fit you well.}

"Nofangs?"

{Precisely.}

In the weeks before the solstice, he finally remembers to track the days—the nights are long again, and even though the underground was never warm in the summer, now the chill has settled into his bones. But he's used to it now, and he's learned to sleep like a sandile, curled safely under Samira's foreleg where her warmth can protect his.

{My aunt,} he begins. {Fangkeeper. How did she become hurt?}

{She looks unhurt now,} Samira observes, which he realizes doesn't have the intonation-hiss for an answer. An observation instead. {I forget how quickly your kind heals. We live much longer, and hold our pain for longer as a result.}

{You warned me to be careful,} he remembers. {Or else I would be like her.}

There's a dull rumbling sound behind him, and he realizes it's Samira's tail lashing across the floor. Anger. Instinctively, he recoils, before she asks a question of her own. {How did your father tell you the First Mandibuzz lost her crown?}

He racks his brains, but he doesn't remember. So Samira tells him:

Mandibuzz was one of the First Peoples as well. Her name was Nekya, and she had a long, beautiful crown of feathers on the top of her head. The feathers were a gift from the Dragonmother herself, plucked from her wings to protect Nekya from the harsh talons of Death. For Nekya had a solemn duty: when someone died, Nekya was to descend upon their body and devour their heart, so that it would be freed from the corpse and be born once more.

This was the cycle that Nekya knew, and she served the Dragonmother faithfully. Though she was kind, many of the First People's still feared Nekya shadow overhead, for they knew what happened when she drew near. Only the Dragonmother did not shy from her, because the Dragonmother could not hate her children.

For this reason, when it came time for the Dragonmother to pass, Nekya hesitated in her duty for the first time. The Dragonmother curled up and entered the eternal slumber; the desert waited for her to be returned to life. But Nekya descended; seeing her mother in such a state, she wept.

The peoples of the desert pleaded with Nekya, but it was too late. The Dragonmother's heart had turned to stone.

At this, the desert burst into chaos. The First Darmanitan and the First Maractus began to squabble, each unable to decide who was responsible for the fate of the sands now. But then Zaathi, the First Krookodile, burst forth.

{Fix this,} she commanded of their sister.

Nekya refused, saying, {I cannot.}

So Zaathi seized the mandibuzz in her jaws and thrust her into the sun. Nekya's crown burst into flames and fell in ashen lumps to the ground. But Zaathi did not have it in her to kill her sister, so before Nekya could burn, she withdrew them both and threw Nekya to the ground.

{Fly beyond the horizon, sister, and pray that we never see you again.} Samira finishes the story for him in a low, dramatic hiss.

He waits.

{My aunt flew into the sun?} he guesses at last.

{She forgot her duty,} Samira says cryptically.

The solstice arrives before he knows it. His father is there, welcoming the clans as they arrive one by one at the oasis. Baku sees him stiffen when the krookodile arrive, but he's already leaping off of Samira's back, the ground weirdly firm beneath his feet as Baku pelts towards him and buries him in an embrace.

"Baku!" He picks swings Baku onto his hip, almost staggering under his weight. {Were the sands kind?} His smile is so wide it threatens to cleave his face in two.

{The sands were kind,} Baku replies proudly, heart almost bursting.

Father's eyes twinkle, and the pride in his voice when he responds in the desert tongue makes Baku feel like he could run a thousand miles. {You must tell us all that you have learned,} Father says, setting him back down onto the ground. {And look how much you've grown!} He puts Baku down and places his hands on Baku's shoulders, and for a moment Baku can't help but revel in the feeling of soft, unscaled skin. How long has it been? Baku holds him close, suddenly aware that over the year his own hands have turned leathery, chafed to callouses from the scales, and yet even in the moonlight he can see how much paler and sun-starved he is now.

"I missed you," Baku whispers into his chest.

For a moment something in Father's face crumbles, but he turns triumphantly. "Come, Baku. Tonight we sing for you."

