“There are humans over there!” Latty pointed behind her. It was difficult to make out her shape in the swirling desert heat, but she was no longer invisible in the sunlight.

Zayn nodded. The trip out of the desert hadn’t been particularly difficult, especially when compared to getting lost in the waste. He had spent a good day and night in the tower before heading out and the water had proven to be a lifesaver. He would have stayed there longer except for the rapidly dwindling supply of food. So he had set out and found that the entire wasteland wasn’t nearly as large as he had thought it was.

This was still the first day after having left the tower. There was absolutely nothing to cause him to lose his sense of direction and even now he had learned that Latty was correct. She could just tell which direction was which. Whatever allowed people to get turned around and lost, she didn’t suffer from it.

The sun was getting close to setting and he had to make a decision, go in now or wait until he had time to rest. He thought about the meat in his pack. No one would probably be able to tell what it was, but he didn’t like the idea of finding out he was wrong about that assumption.

“We will deal with them tomorrow. I am going to eat up the rest of my food tonight, and we will buy some of the food off of them if we need to. He shifted the far heavier backpack as he talked. One of the first things he had done, once he had decided to stay in the tower for the night, was to carefully loot anything that looked valuable.

Most of it had been easy enough to store in the hidden room at the top of the tower, but getting the gold up the stairs had been exhausting until Latty had suggested he use the lift and pulley system. It wasn’t in the sunlight room and it had survived perfectly intact. He would have never figured it out without her, but the system was clearly designed to handle massive weights without relying on human muscles. His improvised elevator had quickly filled with treasure.

Zayn had no idea how much it had been, but it was enough to fill the small casting room and make it difficult to move around in.

He had planned on filling it more when Latty had asked why he wasn’t using the treasury.

Once he realized most of the tower’s wealth, something around ten times what was now in the casting room, he stopped trying to move the money around and just focused on bringing the most value for the least weight.

So now his backpack was full of regular gemstones. None of them glowed, but they at least afforded his small green stone a place to hide.

It also made him incredibly wealthy.

That would have been exciting at one point in his life, but now he realized how little money could do. It was a mere afterthought to the power that the old sorcerer had held, and Zayn had devoured a great deal of that power. His green stone was almost blindingly bright now.

He had no idea what he could do with that power. So his priority was finding a place he could practice in relative safety. If he had a way of bringing food to the tower, he might have considered doing it there, but the only way he could move that much food would be with wagons. A group of wagons trundling into an uncrossable wasteland would draw a lot of questions, and wouldn’t really help him avoid attention.

“What do they look like? Did they see you?”

She laughed, “I don’t know of anyone who could see me when I didn’t want them to. They looked like workers to me, digging in the dirt and gathering something.”

One of the reasons she had taken so long to mention the treasury was that she hadn’t been able to understand what he had been doing. She had just seen him moving ‘stuff’ around. Once she had realized what he was doing, she mentioned that the tower had a kingdom’s worth of treasure in it.

Despite this shortcoming, she had already proven to be an incredibly useful scout. She could move quickly, and as far as either of them could tell it was pretty far from wherever Zayn was. She seemed to think that the tower allowed her to go farther, but she didn’t seem to mind as they were able to move to the edge of the wasteland pretty fast. She hadn’t stepped one foot past that place since she had been trapped as a ghost.

When she had crossed that unseen line, she had been nervous, delighted, and a little more than scared.

“Find me somewhere to rest for the night.”

She nodded and disappeared while Zayn sat down and ate away at his food. He had enough to almost last another day, and eating it all right now felt strangely nice. It had been a while since he splurged on how much he could eat or drink.

“I found a place. It’s on the way to where the people are.”

Zayn simply stood up and gestured for her to lead the way. This was definitely her strong suit. She could give him almost perfect directions without seeming to even realize how she was navigating around all sorts of things that would normally slow a traveler down.

“Latty, don’t talk when other people are around. Got it?”

“Okay.” She didn’t stop her role as a guidepost as they walked wherever they were going. It took about ten minutes to get there and Zayn was happy to see that the sun was almost beginning to set.

He got into the crevice and did his best to get comfortable while he ate and drank far more water than he had been planning on consuming before this moment.

“Mind if I go exploring?” Latty asked primly. She had taken to wandering around while Zayn was resting, especially now that there were new things for her to discover.

“Sure thing. I will be going to sleep. If you think you find something interesting. Make a note of it. It wouldn’t hurt for us to do some exploring later.”

There wasn’t a response. There was just the gentle stirring of the wind as the day slowly began turning into night.

