Zayza remained stiff between Chiwawo and Nahutala, just as fixated on the Tribe Father’s tent as them. But no further words reached the trio.
The heavy rainfall began easing up, weakening to a mere drizzle within moments.
“‘The next stage of your journey…?’” Nahutala finally reflected, the first to interpret that their gathering here was complete. “Zayza…the Gods below have given you a journey?”
Zayza only stiffened further when Chiwawo turned to await her response, even more speculation in his stare than Nahutala’s.
“Oh—um…I suppose that’s news to me, as well…” she stammered.
Chiwawo’s icy eyes softened—perhaps he’d realized the intimidation he’d projected with his first reaction. He crossed his arms in contemplation. “Maybe we are all on this journey...after all, the Tribe Father addressed each of us. The Gods below called all three of us here.”
“True, but it is strange…even Zayza?” questioned Nahutala. “The Gods below would call to an outsider?”
“Maybe that doesn’t matter. Maybe after this, she will not be an outsider.”
Nahutala’s head darted around to ensure nobody was nearby to overhear. Even before Chiwawo had finished saying it, he’d lowered his tone.
“Careful of your speech, Chi,” Nahutala cautioned.
“I know. But…”
Zayza squirmed, feeling like a pet as their ponderings about her unfolded without her input.
“If I may,” she intervened, “we might understand more if we try to follow this ‘journey.’”
Would we, though? she wondered immediately. Why did I just say that?
She didn’t even know who these faceless ‘Gods below’ were, assuming they even existed. Sure, she was learning to navigate the Mainland Desert like a Hidakalan, as the Tribe Father’s riddle had insinuated, but why should that connect to something deeper?
Rather, why did she want to believe it would?
“This may be uncharted territory…But nonetheless, the truth you seek is in our way. In our history…”
The second memory triangle returned to the front of her mind like an answer.
But that was Hiroko’s memory. That was from Hiroko’s private conversation with the Tribe Father, not hers.
No matter how pertinent it felt now, she had to remind herself.
I’m placing all of my hope in guidance that the Tribe Father meant for somebody else, she thought. And all to help me solve a Dream World mystery—something only I could possibly know about…
So am I abusing a religion I don’t understand for my own desires? she feared. Am I just dragging good people into a problem that should never involve them? A problem I might never solve?
…A problem that might hurt us all...?
…Just because of a memory that doesn’t even belong to me?
But with her confident suggestion already out in the air, her caution had come too late. Chiwawo and Nahutala nodded, reassurance flooding them both.
“You are right, Princess,” said Chiwawo. “We should trust the Gods below. What they have revealed so far is what we are meant to know right now. The journey may hold our answers.”
“Well-said to you both,” conceded Nahutala. “Hibon, bendon Hidakal.”
For once, Zayza recognized that vocabulary with ease: ‘glory to the Gods. They forever house my trust.’ Nahutala had uttered it many times on their daily trips to collect heat stones—both as a celebration when they’d found success, and as a reminder when they were struggling.
Zayza felt the guilt set in. She allowed more of her hair to slip from her hood to hide her face.
Maybe I am just selfish.
With nowhere else to look, Zayza stared at her muddied feet.
“So then…what comes next?” she asked thinly.
“Like a true Hidakalan, you are already on the right track, Princess,” Chiwawo affirmed. “Good thinking: let’s all listen for the Gods’ next guidance.”
Zayza wasn’t sure what he meant until she could see Chiwawo and Nahutala close their eyes in her peripheral vision, focusing their attention downward into their soles. They were reading the sand, as they apparently thought she was doing.
Another misguidance, Zayza accused herself. Even without trying, her posture led them on even further.
But at this point, it would come across too disrespectful not to keep playing along. She closed her eyes and felt for the unseen world deep beneath her feet, drawing from all she’d learned in their daily trips.
Who knows…? Maybe this really will lead to something—
A vibration snatched her attention.
It started subtle, but steadily increased. Zayza would have never been able to tell before, or notice its presence so soon, but with her newfound experience she knew it was rising up directly beneath them.
Something was ascending from far below.
It was massive.
Zayza feared it might shoot straight up and crash into them when it surfaced, but to her relief, that never happened. Instead, the vibration evened out and began traveling away from them in a waning curve beneath the village.
