Merin stared at Aram with a fierce no-nonsense expression. She didn't understand everything that drove the other man to action, but she didn't want another shovel flying at her.

She tapped the sand and gestured towards the drawing she had painstakingly crafted.

Aram snorted at her poor craftsmanship.

"Explain yourself!" She shouted, trying her best to add Elan's connotations to her words. The two needed to find a better communication method than attacking each other.

Aram finally took out his shovel and drew some figures in the sand. She watched each graceful stroke of his craft, ready for answers.

He ended up redrawing the Elan Nation, but it was all wrong.

What once was a robust and prosperous nation became the...

"Ela?" She said, confused as she looked around. If Elan lost their name's ni symbol, that meant they lost their God. She shook her head, refusing to believe that. He showed her this before, but it was too preposterous and horrifying to accept.

"That still doesn't explain you attacking me." At Aram's blank look, she tried to mimic their interaction from the day before with her hands. Part of her understood the purpose but needed more evidence for her conjecture.

Whatever that black thing in her had poisoned her and made her unable to use her magic. Whenever Merin accessed it, something twisted within her and caused her to fall apart from the inside.

Merin nibbled on her lip as she stared into Aram's eyes. He was stubbornly looking back at her but not saying anything.

Her exhaustive patience was tested as she crouched to the ground and dug out the ni symbol. Merin then looked up, met Aram's eyes, and deliberated erased the marking from the sand.

He gave a simple nod.

Merin's knees gave out, and she fell backward on her butt as the impact of it all truly hit her. No wonder this land felt strange. She hadn't wanted to believe him, but he clearly understood what ni meant.

The Elan Nation was too great to fall, but it had.

Merin fixed her posture and threw up her hands in a gesture she hoped read as who? She needed to know who did this.

Aram's ordinarily calm and stoic expression darkened into a cold fury of the likes she'd never seen before. The hairs on the back of her neck rose as she watched him write out unfamiliar symbols in the sand.

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The woman would learn much later about the Habrin Empire, which grew into power as she slept. She looked at him blankly as he drew more things showcasing a war.

Had the fall erased the woman's memories and senses? Red wondered, not for the first time if the woman needed a more thorough check-up.

The Habrin Empire was over three hundred years old. The language that she spoke was unknown, but she recognized the importance of the ni symbol. That same symbol dotted the end of her name.

"Merin." He said, and she looked up from her ramblings to meet his gaze.

He used his shovel to point to the location of where they were on the map. He used a quick slash to indicate the direction they needed to go.

"We will leave this place." He said.

She must have understood him to some degree because a tight smile grew on her lips, and she gave a jerky nod.

"Inni." She said. Other words spilled from her cracked lips, but Red knew what she was asking this time.

"Dead." He said. Then he did the well-known gesture of death with a slash across his throat. He pointed out at the sand that littered every inch of their horizon.

She grew pale, and her tiny chin quivered as if she had been physically slapped.

She said more things, but Red was out of patience. He shoved a leather bag towards her. She barely grasped it before gasping sharply as she looked at its contents.

He grabbed some God's Dust during his morning work. It was true that while he dug around in plain sight of others, God's Dust never appeared before him. That was because what little magic Red could access was used to put the Dust to rest when he came across it. To the unseeing eye, it would look like he's ill-fated to never find it.

But if someone knew what he was genuinely doing, they would understand what Red was and how deeply connected he was to this land.

With tear-stained cheeks, Merin shook the leather bag and said, "Inni?"

Again, Red simply nodded. The people of Elan Nation carried the blood of their God within their flesh. The Habrin Empire murdered, enslaved, or ate every member of that nation that they could. Those who were left with their last spark of free will created a suicide pact. All but a handful died instantly. The Ela Desert was born that day. The bones, homes, and land were turned into grains of time that flew to infect Habrin.

The Habrin Empire was cursed, but the sniveling roaches that they were, they found a way around one of the curses. But not their loss of magic. They could only obtain a flicker of their power by snorting God's Dust.

Merin set down the bag of bone dust and turned away from him.

Red gave her a moment to adjust to her reality. He was almost done packing everything they would need to start their journey. He could buy some time with the blueleeches, but only briefly.

The slavers were vested in him and would eventually notice if he was gone. His brothers sold him off for a reason. They did it to keep him out of the way of succession. If it wasn't a crime to start killing each other until their father passed, they would have done so already. But his forefathers were ingenious in binding the sons of the line. Hence, the slavers were there to keep an eye, and the moment his father died, they were tasked with terminating him.

Red wasn't going to go down that easily. He needed to succeed his father, kill his brothers, and then tear apart what remained of his other half.

His mother didn't give birth for him to die in these dead lands. It was to finish what his grandmother had started.

Red drew a moon and a sun. He crossed out the moon and circled the sun. If Merin had any wits about her, she would understand that they would leave at first light tomorrow. Either way, he would be dragging her out of the desert, one way or another.