The wind spoke in grey. It whispered through the dunes like the sigh of a dying god, sifting cold ash over bones the world had long forgotten. Maira no longer felt her feet. She had walked until the pain had dissolved into the dull rhythm of breathing and falling and breathing again. The desert stretched endlessly — a sea of pale dust where even the sun feared to look too long. The air shimmered, thick with silence.
  Then she saw him. A shape in the storm — tall, still, black against the molten horizon. The wind bent away from him as though ashamed to touch his form. The Sage of Life Essence.