The Vertebral Causeway

A few days after leaving Garnet and Hanagrishel, we crested a dune and saw a line of enormous rectangles on the horizon, like a row of crooked molars. Mogen and I, having both been in the Golden Desert for only a few months each, were baffled as to what they were. Karlishek was able to illuminate us.

This part of the Golden Desert - or, rather, the part we could see on the horizon - used to be full of volcanic activity. As a result, it's long been more black and gray than gold. Creminda Zimmergoggle, one of the earliest people to explore the area and write anything down about it, reported "a veritable arboretum of pumice and obsidian. The trees are strange of shape, all formed of black glass, growing from mountains of petrified sponge." *

Since then, nearly all the volcanoes have gone extinct. Now there are earthquakes instead. All but a few of Zimmergoggle's glass trees have been shattered, and the land is covered with their pieces. Razor-edged shards of black glass stretch to the horizon. It's impossible to travel across them in anything less than chain mail. Even that is dangerous; the shards shift in the frequent earthquakes, sliding across each other like the blades of enormous scissors. The plants there are all very short.

The only way most travelers can cross the shattered plain is by the Vertebral Causeway, a trail of massive stone blocks placed there during the reign of the eleventh Farak of Sithera. That was what we'd seen on the horizon.

By the time we'd crossed the valley ahead of us (a small, charming one full of button lilies, whose shrine was a stone hyena with flowers between its teeth) and reached the top of the next dune, geography had shifted, and the Vertebral Causeway was no longer visible. I'm still not certain whether or not I imagined the screech of shifting glass shards in the distance. It all sounds fascinating, but to be quite honest, the shattered plain is one part of the Golden Desert I don't mind not having traveled through in person.

Its history, with which Karlishek continued to regale us as we traveled, is equally fascinating.

The Causeway was designed (like much of Sithera's most famous architecture) by the legendary Femeral San Samara, who - perhaps as a result of building in a region mostly comprised of shifting sand - favored massive, immovable stone blocks in all of their architecture. Their design for the Sithera Public Library required the invention of entirely new methods of construction. The blocks used for the foundation (which is, incidentally, also the first two stories of the building) were too large to be lifted by any known mechanism at the time. In an historic move, San Samara hired a team of dimensimancers, who - rather than physically lifting the stones into their intended locations - were able to simply persuade the geography of the construction site that they were already there. The technique (which came be known as Lumakuma, or Blockwalking) is used in many countries today; it rarely works on smaller stones, but it's become the favored method for moving large ones.

This was the technique used to build the Vertebral Causeway. The scale renders it impossible to determine a precise count of the blocks that make up the Causeway, but there are at least a hundred of them. Each one is the size of a small mansion. The shifting glass shards around their bases continue to scratch and chip at the stone, but travelers on top of the Causeway can cross at a safe distance from the chaos. The blocks shift in every earthquake; maintaining a perfectly even trail would be practically impossible. Instead, they are connected by rope ladders, so that travelers can climb from one block to the next.

We couldn't make out any of this detail from our distance, of course, nor the enormous Halsi characters carved into each block. According to legend, San Samara's original proposal for the Causeway claimed that when completed, the characters would spell out a poem in praise of the eleventh Farak's visionary approach to transportation planning. The eleventh Farak was thus understandably displeased when, upon completion, the blocks proved to instead spell out a proposal of marriage to San Samara's sweetheart. The sweetheart in question was hardly more pleased than the Farak; she reportedly said, "I told you to stop building monuments at me, the murals were bad enough, what in the world were you thinking" and broke up with the architect on the spot. San Samara, always the opportunist, took the design for the sixteen-story mansion they'd been planning to build for her and instead offered it to the Farak by way of apology. The Farak was apparently mollified enough to hire San Samara for several more projects, but monitored the construction much more closely from then on.

Geography being what it is, the blocks of the Causeway change position often, and the marriage proposal was only legible for a day or two (which was probably for the best). These days, the blocks most often spell gibberish. There are a handful of pilgrims who walk the Causeway routinely and record every character as they go, hoping that if they just pay attention, the blocks will someday line up to send them a message from geography itself. Geography has, thus far, sent them little more than the occasional rhyming nonsense couplet and (by a few dubiously reliable reports) one or two dirty limericks.

Opinion is, as usual, divided as to whether this means that the forces of nature have no interest in communication, or that they simply enjoy confusing people. Neither possibility offers much hope that they'll provide a clear answer any time soon. Still, it's reassuring to know that, if they do, someone will be there to read it.

---

*This was back when pumice was still believed to be the fossils of prehistoric sea sponges. The Volcano Dragon has, thankfully, since managed to correct this misconception.

Crickets and Gargoyles

Unlike the vine-covered ruins of Jandraming or the jumbled heap of ancient architecture that is Rampastula, abandoned buildings in the Golden Desert don't tend to get overgrown by anything. The Desert is short on plants and long on space, and many of its commonly available building materials are resistant to rot, even in the rare places where there's enough moisture to make rot possible. Buildings no longer in use tend to simply remain as they are.

This results in experiences like the one the caravan had a week after our encounter with the Painted Ones.

Chak had proven to be, as well as a generous host, excellent company; the two of us had spent most of that time happily exchanging songs and amusing anecdotes while sheltering inside his wagon, I from the heat, he from the dryness of the Desert air. I'd continued to decorate the translucent cover of his wagon with a design of water and fish that I hoped would help to soften the glare of the sun. Though I suspect the confined quarters would have become monotonous given enough time, it was a pleasant way to spend a period of recovery.

The seclusion was broken one day when Mogen opened the flap of the wagon to inform us that there was something worth seeing outside.

We had come across one of the Golden Desert's many abandoned villages. This one was in even better condition than most; the most abundant local building material seemed to have been a type of pink granite, which had withstood decades in the elements even better than other villages' wood or sandstone.

Several travelers with experience in exploring abandoned buildings (a riskier prospect than it might seem) requested that the caravan stop for the afternoon to allow them the opportunity to search the village, in case anything of use or interest had been left behind.

Tirakhai required little convincing to grant their request. The basement of the largest building was flooded with water clean enough to restock the caravan's reservoirs, and several of the smaller houses were home to a rare breed of domestic cave crickets, hunchbacked and freckled creatures the size of guinea fowl. Though feral, they were entirely unafraid of us, hopping between the shade of the wagons and generally getting underfoot in a fashion that most of the caravan's members found charming (except for the gafl, who were afraid of them despite being several hundred times their size). In short, there was plenty in the village worth stopping to examine.

It was about noon at that point, so most people retreated to either the shade of their wagons or the less monotonously familiar shade of the village's houses (those that had been checked by the explorers and proclaimed free of scorpions, rotten floorboards, cellar howlers, and other common hazards).

Chak and I didn't feel the need to brave the noonday sun to satisfy our curiosity, so we waited, listening to the bustle of chores, exploration, and tea preparation outside the wagon, until the shadows had grown longer. Mogen pulled the wagon into the shade of the largest building; Chak donned a scarf soaked in water to protect his face (ineffective for prolonged exposure, but good enough for a brief peek outside); and we opened up the flap of the wagon for a look.

Every house in the village had at least two or three gargoyles on its roof. They were all relatively ordinary examples of the art: hybrids of various animals that ranged between frightening and comical. Some looked benevolent, others charmingly mischievous; some held positions or objects meant to symbolize luck or prosperity, while others - ostentatiously showing off oversized shoes, pots, or spectacles - were clearly meant to advertise their residents' trades. A few, I suspect, were caricatures of the families that once lived beneath them. All of them were fairly sedate and quite clearly the work of the same three or four artists.

Then there was the main building.

No one in the caravan was certain what, exactly, its purpose had been. Various people suggested a granary, a town meeting hall, or a temple of some sort. It's entirely possible that it was meant to serve all of these functions at once. Whatever it might have been, the village's sculptors clearly saw it as the opportunity to create their masterpiece. The building was a riotous confection of bays, arches, gables, cupolas, and small minarets, all built from the same pink granite, and every possible niche and corner was inhabited by a gargoyle.

The East side of the building, which we could see from where the caravan had stopped, had gargoyles in the traditional positions: sly, beneficent, mournful, and pugnacious. Their forms were inventive enough, and the workmanship was superb - clearly several years beyond the work on the houses - but none of them were especially remarkable for gargoyles.

They continued on the South side, though the grimaces became less intimidating there and more like sneezes and stomachaches. A few of the more closely-placed groups gave the impression of quartets or trios of cheerfully hideous singers. It's probably just as well that no one could hear their voices.

The West side, farthest from the caravan, had the gargoyles sleeping, smoking, cleaning their spectacles, and so on. I got the distinct impression of a group of actors killing time backstage between appearances. Still, they remained in typical gargoyle locations, perched on lintels and peaks and at the edges of balconies.

The North side was complete chaos. The gargoyles there had left their posts and climbed all over the walls. They poked their faces into the windows (which must have been a rather startling sight from the inside) and gnawed at the edges of the roofs. Five or six had gathered inside the top of an arch for what appeared to be an upside-down game of cards. According to a few high-climbing explorers, others in less visible areas of the building were doing things less acceptable in polite society (though accounts were vague on what exactly those things were). If this was true, the gargoyles in question didn't seem to be visible from the ground. Perhaps the sculptors suspected that whatever village leaders commissioned the building wouldn't have approved.

Though our view from the wagon was limited, we spent a fascinated hour or two slowly circling the building and looking at as many gargoyles as we could. I even paused to sketch several of the most inventive. We stopped only when Chak said that his face was feeling singed and my head began to swim again from the heat.

I left the wagon that night and spent the rest of the evening comparing notes with the other observers of gargoyles - a category that included nearly everyone in the caravan by then - over a dinner of cricket's-egg omelettes.