The next day found Zayn crossed a hill that had been dug into by the ‘digging people’. If Latty hadn’t been guiding him, he might have walked right off the edge and fallen to his death. With her help simply found himself walking down a narrow path that led to the base. The workers had all stopped what they were doing by the time he reached the base.

He had a perfectly good view of the thing they were mining: gold.

In that moment he felt infinite relief at the realization that he hadn’t brought any gold with him. He didn’t think they would assume he was stealing their gold, but it would have led to all sorts of questions he didn’t want to answer.

Gold, freshly pulled from the earth was a very different thing from the gold you found in a palace after all.

The miners were all covered in dirt and grime, and for a moment he remembered all of the people from his home. They had mined something that didn’t seem as valuable as gold, but everyone had said it was of great value. The white clay wasn’t nearly as pretty as the gold though.

When they all started talking to him, he didn’t have to feign having trouble responding to them. The wave of noise made it difficult to understand what any one of them was saying, and then Zayn realized how long he had spent in the still silence of the desert, with only ghosts to keep him company.

When they offered him water, he accepted it. He didn’t really want it, but he didn’t want them to realize how full of water his packs were. He had thought about pouring out the water, but it had been too difficult a thing to do. No one was likely to notice, and the fear of running out was all too real.

It still helped him eventually get his voice back, and the shock of all the men rose to a whole new level when they learned where he had come from.

“I crossed the waste.”

They all babbled like a bunch of excited children at the news and Zayn wanted to ask for food because they seemed to have forgotten all about it. He wasn’t entirely certain what they had said, but he thought someone had mentioned food.

“Everyone quiet down!” A deep voice bellowed and the group of men grew silent, and a large powerful figure began pushing through the men, “What is all this about anyway?”

The towering man wasn’t nearly as dirty as the rest, but his muscular body left no doubt about how he made his living. He had a big bristly beard of light brown hair that looked really funny on his skin. It made Zayn think of an old man’s beard gone light and clear, and he would have laughed if he hadn’t realized it could offend the man.

His brown eyes shot wide as he spotted Zayn, “Who is this?”

Everyone responded at once, and the man began waving his hands trying to quiet everyone down.

“He just wandered in.”

“He says he crossed the waste.”

“He is just a boy.”

“He is so thin.”

Zayn looked down at himself at that statement. It hadn’t been that long, maybe a month since he had eaten well. Back then he had been rather powerful and muscular, almost as big as any of the men gathered around him.

Now his body had grown thin and frail, almost like an old man’s, and he wondered what had happened to him. He stood there, playing with a shirt far too big for him. When had he been wondering if the shirt was getting too small? Was that two months ago?

He didn’t notice the large man instructing the others to clear out some space for the boy, and he missed them bringing him a bowl of soup. All he could wonder at was how he was still walking. If he had seen someone who looked like this, he would have assumed that they were basically dead.

Suddenly he felt incredibly tired, and he would have hit the ground with a crash if several helping hands hadn’t quickly reached out to keep him upright.

The smell of food caused his stomach to growl in anticipation, and the men all began laughing as he hungrily devoured the food.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

One of the men laughed, “Boy’s got an appetite. Hey boss, how about I go back to the village and let everyone know. I bet he would eat us dry if we feed him with our remaining stock.”

“Good idea Liam, get back there and let them know he is coming back.”

The same man, obviously Liam, detached himself from the group and disappeared towards the east.

“Everyone! I need you all to listen carefully. I know this was unexpected, but we can’t stop working. If you were on the swing shift, I need you guys to go ahead and get to work a little early. If you were working the graveyard shift, I need you guys to go ahead and finish up what you were doing and then you are all going to help our friend get to the village proper.

The results were impressive. Everyone scattered with practiced ease as they all went about their various duties. The number of people here was a lot higher than what they had in his village, but everyone worked so quickly and smoothly.

“Where am I?” Zayn asked the large man called Boss.

Boss’s beard bristled as he responded, “This is the mining camp of a small village to the east of here. Shimmering Sands isn’t the biggest of places, but it is a really nice place to call home.”

“Thank you for the food and water,” Zayn started to try and offer to pay, but the man put a large hand on Zayn and shook his head.

“Your money won't be good here, stranger. We have all been close to death with that foul wasteland on our doorstep. We wouldn’t be deserving of being called human if we didn’t at least help you get back on your feet. You are almost only skin and bones. I would ask you what happened, but I think the fact you crossed the uncrossable says everything that I need to know.”

Zayn started crying, and for the life of him, he had no idea why.

Images of his family flashed before his eyes. The worst part was that he was having trouble remembering what everyone looked like. He could hear the sounds of life emanating from every direction, and for a moment he felt like his father was just behind him.

