At the end of the crystal cave was a structure whose location I will not specify, it would not be right to help explorers go hunting for it, so I will leave it more mystery than fact. Indeed, the construct can hardly be believed as real when before ones own eyes.

Let me explain in a way that will allow a reader to understand, rather than the wonder Lucius experienced. He came from the outside in, seeing the sights in reverse order of importance. Understanding flows from the center, where water continually pours from the sky in a grand waterfall. There, it collects in a grand reservoir from which it can be siphoned this way or that, flooding fields and purging sewers. IT can be irrigated out to animals where crickets are flushed like herds of bison to fling themselves at the pecking maws of chickens.

There are grand ponds of manure, mud, and algae where thralls trudge and stir, mixing the mire to a loose fertilizer. Down from this are the fields and terraces, the rice paddies and grain patches. From here, Lucius at last understood where the base gruel rations had come from. The sunless desert was not bright or hot, but without any hint of night the plants were able to grow nearly as well as in Vassermark.

This grand foundation, this mosaic of engineered life, was as a quilt beneath the city. The denizens had cultivated palms and through arcane arts calcified them. Normally, the trunks of palm trees are considered as no more than chaff for construction. Their trunks splinter, fray, decay, and mold. To build even a meager two story building would be impossible with such material, but through the crafts of their local god, they managed. The still living trees had their essence reconstituted, hardened with resin and set like stone. Their boughs were knit together like woven baskets and laden with creeper vines and again and again, hardened.

Atop these semi-naturalistic pergola platforms sat the city. Huts and hovels, far cruder in make, design, and distribution, dotted the ancient trellises. In these pustules of rotting wood the thralls huddled, ate, defecated, and reproduced. The noise of the city was greater than any city in Vassermark save perhaps the heart of a port at midday, but the sounds hollering back and forth were not words. The ape creatures chanted and grunted, they mimed back at each other repeating each other's mantras of nonsense. Emotion existed only in tone, in grunt and roar.

The oasis city was truly a degenerate society. It was the still functioning infrastructure of the soliedar struggling to hold up soulless inheritors. Had I been there myself, I think I might have slain them all and burned their remnants to ash, but I refrained from joining my pupil’s journey for this very reason.

But this was not my playground, it was and perhaps to this day–I still have not gone down to see for myself–the playground of Anubi. Old even by my reckoning, he slumbered in the wastelands in exile, as far from the wolf goddess as he could go. His fight with her is not the appropriate subject of this text at this time, but needs to be noted to explain his figure.

Thrice the height of a man, his body still carried the strength that once fought the gods in memory only. Muscles were shrunken and gaunt, bulging from ebony skin. His fingers were spindly and slender, tapering to hard points still capable of the greatest crafting finesse, but seeming more delicate than the art of a sugar-spinning baker. The extremities of his body, legs and head both, were mutated by his exposure to Roma’s essence, fully canine.

Anubi awoke as they mounted the steps to his marble pavilion, not the clever constructions of the city but an elegant palace constructed at much expense. It wasn’t the padding of their sandals against the stone, but the trained trumpeters and drummers he kept at the outskirts. They struck up a tune as the three of them approached.

“Faster than I expected,” Anubi said, his mongrel mouth enunciating the Giordanan tongue without problem. The old god lounged upon his throne, looking Lucius over.

“My lord,” the priest said, falling to a knee and bowing his head. Lucius did not mirror the action, and to his surprise, Lupa did not either. “We were harried by the rebels and forced to delve through the caves for protection. We only made time because of the assistance of the water seeker.”

“That would be the creature you left behind, yes?” Anubi asked, gesturing in the direction of the main thrall herd–where Golden had been left.

“Yes, my lord.”

“Enough, I will copy your memories at leisure. Leave me, I wish to speak with the outsider. No, don’t worry. He doesn’t need to be bound. I am not so weak as to be afraid of a little peasant boy with a chip on his shoulder. Go on, before I accuse you of being too interested in him.”

“My lord,” Lupa said, bowing suddenly. History will never know for certain if she blushed at the accusation. Lucius flattered himself with the idea however. The two wastelanders retreated from their god, leaving the stranger as commanded.

For a moment, my pupil stood in front of the magical monster, hands clenching the old relic as he tried to make sense of Anubi. A godling he would have understood. So too a divine beast or an angel. Anubi was something else, but not something unfamiliar.

Once they were alone, Anubi leaned forward and grinned his jackal maw. “Tell me, how is Amurabi doing these days?”

“You’re the same as him.”

“I was. My path took me down a different life, and now I am steward of the shadowless lands. I don’t even know how long it has been. That toy you have, may I have it back? I built it some time ago. Years surely. Generations perhaps. It is so difficult with the apes. I can’t tell their age anymore. Often, I can’t tell them apart. Come now, Jarnpojka, you don’t have to be afraid of me. We’re on the same side.”

“Everyone beneath the sun says demons rule the wastelands.”