The crickets appeared to lay two or three small but nutritious eggs each day, like domestic hens. Tirakhai and several of the more agriculturally inclined travelers insisted on capturing a few in the hopes of breeding and selling them elsewhere as livestock. Using a combination of carrots, greens, and dried fruit, they had no trouble coaxing several dozen crickets into hastily constructed cages, where the insects sat placidly munching on the food and twittering to each other.

Apparently, the crickets used to be a much more common food source in the Golden Desert; Mirenza says that they're mentioned in several historical records, and the omelettes that night were, in fact, an ancient recipe that she'd never had the chance to test with proper cricket's eggs before. As the omelettes were excellent, with a nutty greenish flavor more subtle than chicken's eggs, I suspect that the crickets might be making a comeback in the next few years.

When we awoke in the morning, the gargoyles had moved.

No one who had kept watch overnight had actually seen them in motion, and no one saw them change position while the sun was up. However, everyone who had paid them any attention agreed: roughly one gargoyle in four was in a different position than it had been the previous day. Some had turned ninety degrees; some had shifted from one perch to another.

Most alarmingly, there were now more of them on the east wall of the main building, the side that faced our campsite, and many that had been on the main building the previous day were now perched on the houses surrounding the caravan. None of them were looking directly at us, but all of them were positioned so that they could have done so, if they wished, without turning their heads.

There was some debate - in tones considerably more subdued than the previous night's conversation - as to whether or not the actual shape of any of the gargoyles had changed. An object switching locations is hardly unusual; it happens every day in Hamjamser, though it rarely occurs with anything smaller than a building. For a carved statue to turn its head or move a limb would have implied that something much more unusual was going on. When one of the debates began to grow rather heated, on the subject of whether or not a particular seahorse-headed gargoyle had had its wings up or down the previous day, I offered to fetch my sketchbook and settle the matter. I remembered sketching the gargoyle in question, as it was one of the few in the village with the features of an aquatic animal.

I opened my sketchbook to find that every gargoyle I'd drawn was now shown, not only in its new location, but staring directly out of the page at me.

That was when we decided to leave.

While the others packed up the caravan, I removed the three pages of gargoyles from my sketchbook (I normally have a visceral aversion to tearing pages from any book, for any reason, but felt no hesitation in this case). Accompanied by one of the urban explorers - a woman named Imichek, with whom I had only a passing acquaintance, but whose dry sense of humor I'd come to appreciate during dinner conversations - I ventured into the main building and left the pages in a dry, sheltered area of the floor. One page had several sketches for the design of Chak's wagon on the other side, which I considered only a minor loss, now that the design itself was already sketched out on the fabric. Though the character for Patience in the center of the design was something that I suspected the gargoyles already had in abundance, I hoped, privately, that perhaps they'd appreciate the sentiment. I imagined I could feel the quiet gaze of stone eyes on us as we left the building.

Our departure from the village was far more subdued than usual. Hardly anyone spoke at all until the last minaret of the village had vanished behind the dunes. Even then, the topic of the gargoyles was conspicuously absent from conversation for the next several days.

What's frustrating (and fascinating) about the whole affair is, of course, the ambiguity of it. When one encounters an unexplained phenomenon in a place that has been long abandoned, for no obvious reason, by all intelligent life, it's usually wisest to make a swift exit, as we did. Still, although I wouldn't have stayed to find out, it's quite possible that the gargoyle's intentions - if they had any at all - were entirely benign.

Perhaps they were simply hoping for another taste of cricket's-egg omelettes.

The Provenance of a Pinecone

After a day or two in Chakramalsian's wagon, I was feeling strong enough to stand and begin painting the centerpiece of its roof: the character for Peace, surrounded by a stately procession of the aquatic traveler's favorite fish.

"Put at least one of them in a funny hat, please," he added. "If a mural doesn't include a fish in a funny hat, one might as well not even bother."

In addition to the painting, Chak was also starved for conversation, which I was happy to provide as I worked. Not only was I glad to return something for his hospitality, but he turned out to be my favorite type of conversationalist: one who enjoys speaking eloquently and at length on nearly any subject with even the most minimal of encouragement. After several pleasant hours spent discussing our respective travels, favorite extinct restaurants, the breeding of photosynthetic cats, the use of explosives in Thiglian stomp opera, and the practical considerations of housekeeping at the bottom of a lake, the conversation turned to the subject of family heirlooms.

I took out my grandfather's extra-foldable ruler, the one he used to build so many cunningly hidden secret compartments into the walls and floors of the family home. (Please do let me know, by the way, if you've discovered any more during my absence, especially any more that are deeper than the walls that contain them.) While I'm no dimensimancer myself and can't use it to build elegantly impossible carpentry, I do find it useful, on occasion, to be able to pull a ruler twice my own height out of my pocket.

Chak, in turn, took a box from one of the smaller of his various moss-encrusted trunks. Inside was what appeared to be a pinecone made of brass, small enough to hide in one's fist. Each scale was coated with blue enamel and linked to its neighbors with small loops of wire. When he picked up the pinecone by a larger loop at one end, the individual segments slid over each other with a faint chiming sound, and it telescoped to nearly twice its original length.

"It's a family heirloom," he said, smiling at the pinecone. "No practical use to speak of, but it's pretty, isn't it? I never travel without it. According to family legend, it once belonged to the master burglar Fenish keTmeel." He gave me a hopeful look.

One is rarely offered such a clear invitation to hear a story. Naturally, I asked who Fenish keTmeel was, and Chak launched smoothly into what I soon came to recognize as his don't-believe-a-word-of-this storytelling voice.

"Fenish keTmeel is practically a legend now, like Orbadon or the Ratty Hatmaker, but she was an infamous burglar in the Scalps - if she actually existed - about a century and a half ago. She was a Wayfinder, of course. Nearly all successful burglars are; otherwise, they couldn't rely on ever actually finding their way to anything worth stealing. According to the legends, she could simply turn a corner and walk straight into any vault or treasure room she pleased. Everyone who had a vault or treasure room quickly caught on and posted armed guards, but somehow, she walked right past them. Most of them never even realized she'd been there until she was gone, and the most valuable objects in the room with her. It was remarkable. A number of wealthy dragons nearly exploded.

"She didn't just keep or sell everything she stole, either. If something she took had already been stolen, she often left it out somewhere public - if possible, in such a way that it would incriminate whoever had been holding onto it. During her career, a remarkable number of foreign works of art turned up years or decades after everyone thought they'd been destroyed. A handful of them even got returned to their rightful owners eventually. She kept the vast majority of what she stole, of course, but that bit of theatrical public service was more than enough to make her a sort of folk hero, at least to everyone who had nothing worth stealing. My family's in business, so they've always been rather ambivalent about her, but I admit I've always found the stories quite exciting.

"Especially since most of them agree that, after a while, she started bringing things out of vaults that had never been in them in the first place. Marvelous, impossible things. Soup pots that never ran empty, books that could only be read with one's eyes shut, spectacles that made people who were nearby look and sound as if they were far away. This is a story from the Scalps, remember," he added with a smile. "But that's what she's truly famous for: stealing things from nowhere and no one."

I inquired as to what had eventually become of the thief.

"No one knows!" Chak said with delight. "There are at least a dozen different endings to the story that I've heard. She retired to a life of anonymous luxury in Kennyrubin, or she tried to rob the wrong dragon and got herself roasted, or reality caught up with her and she stopped existing, or she found the thing she'd been looking for all along - an heirloom, or an egg, or her own heart; it varies depending on who's telling the story. My aunt maintains that she was merely a fiction created to cover up a massive streak of banking fraud, but then she's always been a dedicated cynic.

"Besides, the things she stole still turn up from time to time, usually when someone tries to pawn or auction one of them off and the dragon it was stolen from finds out. Then everyone runs around trying to sell it to some other poor fool so that they're not the one left holding it when the dragon catches up. No one's foolish enough to try to argue ownership with a dragon who has a legal claim to something. No one who lives very long, anyway," he amended.

"And of course, there are a million small trinkets sold every day in the Scalps that claim to be from Fenish keTmeel's hoard - more of them than a thousand thieves could possibly have stolen in a lifetime of burglary. Most of them are fakes. But some…"

He held up the enameled pinecone by its other end and gave it a shake. With a chorus of metallic rattling, its scales flipped themselves in the opposite direction, and the entire pinecone turned itself inside-out and became an exquisitely jointed blue enameled goldfish.

"Some, I think, might be real."

He dropped the fish into the water, where we watched it swim around for a minute or two. Despite being mostly brass, it showed no sign of sinking. When he held out a hand under the surface, it came to rest there, nestled in his palm; he gave it another gentle shake, and it turned inside-out again and became a miniature crocodile, still formed entirely out of jointed enamel scales. It swam around for a short time more, theatrically snapping its tiny brass teeth.

"It used to be my great-grandfather's," Chak said, watching the crocodile fondly. "He said he fed it his secrets. I've kept up the tradition; I've few enough secrets to feed it at my age, but it doesn't seem to mind. There's no other power source that I've ever been able to find, no springs or gears - it's just enameled brass and wire. I'd suspect that it's a Hill Builder relic, but… You've seen their work, yes?"

I acknowledged that I had, many times.

"So you know that it tends toward the utilitarian or the inscrutable. I've rarely seen anything they designed that I'd describe as… charming." He petted the crocodile under the chin, and it gave his finger a small play-bite, like a kitten, before swimming back to rest in his palm. "Possibly it's the work of some other artisan, but if so, they didn't leave a mark or a signature." The crocodile yawned and, with another series of chiming rattles, folded itself back into a pinecone again. Chak shook the water out of it and gently set it on a cloth to dry before returning it to its box.