“What is this…?” wondered Chiwawo.
“The Tribe Father just discussed using one’s feet to see,” Nahutala admonished. “Do that. Obviously, it is a Sand Dragon.”
Fear would have swept over Zayza, especially given this ‘dragon’s’ apparent size, but Nahutala spoke without a trace of alarm.
“I know that,” Chiwawo retorted. “What I mean is: why is it moving in such a strange pattern?”
Nahutala paused to keep sensing, so Zayza did the same. The vibrations journeyed close to the outskirts of the village, towards Lake Hirokyauta and the neighboring tribe, before turning and continuing back to where they all stood.
Then it continued in the opposite direction, eventually performing the same turn at the other end of the territory where the Curving Peaks began.
And finally, after cycling back underneath them again, it mimicked the first two loops towards the smaller slopes well past Zayza’s tent—roughly where she and her consciousness friends had first entered when the Hidakalan guards ushered them in.
“Hm. That is strange burrowing behavior for a Sand Dragon,” Nahutala agreed. “It must be another guide.”
“Guide?” Zayza repeated.
“That sensation that led us all here, Princess,” explained Chiwawo, “was a young Sand Dragon. For ages, the Gods below have used Sand Dragons to show us the way to our calling.”
With that, the Tribe Father’s poetic terms were beginning to make more sense. When the sensation overcame Zayza back in the tent, all she could see was a dark blur. It was like picking out shadows through closed eyelids.
If she could ‘open’ the eyes of her feet, would the young Sand Dragon have appeared?
“It is unusual for one to show up beneath the tribe, though,” contemplated Nahutala. “This adult dragon may be burrowing like this to teach its young where not to wander.”
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Zayza broke her focus on the sand, looking to her companions in confusion. “But…I thought you said the dragons were moving like this to guide us?”
She felt a heavy, calm hand pat her shoulder. Chiwawo gave her a smile and began walking.
“The Gods below can use anything to create meaning. You’ll soon see they work in mysterious ways,” he explained back to her. “Come on.”
Nahutala gave her a nod of certainty. Together, they followed their friend’s steps.
But Zayza remained quiet. Chiwawo’s explanation sounded pleasant, but did it really make any sense?
Azvaylen culture was built on order. The laws of Azvaylen magic and the Dream World were founded on generations of intricate study and measurement. Though the fruit they bore was fantastical, specificity was the reason they functioned so reliably.
This Hidakalan faith in the Gods below seemed to weave between trains of logic. It was beginning to seem like anything could be an act of the Gods below, if interpreted as such.
Hiroko had even expressed such doubts to Zayza and Kotono before. She, the one who saved Hidakala, seemed to question its ways the most.
Still, it didn’t stop Zayza from hoping Chiwawo and Nahutala were right. And despite it all, even if there were no gods to thank, learning more about Hidakala kept guiding her to more and more of Hiroko’s memories.
Even if her intent was different from theirs, she had to keep searching.
“Can you see it now, Princess?” Chiwawo asked. “The Sand Dragon?”
She closed her eyes for a moment, but nothing changed. “I can feel it moving in that repeated pattern…but it just appears as a blur in my head.”
Then Zayza suddenly felt stares pressing against her. The trio was passing by a tent, where two men kneeled and tended to its slipping posts. But they paused, eyes squarely on her.
Though Zayza detected no outward distaste in their weathered faces, she could see their quiet speculation. Clearly, they’d heard Chiwawo’s question and her uncertain response.
‘An outsider is not fit for our ways.’
They didn’t say it, but Zayza may as well have heard it nonetheless.
“Don’t worry. You will see the dragon soon, Zayza, just like you learned to hear it so quickly,” said Nahutala.
She spoke extra loud, even turning her head to make sure the two men heard. They averted their stares and returned to their work.
Zayza smiled at Nahutala’s wink.
But still, this new pseudo-sense didn’t seem to improve with further efforts. All Zayza could see in her mind was a blurred form, and even that was fading in and out with the Sand Dragon’s wavering distance.
It was only by reading the rumbles of its travels—by ‘hearing’ through her feet—that Zayza could tell what Chiwawo was up to. They were following the dragon’s course towards one of its three turning points.
Soon the sand beneath them grew compact and damper under their steps. They cleared the last few tents before a view of the trickling waves awaited them unobstructed.
