Olga McArrow - Hot Obsidian

Seeing the lights of the city and hearing its distant murmur lifted the team’s spirits again. The Lifekeepers ran down the dune with a burst of boyish laughter, eager to reach Torgor, that shining diadem crowning the dark sands.

In the cold air, their every breath was a puff of white vapour that the desert hungrily snatched away the moment it appeared; their every step was a fleeting impression in the sand, soon erased by everlasting winds; their voices were devoid of echoes, swallowed by the dunes. The desert holds few memories…

“I heard that Kuldaganian nightlife is truly something!” said Lainuver. He was so cold that his teeth chattered, making speaking difficult, but he just couldn’t wait to share his excitement.

“Oh we’ll have fun there all right!” Oasis’s happy voice joined him in the dark. “I’m so sick of Firaskian curfews!”

“Sorry to disappoint you,” said Bala, “but Kuldaganian nights are mostly work, not fun. It’s just too hot there by day to do anything, so the locals mostly live by night.”

“Oh…” Oasis’s enthusiasm died in an instant. “And what about the city we’re going to from here? That ‘Border’? Is it just like Torgor?”

“No,” said Bala remembering his visit to Border five years ago. His speech became slow and thoughtful. “Border’s people are diurnal. It’s a bit like Firaska: a city with walls and a little army to defend them. They have desert raiders threatening them from one side and No-Man’s-Land bandits from the other. But there are no curfews, so ‘nightlife’ is a thing there, yes. I think you’ll like it!” He tried to sound cheerful and supportive but with the cold that cruel, even Bala couldn’t be his usual self.

Kuldagan is a land of mystery. Formally, it’s a part of the South but in terms of magic, it’s an anomaly. Torgor is the last city where magic is reliable; further north, casting spells is a gamble. The closer you are to Border, the city guarding the entrance to the No Man’s Land, the higher the stakes in that gamble are. That’s why no mage ever takes their Transvolo further than Torgor.

Torgor is a big, busy city, similar to Mirumir in many ways, zigarella smoke excluded. There are little shops, cafés, and dlars (local inns) on every corner and a spectacular market in the central square where all kinds of curiosities from around the world are sold.

The cult of Ancestors’ purity is still a thing in Torgor but it’s slowly fading, losing its influence to the massive multicultural flow of merchants and tourists passing through the city every day. Most of the Torgor locals still look somewhat like the city’s first people: Arnika who was a blue-eyed, brown-skinned redhead and Vadro, her husband, who had pale skin, grey eyes, and silver hair. But very few modern Torgorians are perfect copies of their Ancestors nowadays.

To everyone but Bala who had already been to Torgor, seeing so many similar faces seemed creepy. The boys couldn’t help commenting on that, though in very hushed voices not to be overheard by the locals.

Juel, trying to mend the team's morale, made an unusual decision upon their arrival at the city: he allowed his teammates to spend their money freely. They had saved a lot by having their own mage learn Transvolo instead of hiring a specialist and even earned some with Lainuver’s and Oasis’s shadow business, so he could allow such a gesture.

The trick worked like magic! Soon, Juel’s warriors were laughing again, happy with all the souvenirs, treats, and books they got from the market. But Juel himself couldn’t even crack a smile; in the gloomy light of his true mission, the whole world seemed dreary to the young Faizul. He left the others to their fun and went away to look for a caravan that would agree to take them along. Beyond Torgor, joining a caravan is the only sure way to reach another city alive; you don’t walk the dune sea alone unless you are a Wanderer.

To Juel’s teammates' credit, they didn’t forget about their duty amidst the fun and bought a set of proper desert clothes for every team member – thick, layered, woollen cloak, jacket, and trousers – to keep both daily heat and nightly cold at bay. Bala went through several dlars asking people everything about the desert and its “aren”, which meant much more than just “sand” in the local tongue. “Aren is sand, glass, and monolith,” Kuldaganians said, “but only Wanderers still remember how to tame the third – monolith – aspect.” That was an interesting but not very useful piece of information. The useful one was about maskaks. Bala told Irin everything about those creatures and stressed the importance of spotting and killing them in time so they wouldn’t tell their bandit masters about the approaching caravan. Irin took Bala’s warning very seriously and promised to be on alert. He even visited a local smithy and bought himself an extra hundred of arrows for the journey. Jet-black, with striped feathers and barbed arrowheads, they looked deadly.

That night, filled with shopping, asking around, looking around, and enjoying the exotic city, turned out to be so exhausting that the boys fell asleep in their rented room just where their exhaustion had caught up with each of them: at the table, on the floor, among the backpacks… Orion was snoring by the door where he had collapsed after stumbling over the doorstep. He had overestimated his stamina a bit while tasting local alcohol.

That was how Juel found his team after a rowdy night. For a while, the mighty Faizul just stood there, at a loss what to do, then looked at the lukewarm sky, sighed, and curled up in the nearest bed like a big, heavy cat. He knew he could trust his inner “clock” to wake him up in time. And he needed a nap after a sleepless night too.

Bala, the most responsible one of the lot, woke up even earlier than Juel and made a hurry-up breakfast for the team and a simple sobering potion for Orion.

