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third gift: the river

cw: this chapter contains depictions of death and mentions of blood

{Nofangs,} she calls, days later. It must be time to hunt. He still doesn't hunt, of course, and she still deposits him by the river's edge, but she brings him with her everywhere. There's nothing else he'd do on your own, of course. Somewhere else, children his age would be spending their days stacking stones, or weaving or … no, best not to think about that. Those lazy days are why he had to learn his lesson like this in the first place.

He fumbles through the darkness and reaches out for her. {Samira?}

{Over here.} This time, she's careful to protract her words so that they echo lowly in the tunnel, and he picks his way over, pulling up short just before his outstretched hand collides with her scales. He clambers on. {Are you ready?}

An old instinct tells him to nod. Instead, in the darkness that his eyes cannot penetrate, he hisses back, {I'm ready,} and tighten his grip on her fins.

He's used to the sounds of surfacing at this point. The sand ripples off of her scales in a familiar way; he's started to learn that the flows thin out when she's getting closer to the top, that the accompanying cascade of sand becomes reedy. But this time, she doesn't immediately chart a path for the river. Instead, the two of them speed even further eastward, where a half moon rises. He stands on shaking legs, careful to keep his toes curled for balance—several times he's been unable to sense Samira's sharp turns and ended up flung headlong into the sand—and inhales the clear air, the cloak flapping around his shoulders. The stones turned to sand the further east you went, but he can tell even here that the dunes have somehow become even sandier. Whatever scant brush and plants littered the dunes near Samira's nest give way to enormous, undulating waves, frozen in motion until Samira cuts through them like a knife. This is closer to where the darmanitan live, among the dunes.

But this time when they surface near the darmanitan's lands, there is a horrible stench, like rotting fish, but with a sharper tang of iron. When they get closer he sees that the lumps he thought were stones aren't stones at all, but instead—

In the pale moonlight they survey the valley, which has grown quiet and still. He wraps the cloak tightly into his chest. {What happened here?}

{Geret used to lead the darmanitan from this valley,} Samira says. Her tail lashes the sand beneath them into a riptide, but it does not cover up the footprints that he can see, the scuffles marking the dust along with the char. There's a strip of sand that was heated so brilliantly that it turned to glass. But there are no darmanitan to be seen.

His heart sinks when he sees sandalprints in the ground. The people of the Southern Stones were here. But why? {Samira … ?}

Her voice is unyielding. {I promised to teach you, and so I will not shield you. What do you see here, Nofangs?}

There would be no reason for his people to stray this far west. More than that, there would simply be no way; to cross the mountain range would take them days that they did not have. And yet. {The people of the Southern Stones were here too.}

{I fear I have done something terrible, Nofangs,} she says in response, which doesn't feel like an answer at first.

He tries to think of his father's hands wielding weaving shears as a weapon. He cannot. Even when the sanhim held his staff, it was with a weary sort of resignation. {Why would he have come here, and called for this?}

Samira doesn't respond with words. But she shudders beneath him, and he doesn't need to see her eyes to know she weeps.

His hands are shaking as he clutches her fins. He needs to do something. Anything.

The hunched corpse of a darmanitan catches his eye. The scars on his hide shimmer in the moonlight; for a moment, he's in a solstice long ago, watching Utamo trace silvery rivers. He realizes what's similar about all of the other bodies here. {Where are the children?} he asks slowly, half-hoping he'll know her response. They spared the young, and let them flee—

Samira pulls herself out of the sand and carefully walks along the dusty ground, bringing him close enough to see—he realizes she must've been able to sense the disturbance in the earth from far away, even if his eyes could not pick it out in the moonlight. But as they get closer and closer, he can see a mash of tracks running south, familiar oval imprints of sandals mixed with tiny, three-toed footprints. The trail leads south, winding away over the hills. {After the solstice, a human girl tried to cross the river and was found by a darumaka patrol. Geret was furious when he heard, and sought to follow the lead I had set—he asked the Southern Stones for permission to raise the human and the darumaka alike. The krookodile concurred, and we assumed with our word that it would be done.}

He swallows past the lump that's formed in his throat. {But the Southern Stones disagreed this time.}

{Instead they took the ones who were young enough to learn.} Samira's voice is stiff. {Do you see what I have done now, Nofangs?}

{I do not,} he says truthfully. {How could you say this is your fault?}

Samira suddenly tenses beneath him—a low, wordless hiss rips from her throat, almost unbidden. Without another word, she flings herself headlong into the sand, faster and faster until he's afraid he'll fall off and the ruined valley shrinks to a speck behind them. She'd never raced like this before. {Samira?} he calls hesitantly, but the rippling wind swallows his words.