He wasn’t, of course, these men were just strangers.

“What’s your name?” The large man knelt down so he had a good face-to-face view of Zayn.

“Zayn.”

“My name is Ciaran, and I am the foreman here. That means I yell at everyone who is supposed to be working here, and I get yelled at when there is something wrong happening at the mine. You weren’t alone out there were you?”

“I was with my family and friends.” Zayn didn’t really know what he should say about them.

“So there were a lot of you before you crossed the waste?”

Suddenly Zayn realized that he was thinking that Zayn hadn’t traveled into the waste by himself, but he had been with a group of people. He thought about correcting him, but he didn’t see any reason to explain the actual details. He didn’t really have the energy to talk about it at this time.

“Anyone else alive?”

Zayn shook his head.

“I know you don’t feel like it, but you are actually incredibly lucky to have survived that place. I can’t imagine anyone intentionally trying to cross that place knowing its reputation.”

“Reputation?”

“Yeah, they say that no one can cross that place without dying, and you are still alive. As you are breathing, it isn’t over yet and you can keep going.”

Zayn didn’t know how to respond to that. It felt empty and hollow and he wanted to throw the words back at the friendly man. His thoughts were interrupted by another bowl passing by. It smelled amazing and he quickly found himself devouring the second serving of soup. It was thick and flavorful, and no one needed to tell him to eat it all.

While he was finishing off the bowl, he watched Ciaran and the men packing the raw gold into a bunch of packs.

“They are going to take last night's haul back to the village, the women there will be more than happy to take care of you. So don’t worry about anything.

Zayn started crying again, and it felt even worse. It seemed so pointless to cry after everything that had happened. It felt so nice to hear the people laughing and going about their regular lives, but it also hurt. Deep inside him, something was growing hard and cold at the realization of how much better these people had it than his family.

He could close his eyes and be back with them. In those moments nothing had happened. A part of him wanted to just pretend that these people were his family, and as he looked at the various people he hated them.

He wasn’t sure how he was going to make everything work, but he was bound and determined to make it happen.

He was going to find a way to cheat death.

It didn’t matter what the cost was. If he could bring back his friends and family and not just replace them with these people, he would do anything. He almost summoned the tome then and there to read the secrets of the Eternal Balance, but he was worried someone would notice something. If they were like Latty, they wouldn’t even be able to tell he was reading the book.

It didn’t take long for the men packing to get ready to go. The walk wasn’t that hard, but it felt worse than the entire trip. His body had started aching in a way that he just couldn’t understand, and each step got harder and harder.

From time to time he would have someone lend him an arm to keep him going. The walk was only thirty minutes, but it was unbearably hard.

Because of this, he barely noticed the land slowly changing from a lifeless sandy rock to having patches of green vegetation clinging to the landscape. The first hill that marked the mine was far from the only one. The entire area was covered in numerous hills scattered around the area. The plants and the traveling troupe were mostly found in the narrow flatlands between the hills.

The plants weren’t that amazing, the thing leaves barely had any green to them, but it was almost more than Zayn had ever seen. It would have taken a day or two’s walk to Emberfall to see plants like this. And Zayn could vaguely remember the days before everyone had settled down in what would eventually become Hushwood.

The village proper was nestled into a rather thick batch of spindly trees. The buildings were short and squat, hugging the ground in a strange fashion. Each of the homes was completely white, and Zayn was instantly curious about what kind of clay had been fired to get the stones to look like that.

The women of the village were very different from the ones he had known. In Hushwood the women worked almost as hard as the men, but they were all slender and delicate despite the hard work. Here the women were almost as big as their men, and Zayn felt embarrassed when he couldn’t tell the difference from a distance.

Once they got to the village, several of the women pushed their way to where Zayn was and hustled him off to a room in one of the nearest houses.

As he went in, he was surprised to see that the house wasn’t made out of clay or brick at all, but it seemed to be primarily made out of wood. The white substance was apparently something they covered the wood in.

He protested being shoved into a bed, but it was a futile effort. He just didn’t have the muscle to resist any of them, and the strange white of the bed made him feel uneasy as they lay him down.

It was soft.

He hated it instantly. He had slept on the cool hard beds his entire life, and just a few seconds on the surface had him feeling rather uncomfortably warm. When they added the ‘blanket’ it made things even worse. He had no idea why they would use something like that, and he kicked it off the moment the ladies had left the room.

He started to move to the floor to find a more comfortably cool surface to sleep on but found his body just didn’t have the strength to get up. So he ended up on a hot, soft surface. After a while, he started to doze off, and he was only awakened by a sudden interjection.

