Lucius' journey back to the east has little to be remarked upon. He had one run-in with what he thought to be a pirate ship, but the fishing vessel wasn’t worth their time. What had been intended as insult proved to be effective camouflage, at least for that role of the dice. When the Blazen Arrow was at last spotted, patrolling a certain lighthouse, they were able to signal it with a horn, some waving of flags, and were dragged aboard like refugees from a sunken ship. Captain Ayaz was given more than a fair wage and Golden was at least able to find some leisure proper.

To Lucius’ surprise, the Blazen Arrow had a woman for a captain, one Lady Raine Bellafont of the Order Ashcrow. She flitted about the deck, barking orders and patting rowmen on the shoulders while clad in half as much clothes as one would find decent. While she kept her hips and her breasts wrapped tight, everything else was bare and golden. Save for the divine sigils clad about her feet like sandals. A well-documented but rarely seen stigmata, [Waterwalker], that let her stroll across waves as easily as upon a deck.

“The gambling lion!” she cried out as she hauled Lucius aboard herself. Raine’s laughter was infectious, especially considering that if she wasn’t laughing then a flogging was about to occur.

“Glad to be aboard,” Lucius said as he glanced to the saber strapped to her hip.

“Have you ever been to the wastelands before, m’lord?” Raine asked as she took him to the wheel of the ship.

“No, only as far as Puerto Faro.”

She slapped him on the back with a grin. “You’re in for an experience of a lifetime I say. But I wont’ say you’re going to enjoy it.”

It was not long after he disembarked from the warship that Lucius began pining to see her carefree smile again, to feel the rocking ship and the sea breeze cooling him. The clarity of those memories gave him comfort, but it was to be a very long time before he saw her again. He told me after that if he had realized his time in the desert would be so long, he would have made the trip there more memorable. He would have burned the captain into his mind and drank deep of her to give him strength later.

As most people do, he took the present moment for granted. He whiled away his time only getting the barest of details about the woman in charge of ferrying him to the godless lands. He ate officer meals with her and Golden and he played games with the priestess who mixed their oils and said their prayers. He accepted a few spars with her, dancing upon the swaying deck with sailcloth wrapped blades.

In just a few short days, she delivered him to the sandstone jaws of the wastelands. They sailed into Mandible Bay, named after the pinching, needle-like streaks of land that shielded the harbor. Derelict lighthouses stood at either end to mark the gate, but neither was lit. The fuel of the land had long ago been stripped bare. Raymi’s expedition for ley, the year prior, had gone to the trouble of minor whaling, but the oil was burned up even before the meat was devoured.

Lucius had perhaps an inkling suspicion of what to expect as he was rowed to shore–there was no working dock. Golden’s insistence that everything would be neat and tidy only made sense to him much after the fact. Across the light chop of the harbor, peering to see an army waiting for him, the words prolonged the boy’s confusion.

It was when he stepped out of the rowboat and into the salt slop beach that he began to realize what had been done to him. Perhaps a dozen unwashed men, tawny and bearded, meandered from the mud walled hovels to greet him. They did not applaud, introduce themselves, or even salute.

“Where’s the army?” Lucius asked, trudging up the sand.

“Here and there,” one of them said. “Didn’t think it would be you again.”

“Of course it would be him,” another said, lifting up a bottle from his desert cloak to swig half-fermented moonshine with a stench enough to curl Lucius’ nose hairs. “He’s the reason we’re here.”

“Should’ve defected in Puerto Vida,” a third said, shaking his head and trudging back to the sandy enclave.

Lucius’ expression drew down as his memories began to place one man’s face after another. None of them had been remarkable. They hadn’t been sargeants or notable squad leaders, but they were the men he had led out of Puerto Faro the year before. They men who knew the true Lucius von Solhart and had witnessed Tyrion’s insubordination because Lucius was not the real nobleman.

Rather than confront the men, he spun to see the Blazen Arrow but the rowboat had already shoved off and shouting would not bring it back.

Golden laughed and threw an arm around his shoulders. “Come on, I said this would be neat and tidy. That means tidying up loose ends. It’s all part of the plan. You’ll just have to make do, you know? Be all the more heroic and tragic before rescuing the lovely bishop.”

Stranded on the southern continent without a single true ally, Lucius considered trying to kill the angel. He figured he had decent odds of it, but if the wastelands were as savage as he had been taught, there wasn’t a ship fit to sail on the entire coast, and not half as much wood as could build a raft.

