Interlude One: Raisins and Dates
Nesrine gave her reins a gentle flick, careful not to offend her obstreperous mount, and crested the shallow dune.
She adjusted her headscarf against the punishing early afternoon sun, taking in the tarnished red-brown vista around her. The sands shivered in the heat, baking, low dunes all around as far as the eye could see. Unbroken, except for a single streak of green, and the enormous train of people it seemed to stem from.
Life in the Rust Sea was hard, between the heat and the monsters and the sand, but Nesrine and her people followed the ancient ways, and managed to eke out a living over the centuries.
The Sea was huge, a size beyond comprehension, bigger even, some said, than the great Deep Green that lay beyond the Nails. They were nomads, following the tides to scratch out a living amongst the iron sands. Currently, they were following a high tide.
The Nails, the great mountain range in the south, rising from the sands like the crest of a great wave, were the source of life in the Sea. Pressed, as they were, between the two enormous expanses, one filled with abundant life, and the other almost completely without it, the Nails underwent unique geological action.
Huge geodes of life or water mana, compacted and refined over centuries, formed deep within them. Once they reached a large enough size, the Green began to exert a kind of magnetic repulsion on them, and they were pushed, slowly but surely, from the Nails. So too did the Nails exert a magnetic attraction on the iron sands beyond them.
Great boulders, rust red from the iron in them, broke from the Sea-side of the Nails and dropped to the sands. The great mountains continuously drew iron sands back towards them, and so recouped their losses. It was these forces that gave the Nails their shape, bowed and curved towards the sands like a tsunami.
The boulders, filled to bursting with life-giving geodes, then began their ponderous journey out into the Rust Sea. Where they went, they left dense trails of water and life energy, and so water and life bloomed in their wake. It was for this reason Nesrine’s people called them the Oasis Stones.
In high tides, their people would march along the Nails until they found an Oasis Stone of sufficient size, and then follow into the Sea until it eventually cracked and split, birthing an oasis. Once the oasis dried up, they would follow the low tide back to the Nails. Every few years, the low tide would take them close enough to the eastern or western borders of the Nails or even the northern trade road from Wayrest, and they would host a Glorious Bazaar.
It was a rough life. Plentiful for however many months, and scant for twice as long. But they managed, and this high tide was a special one.
Nesrine looked to the column at her right. The Grand Zabarjid Caravanserai, the Jewel of the Sea, the sole concentration of life in the entire rust-blown sands, marched in a long string, as far as she could see.
It was a curious convoy, split in two down the middle, and as Nesrine watched she could see trees; dates and figs, olives and almonds, and all manner more, bloom before her eyes down the centre.
Her gaze followed the column towards its middle, where the Leaf and Lake Muftis sat at its heart. The Muftis were the spiritual leaders of their people, and so safeguarded the heart of the caravan and its most precious assets.
The Muftis’ splendid palanquins trawled along, one to either side of the column. Just in front of them were not one, not two, but three Oasis Stones. The gigantic red boulders rolled smoothly along, somehow even more stately in their simplicity than the ostentation of the Muftis.
Most tides saw one Stone. Some rare tides saw two. For the first time in centuries, they followed a high tide with three. Three Stones! It was almost unbelievable! The oasis they would make would see their people live a bountiful life, wanting for nothing, for years! And the riches they would bring in… Nesrine banished the thought. It was not her place to think of gold, not any longer. She saw many of her people make blessings at the rocks, praying to them, and she sent one their way herself.
At the front of the caravan was the other leader of their people, the Grand Admiral. All about him his warriors gathered, armed with long spears and curved, flat bladed scimitars, and armoured underneath their loose, flowing robes.
Behind them, protected by the soldiers in front, were perhaps the most important people in the caravan. Idealists, those who had manifested Sand or Iron, or any concept related to them, cajoled and coerced the Stones, herding them gently along their way.
Nesrine herself was an Outrider. The most dangerous position in the caravan, and not one of her choosing, though she had dedicated herself to it, heart and soul. It was her job to protect their flanks from attacks, to raise warning in time for them to mount a defence, and to give her life, if needed, to protect their precious Stones.
Her mother had passed away during childbirth, and her father had been a merchant for the Caravanserai. When Nesrine was thirteen, she had manifested Trickery and, ecstatic with the discovery, she had told her father. Immediately, he had begun to use her skills to swindle money, enriching themselves.
Fleecing their own, they could abide, but her father had duped foreign merchants with her skills at a Glorious Bazaar. They relied on the goods and services the foreigners brought to these bazaars, and would not risk them for any reason. Her father was named a criminal, and punishment was swift. He was dragged behind a camel until the rust sands scoured his flesh from his bones.
As for Nesrine, she was young and an Idealist, and both were blessed in the eyes of Goddess. She was spared, but with no parents, and unable to use her Ideal to pay her way through life, she had no choice but to join the Outriders.
Her camel, Zabib, grumbled at her as she sat watching the column. She hushed it with a word and a gentle pat, and a breeze brought her attention back to the endless red-brown sands to her left.