He slows and marks out his breaths, and by his count an hour has passed when they pass first one rock, and then another. Further west he'd think nothing of it, but here, where the horizon is washed smooth in sand, the smallest imperfection juts out and draws even his atrophied eyes. The shadows they cast are odd as well: perfect, angular, and completely unlike the wind-smoothed stones he's accustomed to.

{Have we been here before?} he asks. He would've recognized the landscape, but he can't be certain if Samira took him here underground before.

{No.} Her response is immediate. {This place is.} What she says next is a word he does not understand.

{Is what?}

She swims through the sand for a hundred feet while she thinks. {Abandoned. Bad. Shameful. Evil. All of these things. More than just these things.}

"Cursed?" he asks hesitantly. The Dancer's tongue feels strange now.

{No. Cursed—} as soon as she says it, he seizes the new vocabulary {—implies it was beyond our control.} She contemplates; the rumbles shake her entire body and through his bones. {This was done for a reason.}

Months ago, when Samira showed him the canyon of the mandibuzz, he'd shivered. They lived in pockets of sandstone, their caves lined with sun-bleached stones that he later realized were too oblong to be anything but bones. Samira paid it no mind, but he remembered the careful ceremony his father had conducted, how he'd solemnly borne the thing that was no longer Mother into the center of the village, how all who knew her took up a torch and offered her to the winds. Father wrapped her bones away in her cloak and buried them, gently, while only Baku was allowed to watch. To see so many there, so naked and forgotten, casually picked over and riddled with holes—that is the feeling Samira means.

"Desecrated?" he tries.

{Desecrated.} She rolls the word around a few more times. {Yes. These two are words that match.}

Usually this game is more fun, a dance that welcomes both of them to shared understanding. But he feels a chill as she sweeps them closer and closer through the rubble.

{We see this place once as hatchlings, and then we do not return except when we have hatchlings of our own, so they may see it for their first time, and our last.} Her voice is stony. {You are older than a hatchling, but you are mine, Nofangs. So it is time that you see.} She pauses, her eyes fixed straight ahead to a singular mountain in the distance. {Perhaps in time you will show this place to your own hatchlings.}

As they get closer, he realizes it isn't a mountain at all. It's too sudden, too straight. Some of it has crumbled to the ground, but what remains stands almost perfectly vertical, stones cut in a way that is too perfect to have occurred by chance. The rubble he passed on the way in must've been flung far from this one, by some force he cannot comprehend.

{Your people were not the first humans on the plains, Nofangs. Before, there were people who built ŵ̸̡̖̦̜̙̜̪̭͉̅̌̈́̀̃̐̕͝ä̵͔̹̗̟͔̤͓̝̮̞́͝l̸̢̡̨̧̫̭̘͉̻͍̟̑̈́͛̑͝ͅl̵̨̹̗̭͓̬̟̖͍̠̐̎ͅş̶͇͉̤̪̠̤̰̝̍̈͑̅̆̽.} She pulls him closer to the thing and hisses a word that he does not understand.

But where other words seemed like they held meaning, this one ... this one feels empty somehow. He cannot describe why. {Built what?}

{People who built w̸̟̲̆̐̔ă̴͚l̸̥͂̆̔ĺ̷͇̟̟s̷̥̈́̂}.She hisses it again and it remains incomprehensible. {You see it here. I will not waste clean words on it. Name it, if you know it.} When he does not offer a word in response, she says in a stormy voice, {If it is never again spoken in the Dancer's tongue, I will not mourn the loss of knowledge.}

Her anger is like the river, thunderous and inevitable, and hearing so much rage in her kills the words in his throat. This much he has learned: Samira loves teaching. To see her savage joy at condemning knowledge to oblivion fills him with the same strange revulsion that the mandibuzz canyon did. The stones and their unnatural shapes made him uneasy, but this … this makes him shrivel closer to her.

