He squatted in a ruin that had been revealed by the lake's draining. Orcs had lived in it once. Before humans came and fired its roof. Before the Mad was made to cover it and bury its floors under yards of sediment. It wasn't much compared to the [brigadier]'s estate, but to him its four walls of hewn and stacked stone were prouder than the brothers' rope. The floor they squared was palatial next to Booky's cell.

He dug through layers of sediment needed downstream but deposited there. Red sand and silt mixed with crumbling locust husks and curled brown barks and flecks of black metal warmer than the rest, warm even in the shadow of the walls on that cold morning, and all of it coated in the oily film that had covered the reservoir before the dam burst. Now blowing into his eyes by the rising wind. Under his fingernails and up his arms and in his lungs. Piled in drifts inside the ruin and in its yard. By turns obscuring and revealing those who had come before. Erasing and revealing their secrets.

As he shifted the sediment the sand and dust gave way to black ash and his hand struck something hard. He dug around the hardness and there it was. Its hair was black and braided. Its torn dress disintegrating as his fingers brushed it. Its skeleton arm flung across a cub. He reached and undid the scapula and thought to say something over it, but there was nothing to say and no one to hear. He sat up. His eyes burned. He pressed water out of them to keep more dust from getting into them, but they just burned more. He left the ruin.

On the terrace above the now unsunken village he used the flat and thin bone to scrape at the ground. There must've been soil there once. Black soil, alive and good for growing. No other reason to terrace the land.

As he dug a small tan cicada crawled past his free hand. He pinched its head and set it aside. He dug some more and another cicada emerged from the sediment. He pinched it too. He pinched and dug until he reached a layer of flattened gray wheat grasses that all pointed toward the sea. For generations they'd lain that way. Like autumn growth suddenly slain by an early frost and locked under snow all winter.

He pulled up a chunk of grass by its brittle roots. The soil caught within them was bad. Dead as dirt. No point in turning it. He wondered what sort of thing could slay soil. Could crack and peel skin from his fingers and tear his eyes and burn his lungs.

He dropped the grass and sat with his swollen hands in his lap and watched it tumble away in the breeze. Glad Nizam had lost five hundred orcs asea. Orc knew nothing of the sea. He could not help their deaths. But he knew something of the land. He could help those starving ashore. If only the land would help him.

He wrapped the cicadas in a strip of cloth and put them inside his shirt. He went down to the riverbank and knelt amid a forest of ashen stumps. Flat topped from sawcuts and no taller than his knees. They had harvested them before the dam went up.

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He washed his hands and arms and the bone he'd taken. He drank and spat and drank again. He dunked his head in the flow and held it there. The land was dead. Without it, orcs were dead. He needed to get back to Glad Nizam before she hunted the boarlings until there were no more boarlings, before she fished the sea until there were no more fish. "Musheater," she would say, "teach us to fish," but he didn't know how to fish. If only there were corns to plant or fruits to pick or humans who needed killing. Musheater of nobody. Better off eating mush with the humans than taking meat out of the mouths of cubs. Better off wandering the wastes of the Madlands, taking whatever it gave. And if nothing was given then submitting his body to a land that could use it. His bloodwater for the aloes and flesh for the flies and bones for the buzzards, thence to the boars and fish and lions that eat them, thence to the orcs starving on the strand. If this wasn't home then why did he care so much about it? Maybe he needed to die in a place to make it home. Perhaps it was better to die for a home than to live without one.

A shadow darkened the water. He pulled his head from the river. Saand stood above him.

She said, "Whose bone is that? Nevermind. Set it aside, anywhere, careful. Do not disturb the sediment. But look. It is all over you. You are going to get sick. Wash it away, wash it quick. Flush your eyes."

She sprayed his face with her waterskin. It splashed off his forehead and dripped down his chin. "You didn't tell me before," he burbled.

"I did not know before. Rinse your shirt. No, do not dry your face with it. Rinse it. How did you survive before you met me? Come on now. Do you have your bag? And your water? Bring them. And your blades also, no, not the bone. Leave that. The steel one and the Skyshard."

He blinked hard yet his eyes felt as if they were on fire. "You found something."

"Up one of his tributaries."

"I found something too."

"Tell me later. We must move quickly."

"We can't grow food here."

"Later. Come on."

She ran him upriver. The canyon's walls stepped up like a staircase made for the human god through layers of speckled gray granite then blue limestone then green shale then yellow sandstone then, at its thick and crumbling rimrock, sandstone as red as a sunset. Along its rim sages and sunbleached junipers jutted as old and indomitable as the rocks they handled and broke within their loving embraces. They passed narrow wadis that wound in and out of sight like monstrous snakes. Their walls overhanging and floors filled with the burning dust. Wind forcing it into every crevice.

"What did you find?" he said.

"A survivor."

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> +1 [Awareness]: ...she fed him all kinds of shit. I would've called it nonsense back before my unlife. But you spend some time sitting in that purgatory and you learn the way of things. Things like how the now reveals secrets of both past and future to those who care to watch and listen... (2/10)