And they do sing. The Dragonmother's relics are passed from the humans to the darumaka, and from the maractus to the krookodile. Father presses a plate full of food into his hands and triumphantly steers them to the fire. Baku can't help but notice that Haruna's grown taller in the past year; she's unfolded like a sapling and stands a full four inches over him. The maractus who chose her, a new flower bloomed on his forehead, introduces himself as Aji. Mila wears a cloak Baku's never seen before; her darumaka peers out anxiously from its folds. Baku watches, mostly, while they chatter. Has it really been a year since he heard the Dancer's tongue?

Mila is halfway through explaining a joke—for his benefit, he suspects; those of the Southern Stones already know—when the sensation hits all at once: they've moved on. They missed him, but they've moved on. An entire year passed while he lived under the sands. Suddenly the food tastes like dust in his mouth. The evening begins to blur and pass him by.

Later he drifts. The sanhim is speaking to Samira in a hushed voice. Both of them look up when Baku draws close. At ten feet away he can see the arched trepidation ingrained in Samira's spine, even if in the soft moonlight he can't make out the expression on Father's face.

"Please," Baku begins, although he isn't even sure what he'd ask for. The second judgment crept up on him throughout the night, and yet he knows—the stones Samira and the sanhim needed to decide here were cast long before this moment. But he can't help but be a tiny bit desperate. He thinks about how Mila spoke in stuttering, halting words to her darumaka, how much smoother his own response was in kind. {I've learned. I've grown}

{You have learned much,} the sanhim says at last. {And yet you have much to learn still. Samira will teach you for another year. So shall it be.}

Baku wants to be angry at both of them. At Samira, for keeping him even though he's struggled so hard. At Father, for not protesting harder. It stings. They're acting out of love, he reminds himself, but that doesn't make it hurt any less. It isn't fair. If he'd known that this would be his fate, he would've never done it. But that isn't the lesson they want him to learn.

He wants one of them to protest. He wants to protest. But—

{So shall it be,} Baku echoes.

The desert tongue is heavy on his lips.

When he returns to the circle of human children for his farewells, he's sure that he looks like a stranger to them. Even in the moonlight he can see how he's so much paler than the rest. He gets a change of clothes, but his father's cloak is tattered, cut nearly to ribbons from the constant beating it's received in the past year. It's tattered. He let that happen. It's tattered and it's irreplaceable.

Truthfully he hadn't even thought of the cloak until he catches Livari's eyes lingering on it. She looks away guiltily before he can say anything, and she hurriedly brushes hair over her face so he can't see her expression, but not before he sees her upturned brow, her parted lips with the words dead upon them. Livari had promised one day to teach him how to tend to the field of wheat that she raised. It would be his duty as the sanhim to know these things, she'd explained proudly, shifting her weight from her bad leg, but she shook her head and smiled as Mila pulled him away to play Stacking Stones. One day.

Self-consciously, he pulls the cloak more tightly around his shoulders, painfully aware of how threadbare it has become. It would be a shame to call it Father's now. This cloak is supposed to last until he is a man, old enough to make a cloak to guard a child of his own. His father began spinning the threads as soon as his mother realized a child was growing inside of her; together, they dyed the flaxen strands to match the winter sunrise. Standing in the shadow of their home, for a moment Baku's struck with a memory he never had—the sensation of the two of them tracing their fingers over the freshly-woven fabric, discussing in soft voices the patterning of the golden grass stitched into the border, their hands drifting to the swell of her belly as they imagined the world they'd show their son.

Was that world full of plunging into dunes, of raging rivers, of krookodile scales? Had they woven with extra care, to ensure it could withstand the chafing of Samira's back? Or had they expected him to hold tight to them, to stay protected in their visage in a world they'd always known?

It's almost a relief when he clambers onto Samira's back at the end of the night.

On the way back, he almost wishes Livari had looked scornful or judgmental when her eyes lingered on his cloak. Instead, she'd just looked sad, the corners of her eyes tinged with the shame he'd forgotten to feel until this moment.

Thus the first year passes.

.