On the very bor­ders of the great South­ern deserts there abounded com­mu­ni­ties of farm­ers and herders, descen­dents of those tribes who cen­turies ago had dis­cov­ered fer­tile lands and set­tled there. They had long since for­got­ten the ways of their nomadic ances­tors, and only frag­ments of the old knowl­edge remained in sto­ries and songs. But oh, how they needed that old knowl­edge again now.

The desert was advanc­ing, and a series of drier and drier sum­mers had all but dec­i­mated their crops. Their ani­mals were starv­ing and dying, and the peo­ple them­selves fared no bet­ter. The approach­ing sum­mer was to be even worse than those that had come before it; so the omens said. Mad from hunger and heat, the peo­ple of the vil­lage tended their arid farms list­lessly, as if they had already given in to the death that would surely come to them soon.

One day, a woman gave birth to a son. There was not the cel­e­bra­tion that in years gone by would have been attended by the whole com­mu­nity. Instead, while their words were con­grat­u­la­tory, their eyes told their true feelings.

“That stu­pid woman,” the vil­lagers said in whis­pers between them­selves, “all she has done is cre­ated another mouth to feed.”

As time wore on and their hunger deep­ened, their whis­pers got louder. With her hus­band dead, the vil­lagers grew to resent her and her son, who only con­sumed food and gave lit­tle back to the com­mu­nity, more and more.

Even­tu­ally, the woman could not take the pres­sure any more. Wrap­ping her son in a blan­ket and hold­ing him close to her chest, she left her crum­bling home behind her and set out into the desert. The futil­ity, the cer­tain death, meant noth­ing to her. At least here she was free – free from the star­ing eyes of the vil­lage, free from con­dem­na­tion, free to die in peace.

And, three days into her direc­tion­less jour­ney as the sun beat down strongly onto the uncar­ing desert, she died in peace.

The hunters who had been track­ing her quickly caught up. At first they only noticed the woman, and they quickly gath­ered around to take any­thing use­ful that they could find in her trav­el­ling pack.

It was only as they rolled her body over to take her clothes as well that they found the boy lying beneath her – his eyes closed, too exhausted even to cry, but still alive.

Tak­ing all the metal and fab­ric that they had found, and car­ry­ing the boy, the hunters headed home.

The woman’s body, they left for the vultures.

The tribe were called the Ikzharoi-sa, which in their tongue meant “Chil­dren of the Wild Sky”, and they accepted the child as one of their own. He was named by the elder as Ka-kalra, or Flow­ing Sands, after the wind-rippled dune on which they found him.

Unlike his for­mer vil­lage, the Ikzharoi-sa were not hun­gry or dri­ven mad by their desert life. They used what food they hunted or scav­enged effi­ciently, and although their lives were not by any stretch of the imag­i­na­tion lux­u­ri­ous, it became all that Flow­ing Sands knew.

For six­teen long years he lived with the tribe, learn­ing to hunt and to scav­enge and to weave and to endure the harsh­ness of the desert con­di­tions. Believ­ing him­self to be fully a mem­ber of the Ikzharoi-sa, Flow­ing Sands did not realise the true nature of his ori­gins until late in his adolescence.

Their trav­els had brought them once more to the east­ern fringes of the desert, and it was decided amongst the men of the tribe that now was the time to show Flow­ing Sands the truth.

They took him to the remains of what had once been his vil­lage, now only a snad-blasted ruin. They told him of the farms and herds of the peo­ple who had lived there, and of the advanc­ing desert, and of the hot, dry fate that was to befall those who did not know the desert way of life.

But Flow­ing Sands did not feel him­self and the tribe to be supe­rior to these other peo­ple who had fallen vic­tim to the desert. Instead, he felt pity.

From that moment, Sands did not travel with his tribe. Instead, he set out on his own. What use, he felt, were the Ikzharoi-sa and their ways if they only ensured the sur­vival of them­selves? Out here on the bor­ders of the desert, peo­ple were dying from a lack of that knowledge.

He trav­elled east, from desert to savan­nah, from vil­lage to vil­lage, pass­ing on as much of what he knew to the local peo­ple as he could. In this way, he hoped to save as many as pos­si­ble to falling vic­tim to their own ignorance.

As months and years passed, Sands trav­elled fur­ther east and north. Whilst every day he learned about his sur­round­ings and passed on that infor­ma­tion to those to whom the infor­ma­tion might save their lives, his teach­ings gained more and more of a psy­cho­log­i­cal and even a mys­ti­cal edge.

Often when he found indi­vid­u­als and com­mu­ni­ties strug­gling with their sit­u­a­tion, he dis­cov­ered that what they needed was not prac­ti­cal infor­ma­tion about their envi­ron­ment, but some­thing else that he could teach instead. A way of life, a way of look­ing at the world, a way of build­ing strong com­mu­ni­ties from strong indi­vid­u­als. So it was this that he began to teach instead, for a while.

The fur­ther north he trav­elled, the more he encoun­tered reli­gions, which were at first some­what of a con­fus­ing thing to him. Whilst their ben­e­fits were clear, he wor­ried about their ten­dency to instruct com­mu­ni­ties to place their trust in some­thing far out­side of their every­day experience.

Another prob­lem of being fur­ther north and thus closer to the Empire was that of bet­ter trans­port. Although Sands him­self still pre­ferred to walk and to sleep wild, his rep­u­ta­tion pre­ceded him from vil­lage to town, and town to city, exag­ger­at­ing itself as it went.

From a sim­ple advi­sor on bushcraft and desert sur­vival, he had become first a guid­ance coun­sel­lor, then a wan­der­ing wise man, and even­tu­ally he had become a trav­el­ling priest in the minds of those who had not yet met him.

This became most appar­ent to him the first time he approached a walled city. He had never seen a dwelling so big, and as he strode towards it think­ing of all the prob­lems within it that he could solve, he was obliv­i­ous of the man­ner of greet­ing they would give him.

Rather than being wel­comed as in most places he had vis­ited, he was branded a heretic and shot at from the battlements.

Though he returned to the vil­lages and the small towns for a while, the city and the pre­sum­ably reli­gious delu­sions of its rulers con­tin­ued to haunt him. He resolved to return to that place, and before very long he got his chance.

When he befriended the own­ers of a strug­gling trade car­a­van, and taught them a route through the local woods that was less pop­u­lar with ban­dits, they asked how they could repay him.

Whilst it was uncom­mon of Flow­ing Sands to ask for any­thing besides bare essen­tials from those who offered, this time he had a desire that he was sur­prised to find that the traders agreed to fulfil.

“Smug­gle me into the city.”