The first handful is given to a sickly child, grains falling like snow from my palm into a meager bowl of almshouse gruel.

The next day, I see the same child running along the shores of this grand city, babbling about someone blessed with salt flowing freely from their hands.

The rumor doesn’t go unnoticed. A fisherwoman approaches me, both arms around a hefty earthenware vessel, and asks for enough salt to preserve her daily catch.

I cup my hands over the container’s mouth. When I hand her the oversized pot, it’s filled to the brim.

She returns every day with the same vessel, emptied, and makes the same request. Salted fish from the city finds itself on tables across the Empire. The woman grows fabulously wealthy; She even commissions a new harbor. It would’ve been in my name, but she never asked for it. Nobody ever does.

And I had such high hopes for them.

Word spreads of a miracle worker. People flock to the city, for salt is as flexible as it is precious. No one ever asks where the salt comes from.

A local merchant waves to me from his horse and wagon, asking for an entire cart full of salt. I pull away the tarps covering his wagon. Polished white blocks appear where empty space should be.

The next day, a second merchant demands three wagonfulls. I grant his wish as well.

This song and dance continues ad nauseam. Even as salt loses all value. Even when a dozen barrels fails to buy a single loaf of bread.

Trading houses go bankrupt. The two merchants are found dead in their homes. I care not by whose hand they expired.

I hope others see the folly of their greed, for their own sakes.

Hearing news of economic catastrophe, the Emperor himself comes to investigate, with a hundred royal guards in tow. When he sees the miracles I worked, he demands a grand sculpture of himself without a second thought.

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I ask only for an empty plinth.

He marches his men into the Hall of Ancestors, and tears the statue of this city’s mythical founder from its foundations. A pillar of polished rock salt bearing the Emperor’s likeness, as tall as five horses, takes its place.

Then the fool shows his true colors, and tries to arrest me.

As the royal guards charge, I sigh, raise my arms, and throw open my hands. Jagged shards stream from both palms, scouring polished armor, sandblasting marble to dust, and stripping flesh from bone.

The imperial column is cut down in seconds, along with the imbecile who led them.

Like all those before them, these people have failed.

News of the Emperor’s death spreads like wildfire. The land falls into civil war.

I give my gifts freely to any general and profiteer who asks.

They salt the fields and wells of their enemies.

When the innovative and ambitious ask for aid, I give unto them sal ammoniac and saltpetre. For my gifts extend beyond salt of the table variety.

Refugees soon bring with them tales of unimaginable destruction; of rockets and firebombs that erase armies, and turn walls to rubble.

The taste of victory turns to ash in the mouths of conquerors, along with the cities they sought to plunder.

They fight over me, of course. By the gods do they. The city suffers accordingly: The Hall of Ancestors, burned to the ground. The new docks, shattered by endless fighting. Even the expected refugees and vagrants are strangely absent.

No one ever asks where the salt comes from.

Some of the fools catch on. Emissaries practically beg me to stop bestowing my gifts. They offer up anything which they think will end the madness.

I laugh in their faces.

All this time, all you’ve wanted from me is salt. If you want salt so badly, then salt you will have, even as it suffocates everything you know and love.

Eventually they stop asking, and resort to harsher measures. Fire and sword waste themselves against compacted salt domes. Assassins turn up as shriveled husks.

Years later, and the empire is no more. Cities lie deserted. Mummified corpses decorate expanses of cracked, barren earth.

And to think it all started with a few grains of salt.

When will they ever learn?

That perennial question hangs heavy in my mind as I leave the ruins of this city, this empire, for wherever the fates lead me next.

Time to find out, once again.