Pausing my work to watch was enough to make me realized how tired I'd grown. After a little more conversation, I put my paints away for the day, and Chak and I retired to separate pursuits, most of which - in my case - involved sleeping. First, though, I asked if any of the other pieces from Fenish keTmeel's ill-gotten collection were available to view, and Chak was kind enough to write me a (somewhat damp) list of museums. I'll make it a point to visit at least a few of them if I ever find myself in the Scalps again.

Saframish

The last place I visited in the Golden Desert was Saframish, a town built around a giant fish temple. The caravan stopped there to exchange passengers with other caravans and refill its supplies of water.

To be more precise, it's one of the Temples of Gilliva, Lady of the Waters, a deity much appreciated in the Golden Desert. The Temple of Gilliva in Saframish is built in the fossil skull of a giant fish. Its jaws rise up from the ground like twin steeples, dwarfing the houses and shops that have sprouted like barnacles around it. The mouth is open; from inside the main sanctuary of the temple, you can look up past the crooked stone teeth into open sky. This is a common feature of all Gillivan buildings. The followers of the Lady of the Waters don't keep rain out of her temples.

Below the open mouth is a long, oval pool, in which swims a single great catfish as large as a bull. Its whiskers have grown long enough to brush its tail as it swims, like the gray mustaches of an old, old man. The townspeople call the fish the Lasra, which means "tongue." They say it speaks for the Lady of the Waters in times of trouble. This century has been good to Saframish, though, and no one I spoke to could recall the fish speaking in their lifetimes.

According to the people of Saframish, there are catacombs beneath the skull, excavated in the spaces between the ribs and vertebrae. I would have liked to go see them, but they don't let just anyone down into the heart of the fish. Some of the passages are flooded, inhabited with shrimp and blind cave fish. The Gillivans consider them sacred, like all fish. (As I've mentioned before, this religion has never really caught on in coastal areas.)

The founders of the town cut the mountain away from the skull a century or two ago. At that time, a giant fish in the Desert was seen as sufficient evidence of a miracle - or at least a place with interesting geology - so they carved the inside into a temple to the Lady. It's the reason that Saframish has grown from a tiny village to the bustling town it is now.

It does bustle, too. Pilgrims journey to the Great Fish from all over the Golden Desert; there are always people grateful for the water with which their homes have been blessed, just as there are always people in desperate need of more. Most of them, being pragmatic as well as devout, bring things from their home towns to trade while they're here. Nearly every kind of nut and fruit in the Desert can be found in the markets of Saframish - even if only in the amounts that can fit in a single backpack. The cries of vendors and crafters and a whole menagerie of Desert animals fill the streets. One herder I saw had a group of lookout giraffes, wearing lightweight viewing platforms like wicker collars around their necks. Another was selling blind hounds, like a hybrid of dog and earthworm. She said they could sniff out water in the Desert.

There was little chance for them to prove their skill in Saframish; water was everywhere. In all my time in the Golden Desert, I have never seen a town with so many fountains. Several of them were full of lily pads, and I'm sure I caught the golden gaze of a bullfrog in one of them. Floater-merchants paraded their way through the streets, pulling billowing globes of water through the air behind them with oil-coated hands. No one but the floater-merchants is sure how they can make such vast quantities of water hang in the air, as weightless as soap bubbles; they have kept the secret carefully guarded for centuries.

This abundance of water was actually why I ended up leaving the caravan. But more on that later.

The Painted Ones

It was lucky that we found the caravan when we did. By that point, after a month or two of traveling through the wild, trackless wastes of the Golden Desert, I had almost forgotten what Tirakhai had hired me to do when we'd started.

I had been unable to get much information about the "Painted Ones," those mysterious beings that apparently required caravans to travel with artists as a precaution of some sort. The people I asked were as ignorant as myself, responding with shrugs and vague rumors they'd heard; or they were strangely reluctant to discuss the topic, giving small shudders and quickly changing the subject. Eventually, I stopped asking. I assumed I would find out if, or when, we actually encountered the Painted Ones. I was slightly less sure by then that I actually wanted to do so.

Less than a week after we rejoined the caravan, the Painted Ones showed up in person and answered all my questions - and as I'd suspected, I almost immediately wished they hadn't.

We never saw or heard them coming. Even Garnet, whose ears and nose were several degrees sharper than average, had no warning. We came around a high dune and they were simply there.

Judging by their appearance, I would guess that the Painted Ones' ancestors included Deinonychus, or one of the other great hunting lizards. They were tall and muscular, with scaly brown hides and sharp, bony faces. They had wide, flat feet - perfect for running on sand - tipped with dagger-like claws as large as my hand. My head barely came up to their breastbones. Even Garnet, I think, would have had difficulty facing one of these. Against a whole pack, the caravan would not have stood a chance.

We had plenty of time to look. The entire caravan froze at the sight of them. The gafl immediately burped out their alarm stink, a reeking cloud that caused several passengers and even one of the gafl handlers to pass out. No one else moved. The Painted Ones didn't seem to mind the smell at all; they just stood there and waited.

There was an aura of casual and utterly terrifying confidence about them. Somehow, standing there with all their sharp edges glinting in the sun, they managed to convey that they would not hesitate to kill and eat every last one of us. It probably wouldn't even take them very long. They looked at the people in the caravan the way you look at fruit in a market stall, considering which ones are the plumpest and ripest and how many pieces you would slice them into before eating them. We would have had about as much chance of fighting back as a fruit would. The only reason the Painted Ones weren't getting started, right now, was that we - I - had something they wanted more than meat.

Then again, maybe they just weren't hungry at the moment. I prefer not to think too hard about that possibility.

Tirakhai had made his way over to me at some point, moving surprisingly quietly for such a large man. I had been somewhat distracted, and I jumped when he whispered to me.

"Well, artist. They have come to meet you." He gave me a sympathetic pat on the shoulder. "Good luck."

I would rather have pulled the tails of a thousand flying hyenas than walk out to meet that pack of fangs and claws. Tirakhai had to give me a rather firm shove before I could make my feet start moving. Still, they hadn't eaten us yet - and nothing focuses the mind quite like the awareness that a creature who would like to eat you might be willing to bargain for something else instead.

I have met plenty of saurian people in my life; most of them are not all that different from any other person, aside from a somewhat higher quota of claws and scales and a habit to tread very carefully on thin floors. The Painted Ones were not like any of them. I am glad to say, in fact, that I have never met anyone like the Painted Ones - with the possible exception of the Cathomar I once riddled for my life. Still, there was only one of him. There were at least a dozen of these tall saurians. (Somehow, I never took the time to count.) Their teeth and claws were wickedly sharp, except where they'd been broken off in jagged stumps. They seemed to have plenty to spare. The bases were crusted here and there with dark substances I didn't attempt to identify. Slit-pupiled eyes, in all shades of gold and copper and blood-red, inspected me with a hungry intelligence that made me feel distinctly uncomfortable. I have heard people speak of "undressing someone with their eyes," but I believe most people would stop at the skin.

Their breath had the faint, metallic tang of old blood.

In my mind, I gave my nose the rest of the day off, to calm its nerves, and gave my full desperate attention to my eyes. The Painted Ones apparently wanted an artist. I swallowed and tried to think like one.

Many of the Painted Ones were marked with what turned out, on closer inspection, to be elaborate tattoos. The pigment had been expertly worked in between the scales to form complex patterns - bold stripes and rings and spots that turned into lacy designs when seen up close. Others of the pack were unmarked. I wondered what the difference was, until I caught a glimpse of what seemed to be a shred of cloth at the base of one hunter's horns. I was still less than comfortable around these tall and exceedingly pointy people, so I was slow and careful in working my way closer. Close up, the shred turned out to be a piece of old, half-detached skin - still marked with the traces of a tattoo.

That was the difference, then. The Painted Ones, like many scaly people, shed their skins periodically - and far more thoroughly than most; tattoos, permanent on most skin, were hardly more lasting than paint for them. They had come to us because they wanted them replaced.

Several of them had pouches hung on strings around their necks, hanging next to brightly colored stones and the occasional clinking bone. (None of them bothered to carry knives.) From these pouches, several of the unmarked took yellowed and much-folded scraps of paper and presented them to me. They were sketches. Done in a wide variety of different pigments and styles, each showed one of the Painted Ones decorated with a unique pattern. The owners of the sketches gestured to the faded designs, then to themselves. These ones, apparently, had their own personal designs and wanted them re-inked.

Others, rather than giving me a sketch, pointed to my sketchbook and made empty-handed gestures. I assumed that these had not yet found a pattern that they liked and wanted me to design one for them to try.

I'd never done tattoos before, but I knew at least the basic theory. Karlishek silently loaned me a few sewing needles - not ideal, but the best tools anyone had on hand - and I got started.

It was almost more than I could manage to drive the needle into the skin of the first hunter's arm. The impatient tapping of its left-hand dagger-claw on the sand was what finally got me moving. The needle didn't even make it flinch.

Once I'd started, the work itself was enough to keep me going; painting and drawing is usually like that, though this was probably the most unusual canvas I'd ever done it on. The Painted Ones' skin was tough and pebbled with scales, hot from the sun, crisscrossed with a hundred small scars. The powerful muscles and tendons beneath it barely twitched with the jabs of my needle. The smells of hot leather and old blood filled my nose. The skin was various shades of brown, from the pale tan of parchment to a deep, rich chestnut color. It looked as if it had originally been meant for camouflage in the Desert. Their culture had clearly left that idea behind, though, favoring bold designs that could probably be recognized from miles away.