Samira continues quietly, {There were once those who learned the secrets of shaping stones and brought that knowledge here. With their hands they built great and wondrous things. At first the krookodile watched without fear. We peoples of the desert must protect one another. The sands are an enemy so great that we cannot afford to fight amongst ourselves as well. All the earth's children share one body, after all. When we tried to speak to the humans, they feared us. But who could blame them? The maractus offered water and fruit. The darmanitan offered fire and warmth. But we, the krookodile—} Samira hisses uneasily, a rippling mass of muscle beneath him, and for a moment he remembers how it felt the first time he saw her erupt from the sands. {Yes. You know the feeling, Nofangs. That much your kind has never forgotten.}

A year ago he would've nodded. But underground, the krookodile have no use for words that must be seen. So instead he responds, {I do} and adds the sibilant hiss that he knows signals regret.

{I wish we'd spoken to them, so we knew why. But one day we found that the humans here had built—} She utters that word again, and this time she pulls up short. {Do you see it here, Nofangs?}

It towers above them, impossibly smooth and reaching around the horizon. It is like a canyon that only goes one way, half a mountain face, a thing that only goes up and out. Its edges are jagged and broken, but its face is smooth. He looks at it in slack confusion and realize that, while she was talking, this thing she's taken him to witness has grown until it eclipses even the sky.

It was made, not weathered. Even though the shape is strange to him, the purpose is undeniable.

{This is to keep people out,} he says quietly.

{They shaped the stone into other things as well.} Samira motions, and he clambers up to the top of her head so she can rear up and he can see higher. But even when she's fully unfolded, he isn't even halfway to seeing what's on the other side of the structure. {But these were their ugliest creation. Behind here was an oasis that the peoples of the desert used to share, before these humans decided it should be guarded.}

He looks around. The parts of these that survived are tall, yes, and they encompass much. Nali and the maractus would be unable to climb such an immense structure. The darmanitan, even with their strength, would be unable to crush through it. But— {This could not stop you, if you did not wish it,} he says quietly to the krookodile beneath him. {Not for a heartbeat.}

{The humans here lived in fear of what we would do,} Samira says. It's full of regret, but it isn't an answer. {That fear drove them to do horrible things. They horded and they stole. So we echoed them, and became the thing that they feared. When we were done, we took the oasis with us. My ancestors swam back and forth across the plains until we carved out a path for a river that was too large for anyone to horde.}

He realizes now why Samira was particular about which word she used here. He realizes why it would be so important for the hatchlings to see. {The krookodile desecrated this place.}

{We did.} She casts a weary eye across the ruins around them. {We have fought all peoples of the desert before, until it was recognized that we were so powerful that our peace must be upheld. But never like this. On that day we sought more than just submission, and our wish was granted. It was a horrible thing, but we agreed it had to be done.}

Her voice deepens. {Our Great Mother, who gave us our shape and formed us from clay, tasked us with protecting the desert while She rested. Some of our kind think differently, but I believe on that day, though She slumbered, the Great Mother wept when She heard what we had done, what we had forgotten. So now that it is my time to be Mother to our people, I remember this place always. When you first joined us, I heard you asking many times why we travel the way that we do, why we pick the routes we choose. I knew no other way to explain our purpose than to show you what we show our hatchlings.} She rumbles lowly. {Forgive me, Nofangs. At the time I did not think I could speak in a way you would understand. With our strength and our bodies we carve rivers, break stones, crush earth so that others can tend it and make it grow. We enforce the solstice peace, and pass the Great Mother between Her children so that we all remember what divided Her. There will only ever be as many of us as the desert can bear. This is our punishment. One day, the Great Mother will be proud once more of what we have done and She will reawaken, instead of hiding away from us and our shame.}

He doesn't say it, but he realizes it then: when Baku crossed the river, on that night that felt so many lifetimes ago, Samira probably saw more humans than just him reaching for something to have.

