The Grave Sands
My people have lived in this desert since the wheels of the world began to turn, and the vast majority of our ancestors stories says nothing about the Whispering Sands and yet, my father spoke of it more than his father, and his father before him. I speak of it more than all of them, perhaps combined. My children, I fear, will speak only of it.
-Qerin tribe leader
Deserts hunger in their own way. The sands seem to lap at water and blood in equal measure, pulling life from everything around it until only the most hardscrabble life remains. This is, of course, metaphor. A metaphor that can seem real at times as deserts shrink and expand into surrounding areas, destroying green life as it goes. It is not metaphor in the sands that whisper. If you are traveling across the desert and the grains beneath your fit turn from tan to black, you should turn around and leave the way you came, preferably without making a sound, lest the cursed desert hear you and follow you home. The Sands are ever so hungry, sapping water and blood as deserts do, but also magic and matter break down the longer that one remains exposed to the sands. The name comes from the soul puppets that the Sands conjure to distract and entrap, forever turning you around and around until you cannot remember where you entered the desert. Even its magical effects pale in concerning implication as its seeming predator-sentience. Why the land itself hunts, nor the method through which it does the things that it does, is a complete mystery. As is the origin of the place. All the more concerning is the consistent growth that the desert hs faced since the Great War, though no one can determine why that is.
Comments