Page Section Written 11/05/2025

MYRRAK

The Breath of the Wildfire

The first breath feels like you’ve swallowed a horizon.

Heat scours your throat, but the burn births clarity: ash, salt sweat, sunstone. Your lashes are sugared with grit. When you lick your teeth, you taste iron from an old split lip and the faint caramel of dates carried too far. The sky is a white drum; the wind plays it with hands of sand. Dunes heave like sleeping beasts. In the middle distance a cliffline of honeycomb basalt saws the world: the mouth of Myrrh’Tal.

You are on your feet before thought arrives. Stance sets itself: knees loose, hips ready, weight pitched forward as if argument were coming. Your shadow is long and thin, wavered by heat. A pale scar in the shape of a hooked crescent grins along your shoulder, molten ink from a rite passed through fire. It warms when the sun leans.

On the plain, the air wavers in the precise shape of a caravan that is not there. Bells you cannot see ring. Voices you cannot reach laugh and bargain and scold. The wind carries a fleck of saffron cloth that refuses to land. When it brushes your knuckles, it becomes ash.

You drop to a knee and press both palms to the crusted sand. The desert answers with a slow tap, as if your touch had knocked upon a door. Tap. A pause. Tap. Tap. The old Sand Laws return in a row of remembered imperatives: Yield is death. Fire is oath. Water is sacred even when it hates you. A cloud shadows the sun; your skin cools a single degree; vision widens.

On the basalt scarp, a silhouette stands, your height, your bearing, the flare of a cloak cut to the wind. They tilt their head. You feel a curl of humor not yours. A belt-knife you have not yet unwrapped nudges at your ribs as if reminding you it exists. You blink. The silhouette resolves into heat haze; the heat haze resolves into nothing.

Across your vision a sigil ghosts: three points joined by a lick of flame, the Ash Oath. Its lines insist on two truths at once: that endurance is love, and that love is sometimes a blade.

Behind you, the dunes hiss. You turn to meet what the desert sends.

When everything remembers you, will you remember yourself?

The wind veers; the scent of camp smoke threads the air, and the first choice rises like a mirage that will not fade.