{This was a lesson, not a punishment.} His voice rasps with the same cadence of a statement, but in his heart it feels more like a question.

{Perhaps.} She sounds unconvinced. {Now each solstice we send our children to guard you. Now your people have no word for what they once built. But I fear, Nofangs, that despite everything we did in the aftermath to help them, they never truly forgot what we could be. And I fear above all that they were correct to remember. We have grown complacent in the dunes, and believed that our power would be enough to keep the desert balanced the way we saw fit.}

Perhaps he shaped the not-question the wrong way. Samira has learned much from him, and him from her—perhaps a lesson for some can be a punishment for others. Perhaps one forms the other. He wants to say that but he's transfixed by the sight before him. But he can't look, either, can't focus on the way that the moonlight has turned everything to a pale greyscale. {My father is different from the humans who lived here, though. He shouldn't … wouldn't have allowed us to do this again.}

{Your father has not been sanhim since the day I passed judgment on you.} Her voice is like stone. {In taking you, in codifying your guilt, I took your birthright, and with it his lineage. That is the price he and I decided on that day, Nofangs. That is the judgment I chose to pass.}

The cloak is suddenly heavy on his shoulders, so heavy that he fears it'll rip him and Samira both into the sandy abyss. {He never told me that.}

{Do you see now why I fear I have done something terrible?} She slowly crouches back down to all fours; the stone structure towers even higher above them now. {And yet when I asked for you I could not have known, right?}

{And yet you could not have known,} he echoes back. But he senses he means it even if she does not. His heart feels like it has sunk to the bottom of the desert. {Please. We must go talk to the Southern Stones. Even if they won't listen to me, they'll have to listen to you.} He thinks of Mila, and Haruna, and his father, of their gentle smiles. He can't imagine them with stern faces and hands clenched around the haft of a spear, turning the darmanitan to corpses, leading the young ones away.

{I raised your aunt the Fangkeeper once. In her year our sandile did not want to live among the Southern Stones, and she respected that choice, so I offered to live alongside her for some time. I always feared she would see me as a replacement, and herself as unworthy, though I learned to see her as a sister,} she says quietly. {I spoke with her on the solstice, asked her to justify her daughter's decision. I do not recognize Fangkeeper now.}

Now he has the words to ask the question, but he doesn't have the heart for it. There are bigger issues than just his family. {There are reasonable people among them! They'll take your side.}

{Nofangs,} she says quietly, turning away from the stones even as he's transfixed by the sight. The image burns its way through his bleary eyes and into his mind, interposed with the scattered ruins of Geret's home. {If anyone witnessing this thinks there are two sides to choose from, then the sands will be plunged into war. And then we have all lost.}

Samira is reluctant to approach the Southern Stones, so he walks there alone. The ground here, she explains, is already carefully softened. If she tried to swim through it she might destroy the place. That is what she tells him. The journey back on foot feels shorter than the journey out did, though it still takes him many suns. Perhaps he's grown.

On the way back he sees small green stones clustered in the sands; when he draws close, they glow. {Greetings, traveler. We serve. What business do you have with the Southern Stones?} one asks.

He stops respectfully. {I am here to speak with the sanhim.}

No response.

He stares at them in confusion, and then he realizes—if these are for the humans, then … Baku clears his throat. "I am here to speak with the sanhim."

This time, all of their eyes glow in unison. They are silent for a moment, and he suspects that there is a conversation beyond his understanding even here. {You may pass,} says one of them. {Welcome home.}

He passes, but once he does so, he can't help but see the oversized hands, the enormous eyebrows. The image of Utamo tracing his fingertips across a darmanitan's hands fills him with an aching familiarity, and when he looks back he knows without knowing what happened to the darumaka the Southern Stones stole, the horrible stonecrafting magic Samira spoke of. Did she know it could be used like this?

The question takes a long moment to form, and when it does, his ears burn with shame: "Are you … are you happy here?"

{We serve.}

"But is this what you wanted?"

{We serve.}

"I—"

{You are wanted in the Southern Stones,} one of them repeats, a sense of urgency slipping into its voice. {And we are wanted here. So shall we both serve. May the sands be kind.}

Numbly, he echoes back, {May the sands be kind.}

The rest of the trip feels much longer.