Anubi laughed. “They’re right, in a sense. Give it here.” Once he had the prosthetic, he spent a moment turning it over in the wan light and grinning. He muttered to himself and laughed about jokes long forgotten. “There we go. It still works. It’s a shame that swordsman died before I finished it,” he said as he slid his fingers into the contraption and played with the golden digits.

“You know, I suspected as much. Master would have told me if the lord of the sunless desert was a godling.”

Anubi laughed and held a hand to the sky. “A godling wouldn’t be drawn to such a desolate land. Tell me, you’ve spent weeks now traversing this realm and I believe you have been given the wits to think. Not even by cruelty. You were born with them and nurtured the old fashioned way. The seeds of discernment were planted in your skull and I would reap some of them. What do you think of this world without Helios?”

Lucius held his tongue until he formed his words, like any good schoolboy should. “This desert is like river sediment left to dry out.”

Anubi stroked his mutant jaw. “Go on.”

“There’s material and there’s creatures that don’t belong. Like they’ve washed up from elsewhere. Like the people, if you can call them that, who walk the desert but with no dogs. They are not chased by mice. Thus, they don’t beguile cats. There are no shepherd flocks, no ranching herds. There aren’t even fleas and ticks. The little things that torment men don’t survive here and it’s a wonder the two-legged ones do either. The fish seem poisonous when you can find them and most meat is from eating other intruders to the wastelands. I’ve heard it said that nature is a pyramid of predation and man cheated his way to the top(1) but here there doesn’t seem to be any foundation. It’s like those at the top are perpetually drowning, only able to keep their heads up by shoving one another down.”

Anubi nodded. “Not a bad assessment, but I believe you think the missing link lies at the little things. The fleas and ticks you mentioned. I thought your trek through the sand would have tipped you off. What is the difference between sand and soil, boy?”

“Nutrients and water retention?”

Anubi laughed again. “I can’t say that you’re wrong, but you’ve overlooked the reasoning, boy. This desert lacks the fundamental miracle of life. Consequently, the little grubs too small to be seen fail to find nourishment. Thus, they do not gnaw upon the sand. They do not suck elements from the air. Feces is not broken down but ossified. So the sand stays the sand. Plants struggle to grow. The little vermin find a dearth of food. Predators have no vermin and so on… So, it hardly makes sense that there are human-like creatures. Tell me what you think of Lupa, the hungering wolf.”

“The one who bit my chest off? I was worried my nipple wouldn’t grow back after she ate the thing.”

Anubi stroked his chin. “How curious. Your stigmata recognizes certain scars and vestigial features as part of your self, but not novel ones? You had it since birth and yet it did not stop your aging? I’m surprised you weren’t stuck as an eternal infant with a brain too soft to conceive of thought yet brimming with power like some kind of larval god.”

Lucius cleared his throat. “You are just like Amurabi, aren’t you?” he asked not quite under his breath. “Why do you want to know my opinion of the girl? Are you asking if I’m a man or something? She’s proud but caring. She is soft but swift. The only thing she lacks is an education but that is through no fault of her own but the depravity of this wasteland.”

Anubi leaned down, one elbow to his knee. “How does she compare to the women of your home?”

Lucius balked. “Well, my home? The land I must call home I have no fond memories of. The one woman I like from there was cast out and… if you mean more broadly of Vassermark, I would say that she compares quite favorably, but that may speak more of my distaste for the nobility. I have nothing bad to say about the common sister-wives of the land. If, however, I neglect the gem of Tavina, I may never hear the end of it. I have a certain obligation on that front.”

Anubi laughed. “An obligation you say? A little lord like you has an obligation to a woman? Amurabi surely didn’t teach you to value marriage. He sees no intrinsic value in it. So what does that mean? Is she with child? Ah! She is. Wonderful. I am a few centuries too old for that myself, at least the traditional way. Lupa, like most every human in these lands, can be considered a child of mine however. I’m afraid I’m not a very good father though. I’m no Helios.”

Lucius glanced about himself. The pavilion had no walls, but the flowing water had a certain way of consuming noise as it dissipated. He dared to ask, “Are you the one who made their stigmata?”

The demon god of the wastelands nodded. “Through blood and death, the compounding of logic and life and an imprinting of myself. ‘Twas I that crafted them from naught but flesh. Every one of them with power beyond their mind was born of dozens if not hundreds of deaths. It’s such a ghastly affair when there isn’t enough to go around. It leads to envy you know. Some can’t handle the evil that brought them into being but self hatred isn’t such an easy thing. They turn it outwards. They craft envy, and that is a very powerful force.”

Realization began to dawn on Lucius, on what he would have to do to secure the blessings of my kin and return victorious. The actions of the priest and of Lupa and the hounding of thrall packs. For the moment, he banished thoughts of the girl from his mind and set himself like the edge of a blade. He had no idea how I had managed to communicate with him from so far away, but he knew better than to put anything past me. With such a faith, he boldly asked, “Then, you need me to hunt down and kill your rebellious children, don’t you? Before they spill over and breach the peace.”

The cursed, mongrel soliedar, the one-time bane of the gods and now lord of sand, answered him. “Precisely.”

Second from the top, depending on how broadly the classifications are made.