He threw the angel’s arm off of himself and ran into the lost city. To call it even that should be a joke, but any map marking the harbor says as much. Over the last seven centuries, indeed even before though I wont’ bother trying to explain the time before humanity, dozens upon dozens of kingdoms, duchies, city-states and religious exiles had spotted Mandible Bay and thought it a good place to settle down. Indeed, so many ages of ruins layered upon one another and intermingled could only be wonderful proof that it was a fit site to settle. People had been doing it for centuries and surely the only reason nobody lived there was because of the savages attacking and burning. Human hubris always said that they wouldn't make the same mistakes as generations past. In defense of the Vassish, an armed military camp is much more easily defended than a city.

But, it does not feed itself well.

Imagine if you will row upon row of houses like gravestones, half buried in the sand. Every gust of air drags more of the powder into house and home. Leave a building for a week and you might not find the door. The basic act of trying to build anew requires digging in search of foundation, cracking through layers of false concrete. The belief that sandstone should be beneath the city sends every engineer to get his shovels and often they do find a flat bit of beige to unearth from the sand. On that they pile stones, pack on mud, add weight until the stone cracks, one corner tumbling into a sinkhole. If there is a bedrock beneath the sand, no one has ever found it and nothing short of divine intervention will ever allow a two story building.

Of course, the sand can be tolerated. The poor housing suffices. Worse than the dirty drudgery is the city’s lack of wood. The wastelands have a mirage like effect that makes scrub look like trees. Greenery turns out to be nothing more than cacti that burn out too quickly to heat a meal with–and the stench! Fresh water abounds, about half an hour’s trek to the south where sandstone bluffs rise and a few wellsprings have been cut, but walking there is asking for a snake to bite you. Most men choose to clad their legs and feet in leather, suffering the boiling heat to save themselves from venom.

To this point, I haven’t even mentioned the savages; the worst kind of predator. They walk on two feet like men but less than one in a hundred has a mind. There simply isn’t enough to go around in such a decrepit land and they envy foreigners for it. Magic is strewn about the wastelands, enough that they believe in it with religious fervor. For this, one belief often rises above all others: that wisdom can be stolen by consuming the brains of the other.

A perversion of the truth that magic can be stolen by consuming another. Their cannibalism brings no benefit to the world.

That diplomacy might work drove the bishop to these lands. Perhaps it might have worked if not for war.

An astute reader will realize at this point that at no point did I describe defensive structures. There was no wood for a palisade. Earthen walls were tried, but the sand smothered them. The closest that existed was a network of mud bunkers which were supposed to house men from the heat to act as a form of advanced warning, but such attention relies on the discipline of the soldiers.

When Lucius found the majority of them getting drunk on foul liquor and burning the barrels to boil a snake stew, he didn’t even have to ask if the watchtowers were manned, for he knew they were not.

Again, recognition slowly passed through the army, some two hundred strong by the looks of it. Each took a jab at a jape, taking turns quietly and respectfully as they said such things as, “The gambling lion.” “The lying gambler!” “The hero of Rackvidd!” “The bungler of Puerto Faro!” “The undying.” “The deserving to die.” “The breaker of chains.” “Should’ve been chained up and left behind.”

Lucius sucked in breath and roared at them, “Shut your mouths. The next man to speak I will cut down.”

Some of them might have taken the challenge, but these crudely imprisoned conscripts still remembered his fight against Tyrion, against Karakale, and they had heard of his duel against Medorosa. If any of them had been blessed with a stigmata that could contend with him, they would not have been abandoned in the wastelands. As such, they shut their mouths and listened.

Lucius pointed back to the sea, his eyes locking from one man’s gaze to the next, flitting as they looked away. “That ship was seen for miles around. You think they don’t know you’re here? The sunless are waiting. They’re biding their time until you can be taken with ease. The only reason you’ve been able to laze about like this is because they thought you would run out of food. Look at you, you’re already scavenging!”(1)

Lucius paused for a moment, refilling his lungs as more soldiers emerged from hovels, shadows, and sleep. “What they just saw was a VAssish ship, clouds upon the sea, deliver something to your camp. What do you think they are going to assume it was? Do you think they’re going to assume it was one man, barely tolerated by the rest of you?”

The answer was obvious only to the quicker witted among the men.

He drove the point home. “They’re going to assume you were just given food! Weapons! Liquor! All things they want for themselves. You think you’ve had it bad here? With shelters? They’ve been burying themselves in sand to stay cool. They’re seething at your shadows, at your wasteful fires. What do you think they are going to do now?” He paced down through the middle of the crowd, confident his words would hold them back. When he emerged the other side he turned and stood with his back to the south.

Bellowing once more, “To arms! We are going to be attacked!”

A few soldiers lifted up their arms and pointed beyond him, to where a sand twister had appeared upon the horizon. It spun and clashed against the desert, gouging a line through the sand as it ripped everything to the sky and drove straight at them.

“They’re coming!”

Snake stew is quite delicious, if one can remove the venom sacks.