The people greet him warmly when he arrives. Livari draws him into a hug; he senses curious eyes peering out from the tents. By now he must be thoroughly foreign to them, and yet not wholly different enough to be one of the krookodile.

Perhaps Livari knew he was coming, because she's barely finished embracing him before she begins speaking.

"You've come back to us. She's finally let you go, right?" Livari's smiling pleadingly but he knows she can't actually mean it, not with the tears in the corners of her eyes. "Welcome home, Baku."

{They—} he begins, and then finds himself stumbling: {They were just teaching me, Livari. I … I wanted this.}

Her smile evaporates against his skin, like river water. "Did you? The whole time? You wanted to be their diplomat?" she asks coldly. When he doesn't respond, she continues, "Your father always spoke so highly of the lessons you would learn. But when you finally came back and you seemed smaller, paler, sadder."

Beneath her words she asks a question he's never been able to answer, even to himself on those quiet nights spent alone in the dark. How could he answer it here? There were times he wished things were different, but wasn't that an experience everyone shared? He searches her face for any sign of deception, of doubt. He finds nothing.

{Where's Awaze? And Nali?} he asks instead. At her side her hand extends from beneath her cloak to grip the staff that marks her as the new sanhim, but the maractus who chose her is nowhere in sight. The humans will be cruel, but surely there are others in the village who would caution reason.

Livari points her chin up defiantly. "The maractus all but left us once they saw the extent to which we were willing to defend ourselves. We will defend them as well if it comes to it, but for now they are no allies to us." Her voice softens. "I defended you, Baku. I told your father he was a fool to offer you up to their whims. Your father is like a brother to me, and I held my tongue in public so our people would not have to see him questioned, but oh, how we fought. He claimed that this was necessary to keep the peace, that our children needed to learn—instead they came for my Mila because she did not hold her tongue, and Geret saw that as an offense. I saw what they did to you. I saw what losing you did to your father. When the time came for him to pass—" She wraps her hands around his, and suddenly he grows cold when he realizes what she's saying. "—for him it was fast. I was there. But I wish you were, too. I knew you wouldn't have wanted him to be alone. But we had no way of finding you, so without asking, Mila went north—."

Grief washes over him like a wave, and he's suddenly drowning again. He wants to reach for Samira's back but there's nothing, and there's no one, and then he's standing stiffly while she has her hands wrapped around his quavering shoulders.

This is a lesson—

There is nothing to be learned here. That anger sparks him upright. This is senseless, and he could spend the rest of his life trying to understand it. There will be time to mourn later. {Livari. If you fight the krookodile, you'll lose.}

"But if they fight us, doesn't that mean we were right to defend ourselves to begin with?" she asks stiffly.

He's reminded of dropping a stone down a cavern, of the way the sound reverberates louder and louder. First one child is taken, then many, then slaughter, then war. But what makes the sound fade away, and what makes it grow instead? And how can he make them understand? {What you did to the darmanitan wasn't defense,} he says at last. That much he can be sure of.

"Perhaps your father was prepared to lose you to earn their trust, but I was not. I know Samira," she says in a harsh voice, fire reflecting in her eyes. For a moment her voice grows low, and powerful, and ancient. {Fangkeeper, she called me.} "For my fierceness and my strength. I was so flattered then that I was blind to why she would want me, why miraculously none of the desert's children would choose me that night. Your father chose to stay blind, because he never wanted the responsibility of sanhim to be equated with power—" She cuts off suddenly. "What did she call you, Baku?"

{Nofangs,} you reply uncertainly.

{Because you have no fangs,} Livari says slowly, the understanding forming between each word. "I was to be molded. But you ... you were leverage."

It's easier to answer her in the desert tongue. {Samira wouldn't.}

"Did she show you her wonders? Did she promise you the world? She told me I was receiving a gift, and I believed her. A chance to leave the Southern Stones and see the world for what it really is like—a chance none of our people would get otherwise. But one day I grew tired, and I wanted to return home. She refused, so I began to walk. When she caught up to me, she broke my leg." Livari's hands clench around the staff. "She told me I was strong enough to bear it, so I did. But I was young. I was stupid. I am strong, but it is of no thanks to her. You're strong too, Baku, to survive what you have but …" Then she softens again, and she looks so much like the woman who used to skip stones with him and Mila in the creek. Her smile grows even more watery. Her knuckles whiten on her staff. "It's okay, Baku. You can come back now. We've made—we're strong enough to make sure they can't take you. They'll think twice once they know what we can do."

