Before Cyril could respond, Barnabas held up a hand. “Wait here.”

The flying papyrus scroll swiveled and shot into the dark depths of the stairwell. Cyril considered following the imp and thought better of it. The library had summoned the worker, trusting it to assist the first guest to step foot in its premises in aeons, and so he would trust the library’s judgment.

His core needed to refill after his breakthrough with the Dominion of Gravity and feeding Barnabas the strand of Knowledge qi. As long as it didn’t take too long, he supposed he didn’t mind exploring the mystery of the Desert Tyrant in the meantime. Now he had a name for the mysterious figure that had thwarted the ifrit-woman: Hosjin Yaserath. The style of name followed no convention he was aware of. He was finding such discoveries less and less surprising.

What did concern him is that almost nothing at all was familiar. How had this area remained undiscovered for so long?

Before he had woken up in the desert, his last memory had been…what? Going to sleep in his home tent near one of the central campfires. The Wandering Phoenix tribe had settled in a well-traveled region of the desert for the past couple weeks. No matter how many mysteries the desert held, the Underdark was a large, hollow region not too far below the surface. His people’s dowsers and guides should have sensed it below them.

Once the thought took root, it was difficult to get rid of. He wondered how far he had traveled away from his family. The thought had occurred to him on the surface, but he had been too busy adjusting to the new reality of his fusion with Behemoth to spare much attention to other concerns.

Barnabas returned, interrupting his thoughts. A floating carpet formed from layers of papyrus trailed behind the imp, straining to carry a dozen tablets and a small pile of mosaic glass shards.

“Here you have it,” said Barnabas. “All the information we have here on the Desert Tyrant. What’s so wrong with being a tyrant, anyways?”

Cyril silently followed the imp and its burden into one of the empty viewing rooms. At Barnabas’ request, he created a stone table to hold the records. The papyrus carpet fell apart moments after settling onto the new piece of furniture, dissolving into blue-green motes of qi.

It was a rather impressive haul. The tablets contained row after row of the tight, conjoined runes of the Beljezan alphabet, engraved onto a variety of surfaces. Cyril ran his fingers along them, adding fired clay, bronze, and copper to his list of Transmute options. All of them were grade-E materials, a step above base level.

Barnabas cleared its ethereal throat, an expression Cyril suspected it had stolen from him. “Are you done caressing the tablets? Good. Guessing you don’t understand Beljezan?”

“I’m afraid not.”

Barnabas shook its head. “Well, lucky for you, I still have some excess energy from my evolution. Enough for me to cast the Translate Cantrip on you for around thirty minutes.”

Not bothering to mention there had been nothing lucky about the evolution, Cyril nodded and smiled. It gave him the opportunity to watch a spirit cast a Cantrip he was unfamiliar with. Copying a technique required far more than simply watching someone else use it, but it would leave an imprint on his Dominion of Knowledge that could potentially open up a path to mastery.

Barnabas’ tiny core churned in its stomach, unspooling wisps of blue-green Knowledge qi. Vivid flashes surged throughout its body, like a lightning storm trapped within a bottle. As the rotation of the imp’s core reached a crescendo, the flashes turned into solid streaks, linking together to form a single blocky rune.

Cerulean light flashed. Cyril blinked.

Once the after-images in his vision faded, no sign remained of the symbol or the accumulated energy. Barnabas floated atop his papyrus scroll, his silhouette slightly more vague than before. No sign remained of its core or channels. The visual effect had come from its excess qi leaking out. Now that its energy levels were manageable, the spirit wasted nothing to entropy.

Cyril felt no different, but when he looked down at one of the clay tablets, the Beljezan runes had transformed into his own native language. He skimmed through it, discovering it was a short account of the Desert Tyrant’s origins:

Hosjin Yaserath was born in the Shade Labyrinth, an Underdark complex beneath the desert territories of the old Manaeon Empire. Little is known about his human father, a mortal who died early in his youth. His mother, Sarin Yaserath, was an outcast in drow society for bearing a child with a human mortal, until her eventual elevation to regency after Hosjin’s Ascension.

Cyril leaned back. “What’s a ‘drow?’”

“One of the sapient, civilized species that live in the Underdark,” said Barnabas. “They’re similar enough to humans that they can breed together, though their offspring are thought to always be sterile, like mules. Haven’t heard of any exceptions personally.”

“Is that why Hosjin became the Desert Tyrant?” asked Cyril. “Humans didn’t like having a hybrid around any more than his own people?”

Barnabas guffawed. “You couldn’t be more wrong. When Hosjin ascended, he conquered the drows in retaliation for their intolerance toward him and his mother. On the other hand, once he emerged in the desert and presented himself to the humans, they loved him. Women went mad for his otherworldly beauty. It’s said wherever he walked, droves of maidens flung a path of flower petals so he would not sully his feet. Men worshipped his strength and swore their allegiance.”

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“That’s not what the ifrit-woman told me,” said Cyril. “She claims he annihilated all manner of tribes in his attempt to unify the desert. Then, he set his sights on Beljeza, and the city came to ruin.”

Barnabas tilted its head back like it wanted to laugh once again, then its voice turned serious. “What ifrit-woman?”

The imp listened attentively as Cyril recounted his discovery of the ifrit-woman and the temple, and summarized what she had revealed to him. Its eyes blazed when Cyril revealed the specific details about the celestial, but it waited patiently until he was finished speaking.

