Then, one day, the wind abandoned us.
Where once there stood an unshakable empire now lies a desert. The sands encroach westward, chasing remnants of what was. Lost are the dreams, forgotten are the truths.
The wind no longer speaks to us, us few who remain, but still we wait for its return. We miss its howl of fury, its gentle caress. We linger in stagnant ruins, longing for a single word, a whisper, the note of a song. With our mouths shut and ears to the wind, we wait in silence for it to speak again.
-Ishkar Ankari,
Last Oracle of Iru
2
Dnara awoke to a gentle breeze tickling her scratched cheek. Her eyelids heavy, she struggled to put the world back together again. There had been a fire... An explosion? It all felt to her like a dream. The pain in her body told her it had been quite real.
She remembered the mud. The cold earth seeping into her skin and the hot wind breathing at her back. The lightning and the thunder. The sound. The sound of-
Dnara startled upright, a whispered word setting a chill up her spine as a fire crackled nearby. A fire? Her gaze shifted to the unexpected flames as they danced in orange and red embers from their stone-circled cage, sizzling and casting shadows to the surrounding trees. The trees themselves stood tall and proud, encircling two fallen brethren who had created a small clearing with their moss covered trunks. Dnara now rested propped up against one of those fallen trees, its bark digging into her skin and reminding her she was alive.
Blinking in the firelight, Dnara struggled to see where she was, or perhaps more importantly, how she had gotten there. Hadn’t she been face down in a mud puddle, clothes soaked and arms burning? She glanced down to her arms, expecting to see the same lightning veins crawling under her skin, but there was only caked mud and a stray leaf. Perhaps it all had been a strange dream, after all.
The fire popped beside her. Dream or not, it didn’t explain how she had come to sit in a clearing next to a campfire, nor who may have built the fire. If only her head would stop spinning so she could focus. A wave of nausea overtook her, and she relaxed back against the log, content for now to simply no longer be running. Her legs ached with the memory of it, and her eyelids once more grew heavy.
Smoke filled her dream as the campfire kept vigil. In the trees overhead, birdsong carried a tune somehow familiar. The fire snapped. She felt herself sink into the earth. The smoke grew a face with lips that smiled, and from those lips came that same word. She strained to hear it, to understand. Around her, the birdsong fell silent. The face no longer smiled. It spoke a new word, one as clear to her heart as the urgent fear which spoke it.
Run.
A roar from the darkness clawed at the wind. The trees shook to the sound of angry thunder. A hundred grey ashbirds took flight.
Gasping for air as the thunder stole her breath, Dnara awoke again, this time to a fire now burning low from hours passed. And, she was no longer alone. From across the fire came the birdsong’s tune of her dream, now played on the soft chords of a wood flute.
Unable to make out the person’s features through the fire’s haze, she sank down lower against the dead tree at her back. The darkness beyond the trees told her night had fallen some time ago. If she could perhaps sneak into the shadows and-
“Ah, you’re awake,” a man spoke, his voice as gently playful as the flute song that had gone silent. “Thank the gods. Wasn’t sure what to do with you if you died. I mean, do I just bury you out in the woods? I don’t even know what name to put on your marker.”
Dnara swallowed on a dry throat, the topic not one you think to wake up to, especially when confronted with a strange man. Still, she wasn’t dead, and he did seem relieved of that fact. He hadn’t harmed her, and could easily have left her. Unless, he meant to sell her to a blackrope. Her fingers immediately raised to her neck, only to find it naked.
“Oh, don’t worry about that thing,” he said, motioning to a nearby stone where the collar rested. “I’m no blackrope, nor a slave trading bastard.”
Her heart calmed as her eyes set on the metal collar. It looked lifeless and strange, seeing it somewhere other than where it had been for too many summers to count. Moving her fingers away from her neck, she swore she could still feel the cold weight of it.
“The starstone in it is cracked anyway,” he continued, taking a small step closer to her but stopping as she flinched. “Which is good, because I needed to take it off to put salve on your wound. Well, one of you wounds. You sure did take a tumble through those briars.”
He paused, but she had no reply. It had become nearly impossible over the years, to speak without being commanded to do so. His hand raised to the back of his neck and scratched while his hazel eyes examined her. He did look