Their first stop: Lake Hirokyauta.
“Searching at the ends of the dragon’s path—I was thinking the same,” Nahutala said to Chiwawo. They both paused to admire the water, like paying respects, before planting their feet deeper into the shore.
Their exploration into the unseen began.
Zayza tried pushing herself to follow their lead, only to watch them in utter skepticism.
Are we truly supposed to find new meaning here, just because a Sand Dragon keeps turning around in this spot…?
“I can hear it…” Nahutala muttered, her concentration steadfast.
Can you?
Zayza couldn’t hear a thing.
“Yes. A break in the ground pattern,” agreed Chiwawo.
At this point, were they just convincing themselves? Were they forcing their own belief?
“It’s…” analyzed Nahutala. “Chi…isn’t this a…?”
“It is!”
Chiwawo practically dove to the ground, his massive hands sending sand clumps everywhere. Zayza jumped from fright.
“I can get my shovel, you big fool!” judged Nahutala—but Chiwawo had already dug a sizeable crater. “Thick-skulled warriors…just like my husband,” she dismissed to Zayza.
Within only a few moments, Chiwawo stood. Proudly, he displayed his discovery: a triangular peach stone the size of his palm.
“A stone heart?” beheld Nahutala.
“A stone heart.”
Zayza’s eyes widened: there really was something there. Perhaps the nearby waves had clouded her senses from detecting it. After all, she was still learning.
Right before she was about to ask of the object’s importance, Chiwawo eagerly turned to her. He was sprightlier than she’d ever seen.
“A stone heart is one of the ways Hidakalans can bring ourselves before the Gods below,” he unveiled. “By burying these, we can make ourselves vulnerable before them. We pour out the deepest parts of us—exposing those parts outside our minds, and trusting them in the hands of the Gods. See, Princess?”
He stepped close beside her, sand sprinkling from him onto Zayza’s dress while he held the stone up for both of them to observe. Carvings were engrained into its smooth, claylike properties.
At first, Zayza averted her eyes. “Is it really okay for us to dig it up and look at it, then?” she worried.
“That is part of its purpose. If the Gods choose, they can reveal these stones to others,” Chiwawo assured.
Again, a rule like that seems a tad convenient…Zayza couldn’t help but think.
“Although…I am not skilled in writing or reading our ancient symbols,” Chiwawo admitted. “Nahutala?”
“Let me see.”
Zayza took one quick glimpse at the stone heart before it was in Nahutala’s care. Though her guess of the symbols’ translation was much worse than Chiwawo’s, somehow, the characteristics in the carving style appeared familiar.
“Is it an elder’s?” assumed Chiwawo.
But Nahutala’s mouth dropped. She nearly lost hold of the stone heart.
“It is Hirokyauta’s.”
Zayza felt her heart leap.
Beside her, Chiwawo’s liveliness morphed into shock.
“She…she never bothered with ancient writings…” he remarked. “She couldn’t read them any better than me…”
“It appears, to make this, she learned.”
Their eyes all found each other. The sprinkling raindrops against the lake replaced their speech for a moment.
By their silence, Zayza could tell Chiwawo and Nahutala felt the same chill she did—a chill she’d felt many times now. This haunting, soothing sense of wonder befalling her was no different than whenever she found a memory triangle in the Dream World.
No—this time, there was quite a difference: Zayza didn’t have to experience it alone. She didn’t have to keep it secret.
Now, at last, somebody was here to relate.
It seemed even in death, Hiroko was helping people connect.
“What…does it say…?” Zayza nearly whispered.
Nahutala brought it close, running her finger over the lettering to better decipher it. Chiwawo waited unblinking like a statue beside her.
Finally, Nahutala nodded. She swallowed to even her voice—and perhaps to fight back tears.
“It reads: If I leave…please do not blame or forsake your people.”
Zayza smiled, her own tears welling up. “That would be her first concern…it seems she was the same back then, too…”
“Yes. This is undoubtedly our Hirokyauta,” Nahutala confirmed, bringing the stone heart close to her chest.
But to Zayza’s surprise, Chiwawo’s response lacked the withdrawn awe she’d expected from him.
He laughed.
Chiwawo jogged over to the shoreline and kicked his foot into the water, watching it splatter and even back out. Lifting his arms, he beheld the lake once again.