When she was eighteen, two years after joining the Outriders, she had manifested Wind. It was absurdly useful in her life, and she had quickly grown to love it. Her very first skill under Wind was a perception skill, pairing incredibly well with Trickery, oddly enough. Perception skills were common, and she had one from each of her Ideals. Both were incredible assets. The perception skill she’d gained from Trickery allowed her to discern falsehoods or illusions with concentration. The skill she’d gained from Wind told her all manner of secrets and information.
The wind whispered to her, just as Trickery prickled at the back of her mind.
Danger, the wind said. Careful.
She peered about, scanning the desert cautiously. The sand shivered as it moved slowly south. No movement aside from that anywhere. She couldn’t see anything amiss.
She made to turn to her nearest Outrider, an older man named Akeem, when suddenly shrieks rose from the column behind her. She whirled Zabib about, and gasped as she saw what was happening.
Over the other side of the column, several hundred feet distant on the other side, a huge mound was rising from the ground.
The mound took shape as it rose, shedding cascades of rusty sand as it went. Soon enough, a figure formed.
Roughly humanoid, it towered over the column, at least a hundred feet tall, still dropping small waterfalls of dust and debris as it straightened. Panicked shrieks rose up and down the column, people milling about in confusion.
The Grand Admiral and his soldier immediately began wheeling and advancing. The Leaf Mufti, closest to the creature, had turned to face it, and the Lake Mufti was fighting slowly through the mass of people boiling about them to join their partner.
Nesrine stared at the spectacle, agog. A sand golem, she thought, awed. I’ve never heard of one so big. It must have been growing for generations…
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Lies… the wind whispered to her. Danger…
The golem raised one arm and pointed it at the column. Sand whirled about the appendage, swirling like a dust devil, forming a tunnel with the opening at its hand. The other end snaked about, probing down into the ground.
WHUMP-WHUMP-WHUMP! Massive concussive blasts reached Nisreen’s ears, and huge flares of red sand blossomed amongst the panicking train of people.
LIES! the wind shouted at her over the noise.
The tickling at the back of Nesrine’s mind became a furious scratching. She concentrated on the golem, and it flickered and wavered, like a scene seen through finest silk. She pushed mana through Trickery’s perception skill, concentrating to her fullest, and the sequence in front of her resolved into clarity.
The golem shrank. Drastically so. Where before it was nearing a hundred feet tall, now it was barely thirty. The plumes of sand reaching towards the sky shrunk as well, now a third of their height too.
An illusion… she thought, desperately putting the pieces together. So big though, it’s unheard of. It can’t be…
Her will wavered, and firmed into steely resolution just as quick. Just because something was unlikely did not mean it could not happen. Not when the evidence was so blatant.
Nesrine pulled more mana from the wellspring inside of her, feeding it into another skill from Trickery. This was her bread and butter, what had gotten her into so much trouble all those years ago. She sank into her saddle blanket, breathing hard, as she activated the skill. She had never had cause to push it so hard before.
Giant letters in the intricate, flowing script of her people appeared in front and to the side of the golem.
MIRAGE, they said simply.
As Nesrine saw people in the column began to point at the huge illusory word she wheeled Zabib back around, calling to Akeem. She could spare no more time for the column. She knew they had at least several merchants with illusion-breaking skills, and they would not sit idle while their brothers and sisters were under attack, even if they were not soldiers themselves.
“Akeem! Ambush!” she screamed at him, and her words proved prophetic.
Sand sprites, shaped like long, sinuous lizards, were exploding from the ground all down the left side of the column. Motes of brown light swirled and flowed, like dust in the desert wind, and joined their forming bodies. Nesrine saw Akeem ready himself, passing the call further down the chain of outriders flanking the train.
Lies, lies, lies… the wind sand to her still, an almost childish refrain.
Nesrine didn’t need the warning. They were regularly set upon by opportunistic monsters hoping to drag one of their livestock, or perhaps an unwary person, off into the desert. It was the whole reason they had outriders in the first place. The Grand Zabarjid Caravanserai was not unused to tribulations, and was quick to react to danger.
Still, this attack was more in line with the monster tides of old, where older, and more intelligent creatures directed their smaller brethren to nefarious ends. Sand sprites sometimes attacked in packs, but never ones of this size. They often lay in ambush too, but none had the ability to cast illusions. Especially not ones on the scale of the massive sand golem. No, the real leader of this attack was still around somewhere.
Nesrine charged at the sand sprites, and all along the train she could see her fellow outriders doing the same. She levelled her spear at the first sprite, rearing up on its hind legs to claw at her.
It attacked Zabib, one ineffectual swipe that glanced harmlessly off his thick silk barding. She pinned it to the sand with her spear in retaliation, and the sprite's flesh turned white and brittle where the red metal of her spearhead pierced it.
They might eke out a hard existence, here amongst the sands, but the warriors of the Grand Zabarjid Caravanserai were among the best armed and armoured in the world. The metal compounds that formed the shells of the Oasis Stones were unparalleled bases for enchanting. Foreign enchanters would even travel here at great expense to work with the metal. Every single soldier in the caravan, and more besides, had a spear and armour made from it and enchanted thrice over.