“Lanazael, that old lunatic.” Barnabas shook its tiny head. “So that’s what happened to her. Hosjin should’ve done a better job sealing her.”

“What?” said Cyril.

Instead of responding, Barnabas floated over to the pile of painted glass shards and tapped one. Careful not to cut himself on the jagged edges, Cyril selected the mosaic hard and held it up to his face.

Fortunately, he had interacted with stored memories before, sparing himself the indignity of having the imp guide him through it. Touching the enchanted shard formed a resonance with his core. He simply guided a strand of his qi along the link and fed it into the shard.

A moment later, his perspective shifted.

He was in the body of an older man--a priest standing atop a simple marble dais in the main city square. Nearly the entire city of Beljeza had flooded the streets as far as the eye could see. People had even taken to the rooftops or climbed to the top of elevated structures in order to get a better view of the spectacle. They were above ground, desert sun blazing overhead, the tops of oasis trees poking up between buildings.

The vague knowledge of who he was and what he was doing transferred along the memory link. The priest had been very aware of himself in the moment--never had so much attention been on him, even if he was the least important part of the show.

Two of the most legendary figures within the entire desert stood on either side of him, their resplendent souls almost blinding up close.

Hosjin, with his pale gray skin and mane of white hair, was as beautiful as a polished blade. His muscular frame was draped in a ceremonial blend of adamantium armor and bolts of vibrant silk cloth. The priest kept his spiritual sight restricted--gazing upon the entity that had bonded with the Desert Tyrant would likely shatter his mind.

On the other side stood High Priestess Anadei, head high and proud. As always, a cloth blindfold had been tied around her eyes, and she wore the same voluminous white robes as ever. Underneath all of her coverings, Cyril could tell that she was nearly identical to the ifrit-woman’s chosen appearance back in the temple.

Hosjin towered over the priestess, but they weren’t there to fight. No, Cyril, in the body of the priest, was there to join them together in matrimony.

Cyril pulled himself out of the memory. After fighting off the disorientation of returning to the real world, he pointed at Barnabas. “Explain.”

The imp bobbed in place above the pile of memory shards, clearly enjoying itself. “And so you see why that mad spirit is so obsessed with Hosjin. It’s really quite a tragic story. Together, with Anadei’s wisdom and Hosjin’s power, they would have conquered the desert. With their talents, perhaps their empire would have extended further.”

“What happened?” said Cyril. “I thought Hosjin slaughtered most of the human tribes he came across. Was she forced to marry him?”

“Yes, I’m sure Lanazael told you that sort of thing. Didn’t mention that those tribes were cannibals, barbarians, slavers, and the like, did she? Believe it or not, you humans tend to be pretty terrible unless someone with enough authority forces you to act civilized.”

“That’s one way to justify things,” said Cyril. “All of his enemies were evil.”

“The reality is that Hosjin didn’t need a justification. It doesn’t matter to me whether or not he had an excuse. Spirits, we have a hierarchy and we mostly stick to it. No one’s gonna cry for old Barnabas if an ifrit takes a bite out of me, are they? Way of the world, how I see it. Just letting you know the facts of the matter before you go believe that old trapped loon.”

“Alright.” Cyril shook his head. “So, they got married. Then what?”

Barnabas’ voice grew solemn. “Finish that memory.”

Surprised, Cyril glanced down at the shard in his hand. Before he forced his way out, he had sensed that less than ten seconds remained in the memory. While their union must have been a lovely moment, what exactly was he supposed to get out of the sight?

A sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach, Cyril activated the memory once more.

Back inside the priest’s body, Cyril spread his arms wide in blessing of the two. His mind was focused on the next few sentences, the most important words of his life, shaping the entire fate of the desert.

Neither Cyril nor the priest’s focused mind realized what was happening as he reached into one of the sleeves of his robe. His hand settled on the hilt of a dagger sheathed against his forearm, and he pulled the weapon free. Unable to do anything, Cyril watched as the priest plunged the strange obsidian dagger into Anadei’s heart.

The priest didn’t even realize what he had done for a few seconds. He stared at the High Priestess as she collapsed, blood blossoming across the chest of her pristine robes, eyes sightless. Stared at the jagged obsidian blade in his hand, the hand that had moved without his conscious effort.

The dutiful smile on Hosjin’s face turned into a tight line. His mouth opened, horror slowly spreading across the half-drow’s granite expression.

“No,” said Cyril in the body of the priest, forcing himself to remain within the memory. “No, it wasn’t me. I didn’t do it.”

Terror flooded the priest’s mind, though Cyril was able to detach himself from it. Hosjin looked like he was able to kill the priest. Then the sunlit sky vanished as the world was plunged into sudden darkness. The cold fury of the heavens swallowed all hints of warmth. Starlight gathered into the shape of a small woman that the priest and Cyril both recognized as the ifrit-woman, Lanazael.

Specks of starlight flickered to life around the ifrit as her anguished scream pierced through the heavens. Then meteors of starlight rained down upon the city, traveling so fast only Hosjin was able to react.

The priest stared upward as one of the blazing infernos of starlight plummeted toward him. His last memory was a rush of earth and darkness as Hosjin’s spirit manifested into the world. The sight shattered the priest’s mind, and the memory ended.