Moisture filled the air as the city drank from the river below. Orange light shone from the ovals in the walls, as if fat fireflies were awakening throughout the tunnels. They moved at a quick pace, the guard followed after them, staggering and ramshackle but persistent.

Water sputtered in an alcove, and its bowl filled with clear water. Brunhilde stopped to taste it, it was fresh and cool. She gulped palmfuls of it down, Hope crowded by her to do the same. Finally, their thirst was sated.

“This is happening everywhere in the city,” Hope said. She rubbed the moisture over her face, wiping away dried sweat. She could cry at the taste of such glorious freshness.

“We can make the gates and escape though?” Brunhilde licked her lips to moisten them.

“If the city doesn’t wake too soon.”

The sound of the fountain welcomed them before they saw it in the orange glow of the ovals. It sprayed out in great arcs like a palm tree. Beneath the umbrella of water, the carved beasts glistened with moisture. Their fangs and eyes shone in the light of the stones. The shivering ribbons of falling water made their bodies dance in the light.

Citizens lying in the pool were soaking, their clothes damp and their bodies bloating as they drank in the water. More twitched and awoke, plunging their faces into the pool of the fountain. Some swayed unsteadily in the sheets of water coming down, lifting their faces and opening lifeless lips. Water coursed down their faces. Where water touched it brought the same flush of colour and eventual bloating as the guard.

“What are they doing?” Brunhilde said.

“They’re trying to drink. But they can’t.” Hope pulled her away. Brunhilde wouldn’t move.

“We should help them.” A body nearby, woken by the water crawled to the pool, pulling a nearby companion with it. Brunhilde imagined lying in the dark, for centuries, with thirst crawling in your throat. Only to be awoken by water that you could never drink. Filling your belly with so much water that you could burst like a greedy blood-mite. “They’re trying to save each other.”

“They can’t. Neither can we. We have to go now, Brun.” Hope tugged on her, but she may as well have tried to lift the entire dam herself. “Please.”

“How can we save them?” Brunhilde felt guilty that bringing water back had done this to them.

“Waaateer,” they moaned. They staggered like the marionettes of a careless puppeteer, arms outstretched and eyes deep-set and wild. They swung towards Hope and Brunhilde, perhaps smelling the water in their bodies.

Brunhilde finally let Hope drag her away. She led them towards the far end of the city where they should be able to open the gates and escape. But a family of undead lurched out of a home at them, bloated and moaning. Brunhilde forced them away, and they raced past. She found it hard to fight off the children, even though they were all crazed and lifeless monsters.

As they raced through the city, they heard the splutters of fountains awakening everywhere, and after that the inevitable sounds of splashing and moaning as the undead woke to gorge themselves pointlessly on the water. They were forced to backtrack away from the common areas, Hope led them through side-tunnels. Caution and paranoia made it a reflex for her to memorise maps and locations, but eventually even she could not find a way forward. In their flight from the scrabbling masses of undead they found themselves on a rock outcrop in the canyon, where a bridge had once been.

“I can’t jump that,” Hope said. She looked down at the river below coursing through the valley. Downriver she saw the great gates of the city. The river crashed against them and disappeared down into more underground drainage caves. It was a tantalising thought to jump down into the water and hope they could escape that way.

“I can, hold on.” Brunhilde patted her back.

Behind them the undead burst from the tunnel, moaning and clawing towards them.

“Are you sure?” Hope said. She put her arms around the barbarian’s neck. It was comforting but also humiliating to be carried like a child.

“No, are you?” Brunhilde said. She ran and took a great leap across the divide. Hope screamed and closed her eyes. She felt the jolt of them land. Brunhilde had made it.

The undead on the far side tumbled off the ledge into the rivers below.

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Hope realised that it would be impossible to fight their way all the way through the city, she could hear water filling the city here as well. “We can’t make it to the gates. There is a room higher up that might give us an exit.”

She led them to it, avoid tunnels filled with the sounds of the citizens. On the map she guessed it was a greenhouse, a great domed room near the surface, but it was a cavern. The roof was not glass but stone, worked into clouds. The walls were covered in statues of trees and beasts, the same snakelike beasts around the fountains.

The care and detail in the room showed it was a temple, with circular seating carved in levels all around. In the centre of the room stood a thick tree of sandstone. Though it was bone dry stone, it looked like a living thing, waiting for spring to bloom again. The surface was lined like bark, with thick knuckles of knots like a real tree. The branches spread up to the ceiling.