He wants to feel some reaction to her truth, to floor him the same way learning of the sanhim's death did, but he can't bring himself to do so. Livari hadn't learned her lesson. Instead he thinks of Nekya, who turned from her duty. And Little Sister, who tried to hide from hers. Both times it was inevitable—the krookodile came, and so did the river.

{They won't think twice. And I don't want to come back.} The surety of his response shocks both of them, but it surprises him more than it surprises her. As soon as the words leave his lips, though, they feel true—this isn't his home. These people aren't his family. And they haven't been for a while. {But I don't want us to fight.}

"Wanting something isn't the same as having it, Baku," she says softly, and he wishes she knew how right she really was.

He rejoins Samira before sunrise. She dives them deep into the earth to wait out the day. He hugs the cloak to himself and wonders what he could've become. If they hadn't taken him. If he hadn't strayed too far. Would they have gone to war if he'd learned faster? If he'd answered Samira's questions in one year instead of two? Would Livari have listened if he'd spoken better?

Samira doesn't even ask what happened when he walks back to her. She can tell just by looking at him, he tells himself.

But that thought clears away as the dirt runs through his hair, and he knows: she hadn't expected anything different to begin with. That was the difference.

{They will come for us if we don't do this, Nofangs,} she says quietly. This isn't a cavern he's used to; it was hurriedly made. So her voice echoes in strange ways that make the intent harder to understand. {Perhaps not tomorrow. Perhaps not the day after. But someday soon. I want to make this clear to you: we will desecrate once more, before the peoples of the Southern Stones are allowed to hurt anyone else. This year it is the krookodile's turn to carry the Great Mother's dark heart, so I feel Her burden even more. But I know your loyalties are divided. I do not ask you to understand what we must do, just that you do not try to stop us. I do not want you caught in this conflict. I … feel I have already forced you too far too many times before.}

{What would you have me do instead?} His heart twists when he thinks of it again—the soft lilt in Livari's voice when she explained that his father had died, waiting. There's a yawning cavern in his chest that hasn't even begun to heal. He can't—he can't do that again, stumble upon Samira lying still and overturned—

{I could take you far from here. I could leave you here when the night falls. The maractus could look after you, or even the mandibuzz; I fear this conflict will spread and you'd be safer if—}

{I don't want to be safe. I want to be with you.}

In all the time they've spent together he's never cut her off, but at the same time, he's never had reason to.

Back when his father had held him tight, on that last true night they'd both had together, he hadn't realized what would happen to him. He's quite sure of it now. When he tries to think of that child's face, it doesn't match who he is now—it isn't the bags around the eyes or the pale skin or the calloused feet. Beneath the desert sands, across the lonely nights, the boy who had desecrated sacred land and lived in fear of the punishment he was about to receive had turned into someone new. Someone who understood now what would be coming, what it would mean to stay.

{Can I tell you a story?} he asks, and he isn't quite able to name the feeling that pounds against his ribcage when she agrees, the way his voice hitches as he clumsily translates the late sanhim's version of Sun Sister and the Three Gifts.

When he's finished, she hums carefully. {We also speak of a sister like your small one. In ours, she asks a stone to carry her through the sky, although it is her fate never to find that which she seeks. Sometimes she loses sight and goes dark, relying on faith to keep her moving; sometimes, the light is strong and she sees the bright path before her.}

{The moon?} he asks.