The common enchantment for spears was cold, and here it proved its worth. As Nesrine stabbed the sprite, twice, thrice, over and over, mottled patches of white began to grow and interlock.
The sand sprites were notorious for being able to reconstitute their bodies to avoid grievous wounds. It turned any battle with them into a slog to induce them into using all their mana reserves. Cold was their answer.
The sprite eventually turned more white than brown, and at that stage Nesrine gave it an almighty thrust directly to its midriff, and the beast shattered. She allowed herself a moment of triumph, and sang a warsong, just a single note, to the desert wind.
Nesrine charged down another sand sprite, and the enchantments on Zabib’s hooves, cold and force, destroyed it outright. Another she rode down and skewered, then finished with surgical strikes of her spear.
She fought this way for more minutes still, glorying in the battle. Here was her purpose, protecting her people with strength of arm and heart. She blasted a sand sprite, riddled with white, with a blade of wind, and it broke into a million tiny grains.
She glanced about, noting there were no more sprites near her, and that her fellow Outriders seemed to have their battles mostly contained.
Behind her, on the other side of the caravan, the battle was raging in earnest. The Muftis and the Admiral were all holding the line against the enormous sand golem, but they also didn’t seem to be making much progress. The huge creature was steadily pushing them, seemingly trying to get at the precious Oasis Stones.
Smaller sand sprites had joined the battle over there too, and none of the caravan’s Idealists had yet broken the mirage. She could at least see that they had realised the deception, and were aiming their skills where they would actually cause damage, instead of passing harmlessly through the creature.
Nesrine turned Zabib about slowly, concentrating for all she was worth, feeding as much mana as into her Trickery perception skill as it would take. She scanned the nearby desert like a hawk. Eventually, she caught a slight ripple on a nearby dune.
She narrowed her eyes, willing her skill to strip away the illusion. After a few long seconds, in which a pounding headache began to assault her, the rippling flickered and failed.
Got you, she thought, a smug grin smothering her face.
A small figure, humanoid, though just barely the size of a sand sprite, stood atop the dune. It stared straight at her as she charged, and she read surprise in its posture.
She was somewhat shocked herself. The creature was a mirage golem. A mirage golem. The entire point of mirages was that they were incorporeal, for mirage energy to lean towards birthing a golem instead of a sprite was absurdly rare.
Mirage sprites were more nuisance than threat, only a few inches tall, but they could make illusions that drew people off the column to die in the desert, or cause any manner of other ills. A mirage golem would be bigger by nature, but for one to be this size …it must be incredibly powerful.
She began to ascend the dune the golem stood on, and it turned and fled down the other side. She spurred Zabib harder, and her trusty camel groaned and whined at her, but poured more of its endurance into the task. She crested the dune not long after it, and spotted it scurrying away.
Nesrine raised her spear over her shoulder and cocked it, standing in her stirrups. She turned an ear to the wind, listening for guidance.
Now! it told her, and she let the spear fly.
And fly it did. She pushed it with another of her Wind skills, and the spear punched straight through the golem. White cracks spread from the wound, and seconds later, it crumpled into shimmering dust. A large gem, the size of a fist, rolled free of it.
Nesrine sighed in relief. She didn’t want to go chasing after the thing. If mirage sprites were dangerous for their illusions, they were incredibly weak physically. It seemed even though the mirage golem was sturdier, it was not enough to make a difference to a spear through its midsection.
Nesrine picked up the gem that had dropped with a tendril of wind and ferried it back to her. It was stunning. The size of a grown man’s fist, rough, but with a sparkling opalescent sheen.
Mirage essence, she thought. This thing will be worth more than a hundred pounds of saffron. I will gift it to the Muftis.
Weary, she turned back towards the column again. The battle with the old sand golem was going much differently now without its illusory backing.
The Leaf Mufti had shackled its appendages with thin roots of wood, and the Lake Mufti was shearing great chunks off it with tiny, thin pressurised jets of water. The Grand Admiral raised walls of sand a hundred feet long to protect them from any retaliation. Smatterings of other skills from the hundreds of Idealists soldiers peppered its grainy hide. Its time was running out.
The golem gave a long, low, gravelly roar, and fell into pieces. The remaining sand sprites fled back into the depths of the desert.
All along the caravan, Outriders and soldiers, imams and merchants, farmers and craftsmen, wives and husbands, took up a great warsong. A full song, this time. There would be a grand feast tonight.
Sand essences were amongst the best essences for self repair enchantments. Nesrine had never even heard of a mirage essence - 'mirage golem' had been a complete non-sequitur before today. Between the essence stone from the massive sand golem and the smaller ones from the sand sprites and the mirage essence Nesrine had claimed, they would have made enough to feed the entire Caravanserai for a year.
It thrilled Nesrine’s heart to hear their jubilation.
These were her people. And though they struggled, they would survive.