That didn't seem to be the only purpose of the patterns, though. Several of the adolescent hunters, for example, seemed to have deliberately chosen their designs to be as painful as possible - lots of dark, intricate work in the relatively soft skin around their nostrils, under their arms, in the bends of their knees and elbows. I could see them grinning at each other as I inked the patterns in. I can handle this much pain, they seemed to be saying to each other. Can you?

The older ones, having apparently moved on to other methods of competition, seemed to choose their designs more aesthetically. Some seemed to be simply abstract; others emphasized physical features, such as unusually muscular arms or protruding brow-ridges. One particularly precise drawing featured a long, jagged line twisting down the left thigh. When I began to paint it, I found myself tracing the path of an old scar, faded nearly out of existence. Apparently, even scars are impermanent for the Painted Ones. They commemorate the best ones in ink instead.

Knowing that gave me a somewhat different view of some of the other patterns.

Karlishek eventually worked up the courage to stand and watch while I worked. He'd been talking to some of the older caravan passengers - apparently, they were less reluctant to discuss the Painted Ones when the real things were standing in front of them - and had found out a little of the history behind this odd arrangement.

Apparently, the Painted Ones used to attack caravans in this region. Unpainted then, they weren't interested in trade; they only wanted the plump, tasty merchant passengers and draft animals. As a result, many caravans started traveling with armed guards. Those that couldn't afford an escort simply set out and hoped. An occasional survivor would return from one of these, parched and delirious from the heat, raving about traveling companions devoured and precious cargo dumped out like inedible garbage onto the sand.

This inspired groups of adventurers to set out from nearby cities (relatively speaking; this is not a densely inhabited region of the Golden Desert).  Drawn by the irresistible combination of riches and danger, they would arm themselves with steel and arrogance and venture into the dunes in search of these lost treasures. Many of them were also eaten. Others, failing to find the treasures they sought, turned to banditry instead - which only made matters worse.

Trade in the region was just short of drying up altogether when one group of the Painted (then the Unpainted) Ones happened to attack a caravan with a tattoo artist aboard. Like many artists, she was rather stubborn, and she continued to work on the tattoo she was in the middle of even as chaos erupted all around her wagon. (Her client, squeamish about pain, had fortified himself with large quantities of Desert ale and didn't notice a thing.) When one of the attackers slashed open the side of the wagon where she was working, she broke his leg with a nearby sledgehammer and went back to work - in plain sight of the astonished predators outside.

This was the turning point in the Painted Ones' career. They crowded around, fascinated by these marvelous paintings beneath the skin. (Until this point, their encounters with the art of the Golden Desert's other cultures had mostly consisted of taking the jewelry off of their supper.) The fighting stopped. Someone, somehow, managed to figure out enough of their language - or perhaps they had learned enough of their prey's language - to negotiate an agreement: the Painted Ones would leave the caravan alone if the artist tattooed each of them. They had found, like many before them, that they preferred art to food.

Word spread quickly. For the next few years, caravans would hire the most spectacularly tattooed people they could find to walk out in front, as advertisements of a sort, hoping that the predators would stop and see what they had to offer before simply taking what they wanted. In nearly every case, it worked. Soon, the display became unnecessary; word had traveled between the packs, and even those who had never been painted knew what to ask for when they found a caravan. No one wanted to be the last Unpainted Ones left in the Golden Desert.

No one is sure how there can be so many of the Painted Ones. There are not enough animals in the Golden Desert to sustain a population of carnivores this large. The most popular theory is that they have some hidden desert paradise - an oasis, a plateau, a secret river valley - that they return to between their voyages across the sand. If it's true, no one has ever found this hidden paradise and returned to tell about it. The Painted Ones themselves certainly aren't telling anyone.

Their language, on the rare occasion that they spoke, sounded to me like a distant relative of Halsi - one that had been put through a meat grinder. They hissed the vowels and chewed the consonants with great relish.

"Mashrakh," they kept saying to me. "Mashrakh farrakesh. Hechram rrkh." I eventually came to suspect that this meant something like "stab harder, weakling. You're barely scratching me." It was easier to work out the signals they used: a wave for "bigger," a slashing motion for "darker," a twiddling of the claws for "more complex." I tried to oblige them as quickly as possible.

Complexity seemed to be reserved for the oldest among the pack. I was surprised when I first noticed that there were children among them, though I shouldn't have been. The smallest ones had only a stripe or two each and tried to chew on my bag of tools when their parents weren't looking. I didn't try to stop them; it could just as easily have been my leg.

Most of the patterns were in black, with touches of red on some of the larger and more dangerous-looking adults. Luckily, I had a good supply of black and red pigments; these colors are easy enough to come by in nearly any area. When I pulled out the small bottle of blue paint, though - the last remains of the cockleworm dye I picked up on the Gray Coast - one of the Painted Ones laid its elegant handful of daggers on my arm and shook its head. (Her head, as I found out later.) The common colors were all very well for the rest of the band; blue was reserved for the leader. She wanted only a few touches of the color at the tips of her horns and tail, possibly to match the tattered blue feathers tied to her horns.

It had been morning when we'd encountered the Painted Ones. The sun was setting by the time I finished. No one complained about the loss of time; in fact, very few people even came out of their wagons all afternoon. A few of the brave but unassuming passengers - usually Karlishek and Garnet - kept me supplied with water and reassuringly non-predatory company, but that was all.

The Painted Ones took several minutes to admire themselves when I finally finished the last one, turning in circles on the sand and making pleased little churring noises. (I hoped they were pleased, anyway.) One of them even gave me a friendly nudge with its muzzle before leaving, making me feel as if a rack of kitchen knives had suddenly decided to get affectionate. By then, though, I was a little more able to take the gesture as a compliment; I was, if not actually comfortable around the hunters, at least not actively terrified. It is always a pleasure to have one's work appreciated, and even more so when the mark of that appreciation is that one is still alive.

The Painted Ones left nothing behind when they glided off over the dunes, running with such a silent, effortless grace that they barely seemed to touch the sand. It was startling to see after being so close to them for so long. I had felt the tough muscle and bone beneath their thick skin; the adults must have weighed at least twice what I did, yet they appeared to weigh nothing at all. They paused at the top of a high dune, a line of boldly patterned shapes against the burning sky, and then were gone with a whisper of sand.

I spent the following day or two inside the wagons. After that day of relentless heat and terror, I needed the rest. The aquatic passenger (more about him later) actually let me share his water-filled vehicle until the shakes went away.

Painting the Painted Ones might be the most difficult project I have ever undertaken. It is certainly the most difficult one I have done without being paid. It was thoroughly unique, though - and in exchange for doing it, I was allowed to remain alive. I consider that an excellent trade.

Wings of Stone

There are many ways of navigating in the Golden Desert. By far the most reliable are the singing sand rats, who can hear the unique song of each town and city and follow it to its source.* Human Wayfinders, blessed with the rare gift of a sense of direction, are also quite popular here. Those unable to afford a Wayfinder travel by kilopede. The great arthropods are just as home in the Golden Desert as in the Mountainous Plains, though they have to drink a lot, and many order snowshoes - several hundred pairs each - so that they can more easily traverse the shifting sand. Other people prefer tree compasses, which forever point to the living sources of their wooden needles. For a prepared Desert traveler, there are almost as many ways of finding places as there are places to find.

We had none of them. For lack of a better method, we fell back on the oldest means of navigation: pick a direction and hope that it leads somewhere. Fortunately, we still had several days of food and water, and we were finding enough on the way to keep our supplies replenished. Death by deprivation was not an immediate worry. All we had to do was keep walking and try to keep ourselves amused.

We spent the first few days singing and telling stories. Karlishek turned out to have a pleasant tenor voice and a large repertoire of folk tales and songs, which made the hot days go by much faster than they might have. (We traveled in the mornings and evenings, resting when it grew too dark to see or too hot to move, but the air was uncomfortably hot by an hour after sunrise and only grew worse from there.) Mirenza's collection of ancient legends and songs, in the bent keys of traditional Desert music, was also fascinating. As the widest-ranging traveler of the group, my eclectic mix of songs and stories made an interesting contrast; the tale of Gan the Foolish Fence-Builder, from the lush and carelessly governed land of Mollogou, required as much explanation from me as the tales of the ancient and highly ritualized Miravi Empire did from Mirenza.

Garnet continued to speak little, murmuring something about her singing voice being out of shape, but she listened closely to everything.

The Miravi Empire was on our minds quite often during those days. Hardly an hour went by when we didn't pass some remnant of it. Broken pillars quivered on the horizon. Piles of stone blocks lay half-swamped by dunes, still retaining just enough right angles to tell that they had once been the foundations of houses. Markers for long-vanished oases gave names to dry depressions in the sand and invited travelers to drink their fill. At night, we slept in old, half-buried ruins, surrounded by ancient stone and illegible hieroglyphs. Statues looked down on us: the stone-faced gods of a thousand years ago. No one but archaeologists remembers their names.

Every single statue had wings, or stumps where wings had once been.

In the ancient Miravi Empire, according to Mirenza, the ability to fly was considered divine. The wingless were normal; the flying were gods, rulers, cloistered and extremely rare. The highest-born spent their entire lives in towers and hammocks, never once setting foot on the ground. The palaces of the Empire were fantasies of towers and balconies and open courtyards, with more doors opening to the air than to the ground. Many rooms were accessible by flight alone. Others had narrow stairs or ladders added as an afterthought, a vulgar necessity for the rulers' poor, earthbound servants.

Those with wings but not flight were considered cursed and cast out into the desert. Even now, the nomadic tribes that wander between cities have an unusually high occurrence of vestigial wings.