{Perhaps.} Samira laughs quietly to herself. {Although I always thought of the two of them as the Great Mother's hearts, chasing one another through the peoples and across the sands.}

Before he has time to ponder that much longer, Samira adds, {We have a similar story to your Small Sister, although it ends differently. Would you like to hear it?}

This time, in the quiet of a cavern miles underground, there's no one else to hear. He can't help but wonder if things would be different if this had been one of stories retold at the solstice. But this time, again, the story's just for Nofangs:

It starts the same, although the names are different. The timid sister chases the bright one into a newborn world. But in this one, she is not brave enough to return Sun. Small Sister was selfish, and held Sun close to her, even as the desert wilted, and its children suffered. Without Sun, Aranu could not grow his seeds; Melai could not reflect her fire. They pleaded with Small Sister, but Small Sister refused.

Zaathi watched. Her heart betrayed her. For Zaathi loved Small Sister, as all the people of the desert did, and it hurt Zaathi to imagine meting punishment on Small Sister in particular, who was her favorite. For a time she watched, and that was all she did—she did not need Sun, after all. But Aranu and Melai's cries were too hard to ignore; the night stretched on with no end. Finally, the First Krookodile surfaced before Small Sister.

{You must let her go,} Zaathi growled. {Sun must be shared, or we will all suffer.}

But Small Sister pretended not to hear.

{You must,} pressed Zaathi, and again received no response.

Heavily, Zaathi hardened her heart and reached forward. Small Sister was even smaller in the claws of the First Krookodile. It lasted only a moment; she sundered; then, Sun was free once more.

The first peoples of the desert rejoiced at the first sunrise, but in her corner at the edge of the world, Zaathi wept bitterly. Her tears came so furiously that they could not be stopped; the dried lands of the desert transformed, and blossomed into something flowing, something new.

Thus Small Sister and the First Krookodile bounded the First River.

In the darkness they share, he's left with only his thoughts once she falls silent.

{This is the story of the desecration,} he says at last. {Of the humans who were before the Southern Stones.}

{One day you will tell the stories of what happens here,} Samira says solemnly after a long silence. {That was the hope that your father and I shared when I took you, although we never thought it would be like this. And sometime after that time, your people will be more powerful than mine. When that time comes, and your people are fully grown, I hope you are kind to us. But if your children's children are as cruel to us as we were to you, so shall it be.}

So shall it be.

The traditional response is almost out of his mouth before he can stop himself. It shouldn't be that way. It wouldn't be fair. This can't be the only option. But these are the only pieces they were given.

He curls up on her back instead, and lies awake even as she eases into fitful slumber.

The rest of it unravels so quickly.

The adult krookodile have many words for war. He does not know these words, nor did he realize how many he didn't know, until this moment, when their low calls rumble through the earth to announce their arrival and all he hears is the groaning of the ground beneath him before Samira propels herself forward. Her claws rake an opening in the ground for sunlight to stream through, and then he's in the center of his—the village.

He watches as another krookodile emerges twenty feet to his left and plunges itself straight through a tent before he realizes that his bravery last night wasn't bravery at all, but foolishness. He shouldn't be here. He can't watch this. He closes his eyes and sinks onto Samira's back, but he can't make himself not hear. Someone screams wordlessly. It sounds like Mila. He's heard the sounds that follow next: once, Samira encountered an enormous pillar of stone that blocked the path of a river the krookodile wanted to make. She called her fellows and together they swam in the earth beneath it until it turned to sand, and the stone sank under its own weight. The groaning is quieter here, but it seems to last an eternity.

When he cracks his eyes open, the village isn't fully sunk; it was never heavy enough for that; there's uneven gouges in the earth that have cut the land into stairs, huge slats of earth that almost look like w̵̢͝a̷̢̅l̴̠̉̎l̵͐̓ͅs̷̞̋́,.

"Sigilyph warriors, to me!" someone is shouting, and then Livari is overhead, flying like the mandibuzz. He glimpses widespread wings, painted more colors than he's ever seen at once, and then there's a harsh crack as the earth beneath Samira's feet shatters and a blast of wind sends him tumbling backwards. As he crashes down her spine his world is a multicolored blur; when he finally catches himself on a fin he sees that the sky is blotted out by rainbow wings.

Samira hisses and lurches beneath him, swiping out with one claw at the nearest one and slamming it into the ground. It shatters upon impact, shards of clay scattering. More stone magic? But he doesn't have time to figure it out, because their eyes glow in unison and then Samira is coiling up and plunging underground and it takes all his focus just to hold on.