“Your leaving didn’t make the Gods below forsake us, sister!” he shouted into the waves. His echo carried all the way across the lake, as if he could see her on the other shore listening. “It led them to bless us! You did it, Hirokyauta!”
With watering eyes, Zayza’s imagination filled in the gaps. She could picture it, too: Hiroko standing at the other end, smirking back at them with crossed arms.
Finally, Zayza cried.
But it didn’t last long.
Water crashed against her and Nahutala. Chiwawo had begun splashing them with Hiroko’s lake, his laugh returning.
“Hey!” Nahutala chuckled, backing away to shield herself. “What has come over you?”
“There must be two more at the other ends! The Gods below are offering us Hirokyauta’s words. She is speaking to us one last time!” he bellowed, practically skipping back towards the way they came. “You should keep that stone heart, Nahutala. Let’s find the others!”
Zayza suddenly found her hand enwrapped.
“Oh!”
Chiwawo pulled her forward, easing up to allow her to gain her footing. His energy spread to her, and Zayza let out a laugh.
This eagerness, this nearly silly vigor, was a side of Chiwawo she had yet to see emerge. It tugged at her heart, a more-than-welcome surprise.
Perhaps this was the Chiwawo that Hiroko grew up with. Growing warm inside, Zayza kicked the sand with speeding steps.
“Right! Onward, then!” she cheered.
Nahutala followed, embracing the stone heart with both hands, as they departed Lake Hirokyauta for their next digging site.
Zayza’s mind sparked with new life.
So the Sand Dragon’s trail really did lead us to Hiroko…
Then…there really is something tangible happening here. It’s not just in our heads...
Chiwawo looked back to check on her. Nahutala matched his speed, their smiles wide and glistening. For once, mourning didn’t cast the only shadow on them. They moved with a new purpose.
It’s not just a phenomenon of the Dream World, then, Zayza learned. Something is happening out here. A force…perhaps those ‘Gods below…’ are leading us to something in the real world, too. What awaits at the end…?
And…what awaits within Hiroko’s memories in the Dream World?
Are they connected?
“Can you see it better now, Princess?” Chiwawo inquired.
Zayza blinked. Though she’d been practicing in their heat stone hikes, she’d almost forgotten the habit of analyzing the sensations in her feet. The vibrations reached her again: the blurry underground figure was continuing its same unending route around the village.
Trusting Chiwawo’s hand to steer her way, Zayza closed her eyes.
This time, the figure didn’t remain a blur.
It was gorgeous.
Zayza gasped in spite of herself, making her newfound progress clear as day to her companions.
In her mind’s eye, surrounded by darkness, a glorious tan and brown being swam in motions that perfectly matched the vibrations she was sensing. Indeed, it resembled the anatomy of a dragon. But it was wingless, its mesmerizingly smooth swerves propelling it forward instead.
Its head was also wide and triangular, lacking a standard dragon’s long snout, and its big eyes peered to its sides. They were black and without pupils, making it impossible to understand which direction they were looking in.
Despite such an extraordinary—and utterly colossal—creature, Zayza melted at its cuteness.
“I…I love him,” Zayza cherished.
Chiwawo laughed again. “So you are beginning to see,” he noted. “Then that means you are beginning to believe like us. Like a Hidakalan.”
Zayza opened her eyes. Even as she witnessed the world before her—the tents, the playing children, and the women sorting baskets of ingredients to distribute amongst each other—her mind could still perceive the Sand Dragon’s magnificent frame.
She was growing. Strengthening.
In spite of herself, Zayza uttered a praise: the same Hidakalan expression Nahutala had said earlier.
“Hibon, bendon Hidakal.”
She knew she probably said it wrong, but that evidently didn’t matter: Chiwawo and Nahutala repeated it in soulful reply.
Zayza had little doubt now. While the first stone heart revealed no secrets or hidden wisdom, the miracle of its discovery alone made it clear: she was on a journey after all.
A journey towards meaning.
And she wasn’t on it alone.
Now, the only mystery that remained was the meaning itself.
There are two more destinations in the Sand Dragon’s path, she reflected. Chiwawo’s right: two more of Hiroko’s stone hearts must be left, then.
Hiroko…wait for us. We’re coming to find your truth.
We’re coming to find our calling.