As odd as this method of choosing rulers seems to us now, they seem to have run the Empire quite well for a time. It was one of the most prosperous countries in Hamjamser for several centuries. Most of the cultures in the Golden Desert have Miravian roots; the ancient Miravian language is the basis for modern Amrat, the tongue I have been learning from Karlishek and Mirenza. Modern Desert cities are built with the same majestic, highly ornamented architectural flair that the Empire perfected. The ancient Miravian cities were centers of art and trade and science, each city keeping a friendly and respectful relationship with the aquifrax that provided its water. These generous, enigmatic Desert spirits have probably never been as well understood, before or since, as they were by the ancient Miravians.

Unfortunately, as so often happens, this understanding eventually became complacency. All of this prosperity ended when the Miravians finally did something to annoy the aquifraxi. Accounts vary as to exactly what it was. Some historians believe it was due to political or religious differences; aquifraxi consider themselves subjects of the Rain Dragon (and he humors them politely enough, though he's never shown any sign of actually wanting to rule anything but tides and storm clouds). Others theorize that the dispute was over pollution, or excessive irrigation, or an infestation of imported foreign frogs. Whatever the reason, one day, every aquifrax in the Empire simply picked up and left. They took the water with them.

They hadn't gone far, as it turned out; they'd merely relocated to the uninhabited areas of the Empire. Within a few months, what had been empty desert was lush and blooming, and what had been fertile farmland was too dry to grow anything but dust and heatstroke. The people of the Empire packed up their things and left everything they'd built. In some cases, they only had to walk for a few hours to reach fertile ground. Many could still see their old homes as they built their new ones. The division between farmland and wasteland is a sharp one in the Golden Desert, though; people have to follow the water, wherever it happens to be. Without an aquifrax, the old cities of the Empire might as well have been on the moons.

Many of the wealthiest citizens stayed behind anyway, hoping desperately that things would go back to the way they had been, until their grand houses filled up with sand.

Most of the winged nobility were among them. The new settlements had been thrown together quickly, to give the farmers and craftspeople somewhere to sleep while they figured out how to feed an entire displaced Empire. There was nowhere for sky-dwellers to perch.

The Miravi Empire never really recovered. It took a long time to rebuild even a fraction of what had been lost, and in the bustle, most of the Empire's less practical traditions - such as the winged rulers - were left behind and forgotten. The rough settlements grew into stable towns and eventually became the Golden Desert's modern cities, such as Karkafel and Thrass Kaffa. The people developed new, somewhat more cautious relationships with the aquifraxi. Life returned to normal. Like most places in Hamjamser, though, the cities remained separate this time. They continued to trade goods and citizens and ideas with each other, but somehow, they never quite reunited into a single country again. It's not that surprising, I suppose. In every part of Hamjamser, empires have always been the exception, not the rule.

These days, the ability to fly is considered as ordinary in the Golden Desert as it is anywhere else. The winged hold everyday jobs and mingle with the flightless without hesitation. Many even consider the winged nobility to have been a foolish idea. In these modern times, most places in Hamjamser consider it unhealthy for rulers to be always looking down on their subjects. It gives them strange ideas.

Still, I have often seen the people of the Golden Desert gazing silently at the clouds, or at the wings of their neighbors. Perhaps a part of them still remembers a time when wings could bring them closer to Heaven, and not merely to the empty sky.



* They can even find things as small as individual oases, though they say those songs are little more than brief jingles.

Canyon Town, part three

In total, I believe we spent a day or two in the canyons. Perhaps three. Surrounded by so many centuries, it was easy to lose track of a few days.

We had grown accustomed to the sunlight coming only from above, filtering down through the narrow tops of the canyons to glisten on leaks from the raised aqueduct and cast shadows from the plants sprouting along its walls. When we finally turned a corner and found sunlight spilling through a doorway, it took us a moment to realize what it was.

We had reached an exit. Instead of another empty house, the arch before us was full of sunlit desert.

We approached the narrow opening slowly, half-disbelieving, like sleepers waking from a dream. We found ourselves strangely reluctant to leave - and not just because of the contrast between the cool canyon streets and the dry, sun-blasted dunes outside. The town had been home to many people once. Perhaps it was only my imagination, but I thought I felt a hint of sadness from the abandoned walls around us. The town couldn't have gotten guests often, and now we were preparing to leave.

Does a town grow lonely when no one lives in it? I don't know. If we had had a longer supply of food, though, I wonder if this one would have let us go so soon.

At the top of the arch was another statue, its features worn away by weather long ago. It might have been a bird of some sort. The words carved below the statue had lasted better, sheltered by its feet or talons, and Mirenza was able to read them.

"Is old poem of goodbye," she said, tracing the faded characters with one claw. "May wind stay at your back, water rise where you step, and such. Every place in Desert has same poem, little different."

It made sense for such a poem to be carved at the door to the desert, but it still felt eerily as if the town was saying goodbye to us.

When we walked out into the sun, Garnet fell behind for a moment. The small woman had barely said a dozen words since we'd become separated from the caravan. It took me a moment to notice she was gone. I looked back, worrying that we had lost her as well, and saw her whispering something to the stones of the archway. Perhaps she had felt that same sense of loneliness I had, and was giving the town a few comforting words. I don't know. I couldn't hear her, even if I had been rude enough to listen.

Far above her head, a stray breeze plucked a single peach-colored flower from one of the aqueduct plants. It drifted slowly down to land in Garnet's hand. She gave the sandstone wall a kiss and turned to catch up with us.

None of us spoke for several hours. I was quite content to be left alone with my thoughts, and extended the same courtesy to the others. We didn't say a word until the sun set and we set up a rudimentary camp for the night. A rocky outcropping provided shelter, as well as some prehistoric graffiti for Mirenza to read, and Karlishek identified a nearby stand of fat cacti as edible. They were a little like cucumbers that had grown already pickled. I made myself useful by building a fire, a task with which I have some experience, though working with the handful of miserly twigs we were able to find took all of my skill and a good deal of luck. Garnet took out a knife that looked about large enough to peel carrots - potatoes might have been a stretch - and vanished into the darkness, returning a while later to surprise the rest of us with a stringy desert hare and some kind of edible lizard. We ate, for the most part, in silence.

The flower could, of course, have only been chance. 

Perhaps. 

In my dreams, I heard the whistling of wind through narrow windows and doors, the trickling of water, and the sound of laughter so faint it was only a dream of a memory. The stillness had a measure of sadness to it - but there was hope there, too. More than anything, there was patience. A town is meant for people. A town carved in stone can afford to wait until the day when they finally come back.

Canyon Town, part two

Mirenza's machine was little more than a small lens in a brass frame. Small buttons and levers protruded from it here and there, like a combination of a pocketwatch and a jeweler's compound eyepiece.

My Amrat and her English have improved since I first met her, so - with some help from Karlishek - she was able to explain a little more fully exactly what the device does.

As far as I could understand it, the lens shows the past. Sometimes. Other times it doesn't. The precise working of it is immensely complicated; the one Mirenza had was the simplified portable version, and even then, her explanations of the functions of all its knobs and switches quickly rose to heights of technicality beyond even Karlishek's ability to understand. Mirenza eventually gave up and just demonstrated for us.

The first subject she tried was a heap of green glass beads lying in an empty doorway. Garnet, Karlishek, and I had to crowd closely around the lens, as it was really only designed to fit a single eye. At first, the lens simply showed the heap, as if we were looking through ordinary - if somewhat dark and distorted - glass. Mirenza gave expert flicks to a couple of switches. The lens darkened, then cleared again to show a different image, grainy and flickering, like the pictures in an antique slide projector. When viewed through the lens, the beads were now on a string. A few more flicks of switches, and the view pulled back to show a dark-haired girl - perhaps fourteen or fifteen, with the stubs of an adolescent pair of antlers on her forehead - wearing the beads around her neck. She laughed, soundlessly, and vanished through the doorway where we had found the beads. In the lens, the opening had a wooden door in it, carved with symbols. "Health and protection," Mirenza identified them in a distracted mutter.

The girl closed the door, and the image blurred into darkness. Mirenza's claws flew over the switches. The darkness gave way to a burst of scratches, which cleared to reveal a priest. (Mirenza identified him by his robes and by the Amulet of Humility* around his neck.) Above the amulet, he was wearing the same necklace. His face bore little resemblance to the girl's, but he did have a magnificent set of antlers.

We watched for what seemed like hours as Mirenza flicked through image after image, following a dizzying array of people. Some had a family resemblance to the girl; many did not. All of them wore the beads around their necks. The lens was watching the beads, in their previous form as a necklace, and their wearers simply happened to be in the picture as well. One brief glimpse showed a glassworker actually making the necklace and giving it to her husband, whose eyes were an identical shade of brilliant green. Other images - much blurrier than the rest - showed only blowing sand, or an outcropping of greenish rock, which we assumed to be the sources of the beads' material and pigment. Apparently, anything further back than that no longer resembled the beads closely enough for the lens to observe it.

Most of the people showed up many times. One heartbreaking scene showed the first girl, a few years older, grieving for the death of her young husband. We had seen the two of them courting in many of the previous images. The next one showed the two of them, decades older, eating a quiet dinner with a small boy so similar that he had to have been their grandson. They were listening, clearly fascinated, while he described something to them with many soup-flinging gesticulations of his spoon.

This was when I started to be doubtful of the accuracy of what the lens was showing us. Mirenza switched it off a moment later, returning it to an ordinary glass lens, and explained.

The lens doesn't see the past; it sees all of the pasts. The pictures in it show both what was and what could have been. Mirenza had pointed it at the remains of the necklace, and we had seen where the necklace had been - and where it might have been, had things been different.

It is an archaeologist's dream. It is an archaeologist's nightmare.

Fittingly, Mirenza's group of archaeomechanogeolinguists calls these devices "arkmasith," which translates roughly to "historians' dreams." They've been working on them ever since Hashmax Bensathrack, their biometallovitrialchemist,** found that he could see strange things through a batch of glass he'd accidentally mixed with the powdered shells of oracular crabs. The creation of more lenses has progressed slowly, as oracular crabs are quite difficult to catch. They always seem to know where you're going to look for them.