She reemerges outside of the line of sigilyph, and he has just enough time to see a human clutched behind each of them, their eyes glowing blue as well, before Samira lunges forward and grabs the nearest one in her jaws. Two more lash out with their wings and Samira's too slow to move out of the way of the cutting blades of wind that follow; enormous gouges open up on her right flank and red scales and blood fly into the air. {Fangkeeper!} she snarls.

"The desert is not yours," Livari says, turning. But she doesn't command the sigilyph to finish them off. The sanhim's cloak flaps around her shoulders. "It may have been once, but it cannot be forever. You cannot shape us as you see fit."

{You cannot do the same to others.} Samira's jaws snap at a sigilyph that strays too close, but she flings it away from herself rather than shattering it and its rider on the ground.

"Because you did it first? Look around you, Samira of the Sands. Tell me your justice is fair. Tell me we would do any worse if we ruled in your stead."

He doesn't feel Samira move beneath him. But he looks around, and he sees the village—his village—and Baku can't look away. The crop fields are torn asunder, enormous trenches carefully dug through to ensure that there will be nothing left by harvest. Stones litter the ground where the tents once stood. Someone has plowed through the brook and spilled it across the plains; its contents burble a miserable, pale red. When he saw the darmanitan ruins he didn't realize how much they'd look like his own.

{Please,} he begins. He isn't even sure who he's talking to. {I'll go back. I'll stay. Just stop.}

"This is beyond you, Baku," Livari says. She almost sounds regretful. Her hand is outstretched, and at first he thinks she's reaching for him. But then his heart sinks: she's holding the white half of the Dragonmother's heart.

It had gone to the darmanitan this year, he remembers distantly. They must've …

{We committed atrocities.} Samira shifts back when she sees what's in Livari's hand, but she doesn't falter. {We have never tried to deny it. But it was in the name of a better future for all of our children, and so I believe in fighting again.}

"There will always be people like you," says Livari in response, "and people like us to rise to fight you."

In the next instant, the Dragonmother's dark heart awakens. Samira roars alongside another. Blackness darker than any night he spent beneath the sands eclipses his vision. The scent of ozone chokes his nostrils, hot and thick like the heaviest summer storm. Wings unfold and blue lightning fills the air.

His father's words ring hollowly through his ears as the remains of his village are dispersed into sparks and scraps of shimmering red fabric—

Little flurry, the things we love are only ours to hold, not to have. One day—

It's too much. He loses his grasp on Samira and goes tumbling back.

The last thing he remembers is seeing an enormous pillar of fire erupt from the stone in Livari's hands.

Royal Archaeological Expedition of Castelia Desert, Day 16

Our second night in this larger section of the ruins was even stranger than the first. We found out what was bothering the stoutland: this place is teeming with ghosts! Webb says not to make much of it, and that all ruins tend to attract ghosts, but Parker thinks it's bad luck, and I can't blame him. It certainly makes the stoutland harder to corral.

One of them has taken to following me around at night. Curious little fellow. I was whistling a tune once and I could've sworn I heard it echoing, but that might've just been the stones. I can't get a good glimpse at it, since it's always hiding from my torch. It scared the devil out of me the first time I saw it though—this one clutches at this strange gold mask, and if you don't look carefully (which it's hard to do at night, of course) it looks like the face of a little boy. Webb's trying to get a specimen to study, but they all seem fiercely protective. I don't want to antagonize the ghosts any, since if there are big ones we aren't going to be able to fight them. The stoutland are good for those blasted sandile, but they aren't worth a damn against these spectral types. Webb seems convinced that these masks are a clue to the people who used to live here, and … well, he doesn't seem wrong about that.

The one that follows me seems friendly enough that I'm hopeful we won't have any issues. I might even take it home with me.

.

thanks for reading my journeyfic about adventure and family!

this story was brought to you by the letter N. and also the "it sure is weird that unova has a castle full of the ghosts of crying dead children and this is all treated as normal and you can actually take as many children as you like; this franchise is weird but it's kind of insane that it boiled the frog all the way up to owning actual (ex-)humans; if you don't think they're people you're probably not going to think any of them are people but it's worth a try" crew.