Page 49 of Heart of the Desert

“There are bone spiders and gravehawks over here,” Dhara commented from the stone slab she observed a few feet away. She used her sleeve to wipe away accumulated sand and dirt and look closer.

“I believe the pictures tell the story of the first man to cross the desert and win her Heart,” Erix said, pausing behind Aderyn and me. “Although, I admit, Lord Alasdar and I did not study them like we should have. I was preoccupied with the broken altar. Perhaps if I had looked closer, I would have some idea of what to do with the broken Heart.”

“Well, we’re here now,” I pointed out with a determined lift of my chin. “And if the answers are in this tale, then we will find them.”

I continued to trace the etchings into the next drawing, finding a figure facing off against a long feline creature. “Here is the first man fighting a sichat. And here he is again killing a bone spider.”

Aderyn leaned in and shook her head. “No, that’s a different person. The clothing is different and the design of the saber. This one has curved quillons, but this one has a basket handle.”

“Maybe the artist just took liberties.” I shrugged.

“No,” Dhara said from across the temple. “There are definitely two people. Here they are approaching the ocean and there are two horses.”

Erix stepped away to look where she pointed. I kept tracing the story along, finding that indeed, two distinct figures faced off against foe after foe until I reached the image Dhara indicated. Two horses bearing riders rode toward the sun rising over the ocean. They held hands.

“It’s a couple. A man and a woman,” Dhara said victoriously.

Indeed, in the next picture, the two figures kneeled facing each other with their hoods pushed back. The details of their features were lost to time, but their shapes and the long tail of a braid blowing in the wind indicated Dhara was right.

I reached out and touched the very center of the picture, where their hands were clasped and something dripped from them. Blood.

They were married, just the way Erix and I had been, kneeling alone in the sand and joining our life force together. I had heard the crashing of waves and felt the ocean breeze on my face when our blood dripped onto the sand. My brow furrowed as I wondered what it could all mean.

Just next to the picture of the wedding in the sand was something that made my breath catch. The couple stood before a familiar temple—its grand scale and beauty in contrast to the ruins we stood in now—and held between them was a round object. If the engravings had ever been painted, the color had worn off long ago, but I imagined it glittering the rich red of freshly spilled blood.

This had to be the tale of the Heart. I leaned in closer, my nose nearly brushing the rough stones as if I could dive into the scene and demand answers. If there were any to be found though, I did not seem to have the wisdom to glean them from the simple illustration. The Heart was notably absent from the next picture.

However, where all the pictures until now had focused only on the two figures, this one depicted them riding at the head of a large group of riders, seemingly all ages and sizes.

“They became first lords of the clans,” Dhara breathed beside me, all of us having tracked the story along the wall. She reached out and ran the pad of her pointer finger delicately over the woman’s figure, where they led the caravan.

“Clan, singular,” Erix noted. “It appears there was only one clan in the beginning, led by the two of them together.”

“They must have divided over time into the clans we know today,” Dhara observed.

“The riders of the desert don’t seem to like to stay together,” Aderyn huffed, and Dhara narrowed her eyes at her, but didn’t seem truly frustrated by the barb.

“They were all one people once, though,” I murmured thoughtfully. These two riders, whoever they were, tamed the desert and brought them all together.

A bolt of frustration ran down the tether in my belly, shocking me with its sudden intensity after the distraction of my curiosity.

“It tells nothing of the Heart, though,” Erix growled.

My stomach sank. He was right.

“Maybe we missed something,” I said, looking around to see if there were any etchings we had yet to examine. “Or there is some hidden meaning.”

“Some of the wall is collapsed.” Aderyn pointed to the crumbling corner. “Perhaps we can uncover those pieces and find more answers.”

It was a sound plan, but something about the temple felt empty, the same way that I had expected the broken Heart to be overflowing with the desert’s magic, only to touch it and find it shockingly mundane. The two halves lay heavy in my pocket like nothing but a sparkly rock, fit only to be used in my sling for hunting.

I shook myself from that hopeless line of thought. We had not journeyed this far to be discouraged so quickly. I trailed Erix over to the broken wall, hoping to rearrange the tumbled slabs into some semblance of their original form.

Before I could take two steps, Elion’s voice drifted in through the open ceiling.

“Come out. Hurry!”

The urgency in his tone lit a fire in my veins. The trials of the desert should abate when we reached the ocean, according to Erix’s prior experience. But the desert’s laws seemed to no longer apply these days.