The Echoes of War: The Oath Among Ashes (5)
Chapter Five – The Song of the Desert
The silence of the desert was never true silence.
Bassel came to understand that truth on the day solitude became his only companion and survival the only lesson that mattered. He stood on the crest of a dune overlooking the valley where merchant caravans regrouped before venturing into the deeper reaches of Zayrhan. The morning sun transformed the rippling sands into an ocean of liquid ruby stretching to the horizon. The dead had stories to tell—if one knew how to listen, if one possessed the strength not to lose oneself in the chorus of lamentations.
“The desert does not lie, but men do.”
One of Keth’Miran’s sayings—the man who had acted as a father when Bassel’s own could not, the one who taught him to read the dunes and distinguish the songs of the desert from the whispers of his own madness. As a child, Bassel recited those words without understanding them, repeating them the way children repeat prayers to gods they do not know. Life taught him their meaning on a red-moon night, when he awoke with blood on his hands and a corpse at his feet. Since then, he had walked corridors that might exist only in his fractured mind, unable to trust his own memories, or even the solidity of the ground beneath his bare feet.
What do you do when your mind shows you things that may be real or false?
And what happens when you can no longer tell the difference—when you cannot even trust your own truth?
His golden eyes scanned the horizon, separating natural shadows from those that might conceal predators. The markings of the Morthak tribe covered the dark skin of his forearms: stylized serpents coiled around blazing suns, now slashed through by a straight scar—the mark of the exile.
Bassel closed his eyes.
The song of the desert reached him, those voices only he had heard since he was five, since the night he woke screaming in the dark. The other children avoided him.
“Whisperer,” they called him.
Perhaps they were right. Perhaps gift and madness shared the same root. How could one be certain that the voices in the wind were not merely echoes of a shattered mind?
It did not matter whom he asked; the answer lived within him, but the words to express it did not exist. There had been only one exception in the entire village.
Nazirah.
Nine years older than him, the only person besides Keth’Miran who did not treat him as an aberration. When Bassel murmured replies to voices no one else could hear, Nazirah would sit beside him and ask what they were saying. Her hands taught him how to braid his hair during afternoons when the heat forced everyone indoors. She was the one who stayed with him through nights when the voices would not let him sleep, singing to him until dawn.
And she was the one who saw him commit a crime.
If Bassel had known with certainty that he was guilty, he could have accepted his punishment. If he had known with certainty that he was innocent, he could have fought to clear his name. Neither option mattered when he himself did not know what had happened that night.
Whose hand was it that killed Keth’Miran?
Something was moving beneath the dunes.
Bassel opened his eyes and began his descent down the eastern face, sand sliding under his bare feet as rock formations rose in the distance. The vibration beneath the ground intensified, and Bassel stopped; small avalanches of sand spilled from beneath his feet into the void below, where a serpentine scar marred the surface of the valley.
Too irregular to be natural.
Too straight to be the work of the wind.
His feet reached the edge of the depression.
Bassel dropped to one knee in the sand as the vibration grew stronger, pounding against his dark skin like a second, buried heart. Something was approaching from below. He rose, his eyes sweeping the terrain, his right hand finding the hilt of his weapon.
It came with an explosion of sand.
The earth split open at the center of the winding scar, and from the depths emerged a dunamorte. Its bulbous form stretched nearly twenty meters from snout to tail tip. Black scales covered the folds of its segmented body; as it moved, the friction between them unleashed a deafening roar.
The symphony of the dunamorte. Also known as the symphony of death. Hundreds of men had lost their lives, lured by that melody. From its deformed skull protruded a single orb the size of a war chariot’s wheel, within which an orange light burned.
Bassel looked at it. For a fraction of a second, his knees weakened. He blinded himself with the bandages wrapped around his forearm. To gaze into that burning core for more than two seconds meant losing one’s sanity. More than five meant never waking again. Even with his eyes covered, the weight of its gaze pressed down upon him.
The dark greatsword slid free of its sheath, and Bassel raised it. The dunamorte attacked with a speed unbefitting its size; its head lunged toward him, jaws opening wide enough to swallow a house.
Bassel was no longer there.
The jaws slammed into the ground, fangs piercing hardened sand. When they withdrew, they left behind smoking craters from which an emerald-green liquid seeped, turning the sand into a bubbling, fetid paste.
Bassel completed his roll and rose into a defensive stance, the greatsword held upright. The scaled hide seemed impenetrable, but even the strongest armor had weak points. The tail burst from the sand. Bassel leapt. The impact pulverized the rocks where he had stood a second earlier, shards flying in every direction.
He landed on the creature’s back, his feet finding purchase on the slick scales as he drove the blade between two plates of its natural armor. The dunamorte roared and thrashed with such violence that Bassel had to cling to the hilt to avoid being flung away. He shoved with his entire body. The blade sank deeper, releasing a torrent of dark blood.
The dunamorte howled.
It hurled itself against a massive rock, sacrificing comfort for the chance to crush the insect that dared wound it. Bassel’s back slammed into stone. His grip loosened; the blade slid free as he tumbled across the rock’s rough surface.
When he came to a stop at the base, Bassel needed several seconds to reorient himself. The dunamorte slid backward, its body carving deep grooves in the sand as the wound along its spine remained open, dark fluid pouring out to form a steaming pool where it touched the ground.
Bassel rose, panting, one hand wrapping around the greatsword’s grip. He had barely straightened when the beast changed tactics. It began to circle—slow at first, but with each rotation the ring tightened, a scaly wall closing him in. With every revolution, its fangs spat venom into the sand, not to wound, but to contain. The poison tore at the surface, melting the grains into burning emerald sludge.
The space shrank until it was almost nonexistent.
Options vanished with every second. He could leap over the ring of venom, but the dunamorte was waiting—its posture betrayed it. As the creature completed the circle and reared for the final strike, Bassel saw it. Beneath the jaw, where the scales parted to allow movement, a strip of paler flesh. Softer. A target no larger than a man’s fist.
The beast lunged. Bassel sprang upward, his greatsword carving an arc toward the vulnerable point as the jaws opened to devour him.
The blade struck true.
It pierced the weak spot beneath the jaw, unleashing a geyser of dark blood that painted the sand. The creature roared, twisted, shook the ground.
Even as it died, the dunamorte spat venom toward Bassel’s torso. The droplets grazed his left side; the fabric of his tunic hissed and dissolved into blackened threads, but the flesh beneath remained untouched. The dunamorte convulsed a few final times before falling still. In death, it lay smaller—another inhabitant of the desert meeting its end beneath the sun. Perhaps a bit larger than average, but that no longer mattered.
All return to the sand—men and monsters alike. Even he would, one day.
Bassel approached the body and slung the greatsword across his back. The fight had drained more strength than expected; his legs trembled, his vision blurred at the edges, and the fingers of his left hand—the one that had brushed the venom—had gone numb.
It wasn’t the poison that troubled him.
“Another day when the voices refuse to be silent…
…"
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