Time was running out.

Kairen had been so happy that first morning after the storm. It wasn’t just a single person who acknowledged his existence, but the whole tribe made an effort to pay attention to him and to what he was trying to say. Even if they couldn’t see or hear him, they were giving him the attention he had been missing for the last few months. Kairen had spent most of the day floating around in a happy daze, feeling sparks of joy every time a nomad decided to talk with a friend about what was happening.

Working with the rats that night quickly brought Kairen back to reality. He had been able to convey the concepts of the arrow and the frowning face easily enough, and days of practicing had honed the rats’ skills to the point they could easily draw quite legible arrows. That skill did not extend to any of the other shapes Kairen wanted them to work on.

The rats definitely did not understand the words Kairen was speaking. For most sentences they understood the gist of what he was saying and that was sufficient for them to follow through with his commands, but the specific detail necessary for Kairen’s plan to work simply didn’t translate. Kairen’s first attempt at having a rat draw a curved line had led to the rodent drawing an arrow where he indicated, before looking towards him for approval.

“Good job, Epsilon.” Kairen sighed after checking the markings on the rat’s back. He let Epsilon scamper away to take care of its own business while Kairen sat down and rethought his plans. The rats had done an amazing job of learning to draw arrows with minimal instruction from Kairen. Unfortunately, Kairen had no way to explain that he wanted them to do things differently now. He could still micromanage a rat or two, guiding them inch by inch as they drew out shapes, but he wouldn’t be able to direct them to work on an are independently without things going wrong. Kairen was sure he could eventually break the rats of their arrow habit, but it would take time, time that he wasn’t sure he had.

In the end Kairen simply sent the majority of the rats on their way. Hopefully, a day or two of not digging out arrows would help distance his next task for them in their memories, but Kairen wasn’t optimistic about that outcome.

Instead, he focused his attention on Alpha and Gamma and got work directing them to carefully mark out and dig specific sections. By the time Dawn arrived the art was finished, the rats were exhausted, and Kairen’s frustration levels had reached a boiling point.

The nomads’ confusion over what he was trying to tell them was simply the spark that lit the bonfire. If any of the rats had been out and about instead of sleeping, Kairen’s rampage would have terrified them into hiding in their den until he calmed down. Instead Kairen was forced to vent his anger on an empty world that he couldn’t even affect. Screaming as loudly as possible, Kairen stormed into the pool where he began to pound his fists into the water. There wasn’t any satisfying splashing of water flying everywhere, but the tactile sensation of his fists pushing against water did help ground him, helped remind him that there was more to his existence than just his emotions.

Thoroughly spent, Kairen spent the rest of the day alternating between napping and sulking in abandoned corners of the Oasis, not wanting to interact with the poor guessers if he could avoid it.

Kairen had some more success the following night. Between resting and calming down emotionally he put some thought as to what message he wanted to convey, now that he had a better idea of his artistic limitations and the intuitive abilities of his target audience. It wasn’t that the nomads were dumb, they simply didn’t have the context needed to make the connections that Kairen had wanted them to. Kairen was simply a mysterious spirit to them, and as far as the nomads were concerned his possible motivations ranged from protecting animals to needing ritual sex observed in his name. While Kairen wasn’t opposed to the latter, he did note that the primary proponents of such a plan were the young unmarried men and older boys, not anyone with any real clout in the tribe.

With the need to keep his message as simple and as unambiguous as possible Kairen tossed away the details of his warning. He could try and clue the nomads into the act that Zar was a threat later if he had time. His first goal was to simply warn them that they needed to be ready to fight.

Instead of drawing multiple symbols, Kairen focused his efforts on a scaled-up version of a single symbol. An axe crossing blades with a sword. The larger image took the rats longer to draw, but it allowed for details to be made far more easily. If the nomads made the connection between the axe Kairen had drawn and the one Zar carried around Kairen would be ecstatic, but he would settle for getting a simpler warning across for the moment.

Having only a single image to argue over worked. Not quite as well as Kairen wanted, but starting that afternoon the guards were scheduled to double their practice time and keep their weapons always at hand. Unfortunately, there was enough support for alternate interpretations of what Kairen wanted that a few weapons were gifted to him at the altar, before being tossed into the pond. The weapons weren’t messy enough to count as dirt, but his magic wore away at them all the same. It would take a day or two, but the weapons would vanish eventually. While Kairen was grateful for the additional upgrade points he received from the offerings he wished he could retrieve the weapons and give them back to the nomads. A missing spear didn’t help anyone, not when you needed it to keep a mercenary from charging you and ripping your guts out.

Unfortunately for Kairen’s plan to expand on his warning, several of the nomads had become curious as to how the warnings were being carved into the dirt. Instead of going to bed at a proper time like normal people, or even staying at the camp and keeping an eye out like the guards, the idiots had set up a small fire near the altar where they could keep a midnight vigil to spot the carvings as soon as they were formed. Of course, having humans clearly visible nearby made it impossible for Kairen to convince the rats to actually work for him. It took two days of no messages and missing sleep before the eager nomads gave up their self-appointed mission, time which Kairen desperately wished he could recover.

The time wasn’t completely wasted, as Kairen did his best to interfere with the magic Ramses was casting. His efforts at irritating Ramses and somehow having the nomads see his dislike of the mage hadn’t really paid off. While it definitely took Ramses more effort to cast his spells every time Kairen came around, the mage’s ready-made explanation for the fluctuating difficulty and the nomads lack of magical education meant that no one really questioned the oddities involved. That didn’t mean Kairen was about to stop. Even if the mage was working on building small houses now instead of the chest high wall, Kairen still took pleasure in seeing Ramses sweat and grimace as he tried to complete his spells.

Despite the pleasant diversion Kairen was more than ready to switch focuses back towards writing out messages once the observers retired from their duty. With the nomads knowing that a fight was coming, Kairen did his best to warn them who their enemy was. It was a slow process. At first the nomads believed he was giving them a completely new message due to the gap in drawing anything, and didn’t put the effort in to associate his representation of Zar with the weapons he had previously displayed.

Correcting that mistake took another night, and even then most people didn’t think it was Zar he was referring to. They at least got the message that they would be fighting people when the time came, but missed the clues he had planted towards Zar's identity.

At least they didn't go ahead with the gladiatorial combat idea.