The team has managed to improve the accuracy of the lenses somewhat, using the elaborate mechanical workings around them, plus an exhausting amount of testing with objects whose pasts are well-documented enough for comparison. The small one Mirenza had was an early model, with few adjustments for accuracy, considered by most of the team to be past its usefulness. She had kept it anyway. "We are look for beginnings," she explained, with a smile at the edges of her beak. "We never should forget beginnings of our own work. Also, is shiny thing."

We wandered through the canyons for the rest of the day, taking turns looking through the lens at whatever remains of the vanished community caught our eyes. We looked back to when that streak of rust was (probably) the wheel rim of a cart pulled by goats and miniature saurians, when this rock was (possibly) at the bottom of a swift-moving canyon river full of fish and freshwater nautilus, when that doorway was (perhaps) carved by a stubborn one-armed sculptor who clenched his chisel in his teeth, when this fossil was (dubiously) a small trilobite who spent its days tracing geometrical proofs into the silt of an ocean floor, when the hollow cave-houses were (most likely) inhabited by families who lived and died and danced and prayed beneath statues that had not yet lost their sandstone faces to centuries of wind and rain and neglect.

Not one view gave us any hint as to why they had left.



* The Amulet of Humility is commonly worn by the priests of Uncertainty, who teach that true knowledge comes only through sufficiently complete observation. "Sufficiently complete" observation, in the strictest division of the faith, is possible only by omnipotent beings. The most exceptionally adventurous and introspective of mortals might, by the end of their lifetimes, come to know all there is to know about themselves. To know everything about another person is usually considered impossible. To know everything about a place, or a society, or a species - much less the rest of the world - is utterly beyond hope. True knowledge is therefore restricted to the central deity or possibly deities of the Uncertain (His/Her/Its/Their followers don't presume to know anything at all about Him/Her/It/Them, including whether or not He/She/It/They actually exist). Mortals must learn to accept that the sum of their knowledge will forever be a microscopic grain of flawed and partial observations in the vast and incomprehensible universe. Followers of Uncertainty consider it a sin to be certain and a virtue to admit to being wrong. This perhaps explains why there have always been so few of them.


** All of the terms I'm using are broad approximations made up based on Mirenza's attempts to explain the scientists' work to me, and are probably laughably inaccurate. Language barrier aside, they simply do not seem to divide the sciences into the same categories with which I'm familiar.

Canyon Town, part one

We wandered in the canyons for several days.

There is, as yet, no reliable strategy for navigating a maze. Their constant shifting defeats any attempt to be methodical. Most people foolish enough to step into one simply wander around until they reach an exit - or, depending on the maze, perhaps something else of interest.

Wayfinders, being blessed with superhuman navigational abilities, can step into a maze and immediately find a perfectly straight path leading to their destination. As none of us were lucky enough to have this rare ability, we were confined to ordinary methods.

Nearly all of my supplies were, of course, in the wagons that had moved on without us. This could have been a serious problem. Fortunately, I have been a traveler long enough to have developed certain paranoid habits. I had with me a bag containing supplies (food, water, pens and paper; just the essentials) for several days. I try to keep this with me at all times, regardless of inconvenience, for just such situations as these. The supplies inside were meant for one, but could easily be stretched to three for a week or so.

Food, then, was not an urgent problem, as long as we rationed our supplies. Neither was water. The river that had carved the canyons was clearly long gone, but water still flowed through them in a sandstone aqueduct above the street.* Steps led up to it periodically. One of the first things we did was to climb the nearest staircase and fill our canteens.

After that… We wandered.

The city was carved right into the walls of the canyons, themselves carved by thousands of years of water erosion. The graceful, flowing lines of the striped stone dipped in here and there to reveal a window, a staircase, an arched doorway. Mirenza and I kept stopping to sketch particularly interesting pieces of stonework or take rubbings of the carvings on the walls. Mirenza was in her element - surrounded by stone and history and the elegant script of the canyon-dwellers' language. She pointed out glyphs, architectural styles, and geological strata with equal enthusiasm.

Most of the layers of stone were smooth - as smooth as sandstone ever gets, that is - but occasionally, we would find one with fossils embedded in it. The canyon-dwellers had added carvings to a few of these layers, so that the fossil ammonites and eurypterids had tiny stone riders or chariots hitched to them. One particularly large trilobite had an entire city built across its back, with hair-thin rope bridges crossing the gaps between segments.

Whoever the inhabitants had been, they seemed to have left in a hurry. The sand-drifted streets were littered with fallen jewelry, broken pots, wagon wheels rusted into arches of metallic lace.

This was when Mirenza brought out the machine she'd been carrying under her robe.

But I shall write more about that tomorrow.



* Anyone who has lived in a city will know that one never drinks anything that's been below street level.

Icebox

The village of Frish is a small place, its houses slightly shorter than the sand dunes that surround it. In spite of its small size, though, we saw the village long before we arrived - one part of it, at least.

Frish is built in the shadow of an enormous Hill Builder machine, a complex - though unmoving - engine the size of a large hill. The base is half-buried in the sand. There's a long metal spire sticking at an angle from its top. I do mean long, too - the spire is easily fifty times as tall as any house in the village. It's not just the tallest thing nearby; it's the only tall thing nearby. According to the villagers, every thunderstorm that passes over the village strikes the spire with lightning at least once.

Its size is not the strangest thing about it, though, nor is its affinity for lightning. Even in the most blistering Summers of the Golden Desert, the engine is always cold. The villagers caution their children not to lick it. (Some even listen.) I walked over to it after we arrived in the village. In the hot afternoon air, I could feel the chill coming off of the metal in waves. Faint clouds of mist drifted from the spire above me. The cold was pleasant from a distance; close up, I actually started shivering.

After a year in the Golden Desert, I'd almost forgotten what it feels like to be cold in the daytime. Cold weather here tends to be strictly nocturnal.

I don't know what the engine is, or how it works, and neither does anyone else in the village. This is normal for Hill Builder relics. Whoever the Hill Builders were, wherever they vanished to, they left their tools and toys and other creations scattered about the world in astonishingly large numbers when they left. Many of their old machines are still running today. The Train of the Railway Regions is one of these machines; so are all of the floating cities. The original radios, the elegant and relentless Guardians, the little crystal brains used in clockwork pipe crawlers, the Omnipresent Typewriter, the infamous Answering Machine of Miggle-Meezel… The Hill Builders left a lot of useful things behind.

It's a shame they neglected to leave an instruction manual.

However it works, the engine is cold enough to pull moisture out of even the dry Desert air. Beads of water condense on its surface every morning - and with the entire height of the spire, that's a great deal of surface. The windward side of the machine's base is buried beneath a drift of sand, but the leeward side shelters a depression in the rock, where the water dripping down the spire forms a small pool. This is what allows the village to exist. We're days away from the river Lahra; all of Frish's water comes from this one frigid pool, as clear and cold as snowmelt.

Very little lives in the pool. The Golden Desert does have a few aquatic species - mostly amphibians and the occasional lungfish. Pebble-toads bake themselves golden brown in the sun and disguise themselves as rocks. Raindrop frogs spend months hibernating underground, sealed beneath the cracked surface of dry stream beds, only emerging for a few exuberant hours when the rain comes and frees them from the hard ground. Desert-dwellers who know where to look come out sometimes to find them dancing in the rain.

None of these species live in the engine pool. The water is clean enough, but it's cold - so cold that the children of Frish often dare each other to stand in it until their feet turn blue.* Frost forms on the stones around it at night. Anything that wanted to live in the pool would have to come from a mountaintop somewhere, or perhaps the arctic wastes of the Stone Ocean, and it's a long way from there to the Golden Desert. For now, the pool remains uninhabited.

The caravan will not stay here long, sadly, as the village grows only what it needs and has little to trade. Many places with Hill Builder relics take them apart and use the pieces for other things - Cormilack, for instance, exports hundreds of ancient gears every year from its huge and motionless Earthmover - but Frish is understandably reluctant to do so. They rely too much on their silent engine, their great metal icicle, to interfere with its mysterious workings.

Besides, all of its openings have been frozen shut for centuries.



* Their mothers try to discourage this, but so far, it hasn't worked. A few of the mothers have given up and taken to wading with their children instead. This seems to work better.

Creeping Hieroglyphs

After I wrote last night's letter and handed it off to the postbird, the innkeeper led me upstairs to a narrow stone room roughly the size of a coat closet, which I am sharing with an elderly tortoise.

At least, I'm fairly sure it's a tortoise. It hasn't actually come out of its shell yet. I'm certain there's something in there, though, if only because of the snoring.

Exhausted as I was, I collapsed into the heap of mismatched cushions that serves as a bed and fell asleep almost instantly. I dreamed that I had become a creature of living flame. Every time I tried to write a letter, the paper would burn up in my hands, and the words I'd written would speak themselves in the crackling of the flames.

I woke to find that I had left the curtains open last night and was now lying in direct sunlight. This explained the dream. Even early-morning sunlight is hot in the Desert. The room was far too hot to stay in at that point, so I left the tortoise shell to its nap and went out to look at the village. I'd only seen it in the dark last night.

Rikanta is a small town, perhaps two or three dozen houses, centered around an old sandstone castle. These are fairly common in this region. Like most of them, this one was built when the Locust Marauders were at their peak and had started making forays into the Golden Desert. You can still see the tooth marks in the stone. The Marauders are long gone, though, and the castle has been empty for nearly as long. It hasn't had an enemy to keep out in decades. The town's Chooser* lives in a house now, and the castle's few intact rooms are home only to sand-colored day bats and the occasional night wanderer. Swallows and potter wasps build neat clay nests under the crumbling battlements. The outer walls shrink just a little every year as people take the old, elegantly cut stone blocks to build new houses. They're not about to let good stone just sit around.