“You won’t believe what I have found.”

He had already grown accustomed to the way Latty would start a conversation. With nearly no warning whatsoever.

“I already saw the trees,” he said noncommittally.

“Oh, I know about trees. There used to be thousands of them when I was alive. The entire area was green. No that isn’t what was exciting. I found animals.”

“Animals?” Zayn couldn’t tell if she was being serious.

“Yeah, a mommy and two babies. They are sleeping in a cave I found.”

“Where are you?” Zayn didn’t want to sound annoyed, but it was rather annoying being this comfortable and his body was really tired.

He got chills as her head drifted into view through the bed. She had done this numerous times now, and it always gave him the chills. Each time felt like dozens of chilled insects were crawling through him wherever she passed through.

Attempts to get her to obey the natural and obvious things, like physical spaces, tables, doors, and the like had completely failed to connect with her. Whatever she experienced didn’t make it easy for her to understand what he was asking of her. So he had come to the conclusion that he would have to learn to deal with this odd behavior.

“There used to be a lot of trees near the tower?” He didn’t really want to talk about the animals, and he didn’t want to think about the frozen legs dancing their way through his leg right now.

“Yeah, it was called a jungle.”

“A jungle?”

“Yeah, it’s where the plants grow so thick you can’t see the sky through them.”

Zayn couldn’t imagine something like that, “Are you happy you came with me then?”

She turned to look at him, her body was partially inside his leg still, “Yep.”

“Did you see anything I might care about?”

She floated out of his leg as she thought about it, “There’s an old abandoned cottage on the other side of the hill.”

“An old cottage.” He frowned as he contemplated something, “These things are called cottages?”

She began to lazily float up towards the all too white roof of the room, “Yeah, it’s a small house made out of wood. People have been living in them for as long as I can remember. What did you live in?”

“A proper house. One that was made from Adobe.”

She tilted her head, “Do you mean clay?”

He nodded.

“That sounds weird. Why would you do that?”

“It helps with the heat.”

The conversation dropped off as neither of them had anything to add to that. Then Zayn remembered what had gotten them into the conversation, “You said there’s an abandoned cottage over there, what’s interesting about it?”

“It’s in a place that is kinda hard to find, and I have no idea why one of the villagers would have lived in a house that was on the wrong side of the hill. I think there is a second person still living out that direction,” and here she paused, striking her thoughtful pose, “although I will need to investigate it further.”

Zayn sighed, “So what you are saying is that it is probably nothing interesting for me, but you really want to go explore the area.”

“Yes.” She didn’t even try to hide her excitement.

“Alright, I think I can get around to doing that.” He was feeling rather sleepy for some reason.

“So what are you going to do next?”

The question caught him off guard. If he had been a little more awake, he would have given a more careful answer, but it was only Latty and the bed was so soft.

“I think I am going to bring everyone back to life.”

“Can you do that?” Latty floated down, pretending to sit on a chair or stool that was slowly sinking into the floor.

“I think so. I haven’t read nearly enough of the book yet. So I really need to figure everything out first. But the book makes it sound easy enough. Giving a body to someone who doesn’t have one is supposed to be child’s play. So the real question is can I get their soul’s back.”

Latty was quiet for a moment and Zayn started to drift off to sleep.

“Can you give me a body?”

He hadn’t even considered the possibility,” Sure, I don’t think there would be a problem with that. I need you to know that I don’t know if I actually will be able to do it. It will take time.”

“I don’t mind waiting.” Latty was sitting properly in a way that made her look like she knew that there was a floor. She raised a delicate hand and stroked her phantasmic cheek, “I could feel the wind again?”

“Only if I don’t have any problems.”

She began straightening her outfit, “I suppose I should pay more attention to how I look then. I can’t let myself fall apart before I get myself a new body.”

“No more walking through me?”

She smiled primly at Zayn, “I might do it from time to time, but I will do my best to avoid it while you sleep.”

Zayn yawned. This bed was definitely too hot and too soft.

“That a promise?”

She sniffed, and then flipped around so she was bowed low to the floor, “I promise to do everything in my power to obey and aide you. If you get me a body back, I will pay any price.”

Zayn didn’t know what to say. He didn’t need her oath. He had absolute power over her, but he didn’t see it causing any problems either. So he simply waved a hand.

“Guard the door. I think I am going to fall asleep again. I just woke up, and I can’t be that tired. Must be these weird beds that they are using here. Keep an eye on me and make sure no one touches my stuff. Some people will try to stop me.”

With that, he drifted to sleep.