And there against the trunk lay a figure in tattered but fine robes. Gold thread weaved through the robes showed this was a person of high status. He cradled a long staff in his arms like a baby. His face was peculiarly fresh-looking. His skin was pale but nothing like the papery mummies outside. His black hair shone like lacquered wood, but hung lank around his face.

“I don’t like the look of that sleeping corpse,” Brunhilde said. She felt power in the stone around her.

“Close the doors.”

Brunhilde leaned against each stone door and pushed them shut. “Is there a way out here?” They heard moans getting louder as the terrible denizens of the city approached. “If not then we’re trapped here.”

“I know that!” Hope snapped. She tried to calculate how thick the stone was above them. The city only went so high, was it possible they could dig through the roof here? If they climbed the tree perhaps there was a secret exit? She was clutching for hope when there was none.

Her calculations were interrupted by water coursing through secret channels reaching the tree in the centre. The city must feed its temple tree as well as its people. Blood red colour seeped up from the trunk base. A stench of earth and freshly slaughtered cattle came from the tree as it woke.

“Feh.” Brunhilde wrinkled her nose. This was not the smell of a life-giving plant. “Something evil happened here.”

Fat knots on the tree glowed with the orange light they had seen before, but with a dark red tinge. They quivered like things in pain. As the branches filled with colour, motes of dust like pollen dropped from them. The air felt gritty like a sandstorm. The temple was alive again.

The figure under the tree took a deep breath and slowly opened his eyes. Like a shepherd waking from a short nap, he looked up and smiled. “We’re saved.” He raised his staff. “Praise be to the lifeblood. I saved us.” He levered himself up with his staff. Though he looked young he moved like an elder on the verge of tottering over. “You brought me back?” He made his way slowly towards them.

“What did you do here?” Brunhilde punched her fist into her other hand and stood tall. She glared at him.

His lower lip quivered. “I worked for years to save us. Is this a fitting welcome to your holy priest?” He doddered closer to her.

“We’re not from this city,” Hope said.

He eyed them carefully. They were both dressed so strangely. The tall red-head in furs and piece-meal leather armour, and the shorter dark-skinned woman in a long flowing robe with an outrageously colourful cloak.

“Outsiders? We’ve fallen to barbarians. Kill me now.” He dropped to his knees. Fat tears dripped from his downturned eyes. His skin was pale, like a wax sheet draped over his jutting neck bones.

“We saved you.” Hope wanted to kick him, but she wanted answers more. “We brought water back, along with a city of water-crazed undead. What did you do to your people?”

“I saved them.” He glared with reddened eyes. “I saved them twice. You don’t know what a glorious city we had here, carved into the desert by generations. When the river died, I begged the spirits of the storm to bring us water, and they did. They hunted storms and oases and brought it to us.”

“These things brought you water?” Brunhilde pointed at the beasts around the walls.

“They did, for generations. I don’t know why they turned on us. They went mad.”

“You didn’t beg them, you bound them.” Hope realised this man was more powerful, and foolish, than he looked. “You can’t bind the forces of nature. At best you can bend them for your use. Binding storm spirits is forcing infinite energy into a finite system. It can only end in a cataclysmic feedback loop.”

“I don’t know what that means,” Brunhilde said.

“It’s like…” She searched for a simpler idea. “Like holding trying to hold rock over your head forever. One day it’s going to fall on you.”

“That I have done.”

The doors behind them thudded. The whole city could be making its way here to the temple.

“It’s not my fault.” He lifted himself up and clung to his staff with both hands. His jaw was set in defiance. “I saved this city from death.”

“What did you do after the spirits turned against you?”

“I begged the lifeblood for help. I eked power from the earth, to keep us alive. Just long enough for us to survive the spirits, until the river flowed again. We could sleep, and wake up when water came back.”

“Undo it.” Brunhilde said. She grabbed his robe in her fist. His eyes were black, with red flecks in them like rubies floating in a night sky.

“No.” He closed his eyes. His face was serene but stubborn.

“He can’t.” Hope saw a faint line of power from the tree to this priest, blood-red and fine. “The tree cannot die, so he tied himself to it. And he tried to do the same to the others, but not well enough.”

“It was a sacrifice, I needed to be strong, to save the other.” His face was still, but his neck pulsed with tension. Lines of dark red crept along the veins of his face.

“You saved your own life and doomed your city to lie in the dark! Your story should be swallowed by the Moon.” Brunhilde shook him, she could have thrown him across the chamber, he was as light as his staff. But a sudden force like a giant’s fist slammed into her midriff and sent her flying. She landed underneath the jaws of a statue.

“So, it’s a fight then.” She would enjoy this. There would be no guilt in teaching this arrogant priest a lesson.