Most of Rikanta's buildings have a thick, chunky look as a result; they are small houses built with castle-sized blocks of stone. Many of the walls are thicker than the width of the doorways. As well as looking funny, this is actually a good design, keeping the houses cool during the day and warm during the night. There is very little that insulates as well as two feet of solid stone.

The architecture, however, wasn't the first thing I noticed in Rikanta. The town is overgrown with creeping hieroglyphs, a form of two-dimensional life adapted to live on dry stone. They look like letters, neatly painted in faded brown dye, a growth of random symbols that never quite resolve themselves into a readable alphabet. Their seeds are windborne and look like commas. The glyphs alarmed me at first - had the word-plague spread here from Arkit? Fortunately, a few townspeople assured me that the glyphs had been around for decades and had never shown any sign of interfering with the town's actual writing - though the appearance of the occasional Halsi character in the otherwise random symbols suggests that the two might be interbreeding.

Neat, geometric, and completely incomprehensible (though many linguists have tried), the glyphs apparently started at ground level and simply worked their way up. The popular theory in Rikanta is that they started on an old vase or pot buried in someone's basement. Craftsmen in several of the old Desert civilizations used creeping hieroglyphs as decoration, encouraging them to grow on pottery and carvings. No one is sure whether these craftsmen liked the nearly-legible patterns or if they were just too lazy to add their own decorations.

Wherever they came from, the glyphs have spread by now to nearly every (previously) unmarked surface in sight. They seem to fill the role that ivy or tambourine wisteria might in a wetter place. Lines of elegant symbols twist their way up stone blocks and wooden posts, along walls and across rooftops, curling around corners and tracing the most minute imperfections in any surface. On occasion, they will even spread to the skin of a person who sits too long in one place.

Mammals usually don't care; the glyphs are hidden beneath their fur, and being two-dimensional, cause no actual physical change. Some say that they even keep fleas and bedbugs away. The town's furless inhabitants are somewhat more likely to object. Many of the reptilian townspeople have rather dramatic scale patterns of their own, and they don't want to add a layer of meaningless symbols on top of them.

Fortunately, the glyphs can be killed by sufficiently heated debate. Inscripted people often go to the town hall, a stone building completely devoid of glyphs, and attend meetings of the elders' council for a dose of remedial bickering.



* Chooser is a position somewhere between mayor and magistrate; most towns of any size at all have a council of elders and a Chooser. The relationship between them is a complex one, and I don't fully understand it yet, but I suspect that the Chooser's job is to step in when the council finally becomes too exhausted to argue anymore.

Fish of the Ground, Beasts of the Air

The people here have a great deal of trouble with flying camels. The beasts just swoop down out of the sky on bristly wings and carry off small children, spiriting them away to their camel fastnesses in the desert, where they raise them on the fruit of the hazzle-cactus and teach them the mystical secrets known only to flying camels. The rare camel-snatches who return to the villages are famed for their wisdom. Most people are willing to overlook their eccentricity and their refusal to explain anything (not to mention the spitting). Still, most parents here keep a close watch on their children while they're small enough to be snatchable.*

One of these camel-snatches was Hanzifan Krickl, who found a fish in the Desert and founded a town on it. The town is called Kellekath, the local word for "coelacanth." The caravan stopped there for water today. According to the legend, Krickl discovered the system of caves beneath the town thanks to a fossil of one of the ancient fish, which pointed the way for him. The water that collects in the caves is all that allows the town to exist. There's an aquifrax in the caves, as there is in every oasis in the Golden Desert, but it allows the town to use the water in exchange for honey and the occasional shiny marble. It probably has hundreds down there by now, unless it's been eating them. You never know with an aquifrax.

These days, the coelacanth fossil is considered to have been a sign from Gilliva, Lady of the Waters, to whom fish are sacred.** Fish show up seldom enough in the Desert that they're generally considered to be a sign when they do. Kellekath is particularly devoted to the Lady; the town keeps a pool full of koi in her honor. Like most koi, they - or their distant ancestors - were imported from Mollogou. Unlike the piebald Mollogou koi, though, the ones in Kellekath have been bred to be shades of blue and green; they range from the deepest ultramarine to the pale green of new leaves and a turquoise the dry desert sky has only seen in its dreams. The townspeople love them and spoil them terribly. Many people wish they could have actual coelacanths in the town, besides the fossilized one, but bringing a whole population of misanthropic saltwater fish to the Golden Desert would be all but impossible. The koi were difficult enough.

Coelacanths aren't the only fossils that show up here. According to geologists, the whole Golden Desert used to be the floor of an ocean. The tall rocks that stick up from the sand often have fossils in them, fish and ammonites and strange spiny beasts with compound eyes. They speckle the stone in layers, like jeweled rings around sandstone fingers. Other parts of the Desert have larger things. The bones of whales and great sea-serpents emerge from the dunes now and then, breaching between the waves of sand, until the wind covers them again. A few travelers have found a mountain that, when seen from the right angle, is unmistakably the skull of a giant fish. The smaller peaks of its vertebrae stretch out in a line behind it. The most dedicated wanderers say they've even found shipwrecks out in the sand, buried up to their bone-dry masts, with shreds of ancient sail flapping in the Desert wind. Archaeologists have found books in some of the wrecks. Their pages are speckled with strange pictograms, beetles and blowfish and delicate assemblies of gears. No one has deciphered them yet. Linguists believe that even the gears are a language, but any meaning remains lost in the machinery.

Perhaps one of the camels' pupils will decipher them one day.



* A few parents with different ambitions send their children outside every day wearing brightly colored clothing. It all depends on your hopes for your child's future, I suppose.

** Fortunately, fish are rare in the Golden Desert. This religion has never caught on in coastal towns.

Charcoal Chrysalis

Back in the Autumn, I visited the village of Glimrack. It's a tiny village in a barren corner of the Scalps. The whole area looked as if it had been burned recently; there were plants here and there, but the soil they sprouted from was completely black. It seemed to be mostly ash. On the way to the village, I passed through a whole burned forest, a field of blackened sticks poking into the sky. None of the plants sprouting beneath them looked more than a year old.

There was very little soil, even ash, around Glimrack itself. Most of the village is built on bare stone. The villagers make their living by farming mushrooms in caves; most of their food comes from the nearby village of Gramfimly. All the buildings are made of stone with slate roofs. There are wooden beams underneath, but they're well hidden. When I arrived, the only wood in sight was piled up in tall heaps on the plain outside the village - broken chairs, dead branches, and what looked like several years' worth of firewood. Everyone in the village was running back and forth, adding more wood. Wagons rolled into town, one after the other, piled high with dead logs from the surrounding forests.

All the people I saw were reptiles, which was interesting by itself; even the smallest villages usually have at least a few mammals and avians as well. I asked a few of them what it was all for. "For the moths," they said. "They hatch tonight." None of them would tell me any more. They kept running back and forth, their arms laden with wood. I stayed and watched. Eventually, I started helping; there didn't seem to be much else to do. The piles of wood kept growing until they covered most of the plain. The bare stone was still visible, but more than half of it was buried under the splintered heaps.

After dark, they lit them.

It was the largest collection of bonfires I've ever seen. They turned the plain into a fiery maze, paths of bare stone between walls of flame. The air had been chilly all day, but it quickly grew so hot that I had to back away. The villagers didn't seem to care. They walked out into the maze, shedding their coats and jackets as they went. Slowly, solemnly, they began to dance.

The reason for the burned forest became clear when moths of flame emerged from the bonfires, swirling up and out in cindery clouds, sparks dripping from their burning wings. They swooped in wild curves through the flames, rising on updrafts and whirling around each other. The people danced through the flames, most of them stripped to the waist or further, spinning in graceful circles with the tiny scraps of living fire.

It seemed to be special when a moth landed on someone. Whenever it happened, the person would stand perfectly still as the moth dripped fire on their skin, smoke rising from the singed scales. Everyone else would do wild leaps and turns around them. When the moth finally left, the standing person would press their hands to the burns left behind, then throw themselves back into the dance with renewed vigor. I must have seen it happen more than twenty times during the night.

I learned later that this is actually part of the life cycle of the moths. They return every year to lay their eggs in the ash, the way monarch butterflies lay their eggs on their native patches of milkweed or viperwort. The caterpillars are gray and ordinary-looking. They live ordinary lives all year, eating ash and charred wood, until a fire burns away their solid bodies and releases the adult flame moths inside. A hundred years ago, there was a forest where Glimrack is now; its frequent fires provided the moths' first hatching ground. The trees are long gone, but the people of the village still gather wood all year long for the Autumn bonfire. The moths have been part of the villagers' lives since the days of their forest-dwelling five-times-great-grandparents. They don't want them to find another place to lay their eggs.

I still don't know exactly what the moths mean to the villagers. Whatever happened that night is obviously quite important, to be worth enduring so much pain, but I don't know why. No one I spoke to offered any information, and I didn't ask.

It was almost dawn before the fires finally burned down to embers. The dancing slowed down as the fires died. A few people paused to receive a last fiery kiss; then, all at once, the whole burning cloud of moths lifted into the sky. The villagers watched the moths until they vanished in the glow of the rising sun. Then, silently, they turned and walked back to their houses.

In the morning, they emerged with the shapes of tiny wings burned into their scales.

The Shell of a Town

I'm not sure exactly when we crossed over from the Pinstuck Plains to the Golden Desert; perhaps we haven't yet. There's no clear border between the two, and what there is shifts constantly.