Refreshed but still sleepy, the Lifekeepers paid for the room and headed to the gates to catch up with their caravan.

The merchant the caravan belonged to, an elderly woman, frowned as she saw the young warriors. That they were young, she knew (Juel had told her that), what she didn’t expect, though, was a gaggle of kids. She gave Juel a grim, reproachful look. He replied with ardent praise and swore that each of his teammates would be worth at least three bandits in a battle and that having a master archer in the caravan might even save them a battle altogether. That was the longest speech Juel’s teammates had ever heard from him. Their leader could be eloquent when he wanted! Finally, the old merchant nodded in approval. Lifekeepers did have a good reputation, even young ones, after all.

“My name is Ramayana Arnika-Vadro,” she introduced herself to the younger boys. “You are welcome to join my caravan. May our journey be an easy one.”

…Patience. Patience. Patience. This is the very first lesson a Lifekeeper must learn and they all do. Even Jarmin, a six-year-old, had learned his lesson of patience years ago, so he endured the hardships of the desert journey stoically, without even a pip, even though they were nearly killing him. His teammates and the merchants did everything they could to ease the little boy’s suffering. Ramayana allowed Jarmin to sit on one of her dunewalkers instead of walking the sands himself. Juel, Orion, Bala, and Lainuver shared their water with him. The younger Lifekeepers – Kosta, Pai, Milian, and Oasis (Irin just didn’t care) – wanted to share theirs as well but Juel forbade that. Those four were still too young, so depriving them of water would be a sure way to turn four capable warriors into helpless children. Jarmin’s troubles aside, the journey was going well, probably thanks to Irin who kept watching for maskak scouts as he had promised and shot them all at sight.

Caravans rarely go straight to Border; they usually take a little detour to one of the smaller cities to have a rest, trade a bit, and refill their water supplies. There are two such cities on the way from Torgor to Border: Aren-Castell and Aldaren-Turin. Ramayana Arnika-Vadro preferred the latter. Juel and his team didn’t care what she chose; water and rest were all they could think about then.

When Aldaren-Turin had come into view, everyone cheered, even Ramayana’s most seasoned followers. But their joy was a bit different, tinged with their knowledge of the true hardships that awaited them beyond the Turin-Castell crossroads.

“Aren-Castell” means “sand castle” in Kuldaganian; “Aldaren-Turin” means “battle turret” which sounds much more serious. Soon, the Lifekeepers saw why. Every Kuldaganian city is surrounded by a wall but only Aldaren-Turin’s wall is made of a pure monolith, which is aren in its third, known only to Wanderers, aspect. Even more: that wall looks like a remnant of some other structure, gargantuan in its size, possibly an ancient fortress, broken at its foundation and carried away by some monstrous force. Rami and Otis, the first people of Aldaren-Turin, founded their city in the ruins of that structure and called its jagged outline a wall. Even defeated, the unnamed “turin” protects people still…

“Their ‘turin’ sounds familiar to ‘turris’,” mused Milian. “How tall do you think that ancient thing had been? Orion?”

Orion dozed off again; during the journey, he had learned to do that while walking and abused his new skill shamelessly. He jerked his head up as he heard Milian’s call and stared at Aldaren-Turin’s wall for a while, thinking. Slowly, a familiar smile dawned on his tired face. A moment later, he was already tugging at Jarmin’s cloak to wake him up. Lulled by the dunewalker’s steady pace, the boy was sleeping tightly; he didn’t look very happy at being awakened like that. But Orion asked, “Hey, kid, want to hear a fairy-tale?”, changing Jarmin’s mood in an instant. The little boy smiled, very carefully, of course, so his dry lips would not crack again.

With Milian and Jarmin both ready to listen now, Orion began his tale. He didn’t approve of that pathos-filled tone most professional storytellers used, so his stories always had that flavour of sincere simplicity in them that his teammates liked. His speech flowing with a steady, graceful pace like a wide river, his tone, changing and dancing to give every event a flavour, every character a voice, his unfailing confidence – nothing betrayed the fact that he was thinking up his stories on the go, picking them up everywhere, like a curious toddler picks up colourful pebbles and seashells from the ground.

Right now, the “seashell”, picked up by Orion and turned into the story was Milian’s question about the ancient structure that used to be on top of Aldaren-Turin’s “wall”.

It happened in a faraway world where people were a lot like us in that their knowledge grew way faster than their self-awareness did. Such disbalance never ends well.

Those people believed that their world was created by gods and that the gods lived in the sky. Eventually, somebody came up with an idea of reaching the sky so people themselves could become gods. The idea turned out to be so strong, captivating, and infectious that it outlived its creator and kept spawning various cults for centuries. The Cult of the Tower was the strongest of them all.

For years, the cultists placed one row of stone blocks above the other, lifting incredible weights with their machines and magic. Countless generations lived and died for the sake of the crazy dream. From birth to death, the cultists toiled at the enormous building site, having little time for anything else. Eventually, the “unnecessary” things like love, games, poems, and songs were forgotten. Only one song, the howling song that helped them keep the rhythm while working, survived in the end. Love and friendship didn’t survive at all, replaced by the endless loyalty to the cult.