Rain is capricious in the outskirts of the Golden Desert. People settle in the green spaces, plant crops and build towns, only to have the rain move on a decade later and turn their farmland back to dust. There are ghost towns all over the Desert's outskirts. The dust piles up against cracked boards and peeling paint, drifting through the broken glass of carefully shut windows. Years later, if the rain returns, the exiles of a different town will move in and bring the ruins back to life. The people of the outskirts are used to living with someone else's ghosts.

CheChmit is one of these towns. It's new and old at the same time. The people only recently moved in, settling down in the abandoned husk of the town after weeks of traveling. Their old town dried up several months ago. A few months more, and it will look exactly like this one did.

At the moment, though, CheChmit is coming back to life. Weeds grow up around the buildings. In most parts of the world, people would pull them out, but not here. Weeds are a sign of life. When they start dying, you know it's time to leave. The town well has water in it again - though the bucket is rusted through - and the farmers are busy plowing the soil around the town. Families are clearing the dust from the houses, putting new glass in the windows, and replacing curtains worn to white rags by the wind. The children keep finding old wooden toys and glass marbles that have lain in the empty houses, forgotten, for decades. The town is like a hermit crab's home - a dry, discarded thing filled with sudden, bustling life. Before it was abandoned, this place was known as Kelikeff. The place its current inhabitants came from no longer has a name. This is the outskirts of the Desert, where whole villages pack up and move all at once; a town's name goes with its people, not with its buildings.

I walked around the streets for a while (there aren't very many), looking at the deep cracks the wind has worn in the stone and wood of the buildings. People were painting a few of them. Mostly, they limited this to a touch of red here, a yellow door frame there; in the Golden Desert, the texture of well-aged wood and stone is considered at least as beautiful as a coat of paint. I stopped for a while to help a family of reptiles patch the roof of their new old house. They were doing it very carefully, so as not to harm the tree growing up through it.

Their daughter stayed on the ground (her mother didn't want her up on the roof) and drew things on the walls with a piece of charcoal. I came down to take a look when we all took a break for water. She had drawn a procession on the walls; strange, solemn-looking shapes marched in a rough black line around two sides of the house. There were tall ones and short ones, smooth and spiny, bare-faced and hooded, fat and thin. Mostly thin.

"These are the quiet people," she said, without waiting for me to ask. "I see them every time we move. We've moved a lot. They always leave the towns before we get here, because they don't like noise. That's all my mother would tell me. She said it's not polite to talk about them. Too noisy." She returned to drawing. One of the taller shapes was covered in what might have been stripes or bandages. "She didn't say anything about drawing them, though."

I didn't ask anyone else about the quiet people - I wouldn't want to be rude - but I'll have to keep an eye out for them if I visit any more abandoned towns.

FlunDitChukk delivered the jazz birds and musical instruments to the leader of a caravan in town. They'll be moving on to some city or other in the next few days; the caravan is only in CheChmit to pick up the birds and replenish their water supply. I don't know how they managed to schedule the meeting so precisely. In return, FlunDitChukk picked up a load of palm-tree crystals to bring back to SuyMaTmakk. His wagon settled noticeably lower on its wheels when the chunks of honey-colored stone were loaded onto it. I said goodbye before he left, and he replied with a grunt that sounded almost friendly. The caravan leader noticed me a bit later, when I was painting a border of morning glory vines around the window of a house, and offered me a seat on the caravan. Apparently, they need someone to touch up the paint on the wagons.

I accepted. It's been years since I've visited the Golden Desert.

Shapeshifters

Twokk, as it turns out, is mostly surrounded by farmland. I suppose most towns are. They had run out of things to paint - the need for artists tends to be limited in places this small - so I moved on this morning. The cook of the Moons and Magpie gave me half a dozen different kinds of food when I left, all of them made of locusts.* She says they'll last for months. I believe her.

The road out of town (an actual road, not one of the treacherous paths of the Scalps) winds through fields of cotton. The vegetable lambs are still young at this time of year. They sit curled on top of their stalks, cradled by leaves, pink skin still showing through their first layer of cotton wool. The fields are full of the sound of tiny bleating.

Most people are fairly sure that the vegetable lambs were created by shapeshifters. Not all hybrids of plants and animals were shifter-made, of course. Though no one can be entirely sure, tubermoles probably came into existence the normal way (whatever that happens to be), as did the enigmatic Greenlings and the trapper vines with their subterranean stomachs. Most of them are closer to one side or the other, though. Greenlings and trapper vines are mostly animal; they just happen to be capable of photosynthesis. Tubermoles are basically roots with digging claws.

The vegetable lamb, though, is an even division of plant and animal: a little sheep on a stalk. That rarely happens when shapeshifters aren't involved. No one is sure how many of the living things in Hamjamser were originally created by shapeshifters. The meatroots that feed the floating cities** certainly were; their creator's name was Sashrem. Tesra Sashrem, some call her - a craftswoman who worked in flesh and bone. There are statues to her on most of the floating cities, depicted as whatever species she happened to look like at the time each sculptor met her. She also created coal-nuts and the dirigible octopus. She supposedly said that sea-spackle, silt-crabs, and the surprisingly popular memory leeches were also created by shapeshifters, though she respected their privacy too much to mention their names.

She was unusual. It's rare to meet a shapeshifter and know it. Nearly all of them stay hidden, anonymous, using their extraordinary abilities to appear completely ordinary.

Most of Hamjamser's disguised people have a perfectly innocent reason to hide themselves, of course. Vancians consider faces to be private. Visitors to Samrath Kazi used to be required to wear a mask if they didn't meet the town's standards of beauty.*** Cloisterers hide their faces for religious reasons. Aggravarns (sometimes called the Worms that Walk) occasionally cause vomiting in people who are scared of worms; they usually feel just awful about this, so they wear coats over their collective bodies when they go outside, recognizable only by the faint squishing noise when they walk. Some troglodytes simply sunburn easily. Shapeshifters have a similar but different reason: they don't want the attention.

Like anyone with rare and exceptional abilities, shapeshifters tend to become instantly famous whenever and wherever they reveal themselves. Everyone is curious about them. Everyone wants to find out more about them, to understand how they work, often to ask them for help. Even ordinary conversations with shapeshifters can be awkward; no matter how good your intentions, it's almost impossible to forget that they've built themselves from scratch. The mind has a tendency to dwell on how they must have sculpted their bones, strung their muscles, tailored their skin, wired their nerves... If, that is, they even need nerves. People with near-perfect control of every cell of their bodies (or whatever they prefer to use instead of cells) have little need for anything as inefficient as a nervous system.

This is why many people are somewhat uncomfortable around shapeshifters. Of course, being basically sensible, most inhabitants of Hamjamser think nothing of it after a few days; they have no qualms about eating dinner with someone who uses a homemade stomach and could grow their own silverware from their fingernails. The shapeshifters answer the same questions that everyone asks them constantly over the years of their unending lives, smiling patiently, and all is well.

Still, there are always a few people who can't get used to shapeshifters, and even more who are just annoyingly curious. This is why most shapeshifters have stayed in disguise for the last few centuries. Their existence is fairly common knowledge; most people have heard of them, if only as a myth. Individual shapeshifters, though, prefer to stay anonymous. All we see is their handiwork.

Many village healers are actually shapeshifters. (The villagers are usually polite enough to avoid finding out.) Being able to manipulate individual cells - their own and, with far more difficulty, those of others - shapeshifters have healing abilities far beyond anyone else's. Most of what we know about biology was discovered by shapeshifters; they've seen it, or sensed it, firsthand. They build their own cells, defend themselves against diseases, puzzle out the complex mechanics of reproduction (and often design more convenient systems of their own). Medicine would be very different without their vast and microscopic experience.

Their creations have changed the world just as much. Life on the floating cities would be impossible without the meatroot; even if there was room for pastures in the vast machinery of the cities, the weight of a whole city's livestock would make them too heavy to float. Without memory leeches, who provide brains in exchange for blood, the mental abilities of abacus thinkers and omniglots would be equally impossible.

Then, of course, there are their descendants. About one person in sixteen has some sort of obvious quirk inherited from a shapeshifting ancestor, however distant. Some call it the Shapeshifter's Curse. Many of its apparently random manifestations certainly seem like curses - there are tails that never stop growing, hearts that play hide-and-seek with doctors, and a bizarrely common variation that causes the random growth of extra teeth.**** It's harmless most of the time, though. Many people even consider it a gift. It also shows itself in unexpected wings, in perfect immune systems, in shifting kaleidoscope skin, in bodies that heal without scars when anyone else would die - sometimes even in immortality. Many inheritors of the Shapeshifter's Curse never age past a certain point. I've met people who have been thirty (physically, at least) for hundreds of years.*****

My own variation of the Curse has been useful, however slow and uncontrolled - a constant, gradual change that always seems to know what I'm going to need, wherever I find myself. In the Winter, I grow fur; in the swamp, I once grew gills. It's possible that the legends about the wandering of the Cursed are true, and I might have settled down in one place if I had a body that could settle down in one shape. I don't know. Without shapeshifters, though, I'm sure I'd be quite a different person.

Without shapeshifters, you probably wouldn't be reading this letter.

* Swarms of locusts come through Twokk occasionally, though it might be more correct to say that the town comes through them. The insatiable insects normally eat everything in sight. They're probably surprised when Twokk eats them instead.

** Another combination of plant and animal, by the way. The meatroots are enormous, turnips the size of mountains with roots of solid steak.

*** This is not the case now, of course, as the town no longer exists.

**** I have several myself. There are rumors of people who have even grown teeth on their eyeballs, but I suspect that this is hyperbole.

***** Whether they see it as a blessing or a curse after all that time depends heavily on the person.