Location:The Eastern Margin, Four Days beyond Zhū'kethara
Date/Time:18 Ashwhisper, 9942 AZI — before first light
Realm:Upper Realm
The sand here did not hiss.
Ren had crossed the eastern margin perhaps thirty times in ten thousand years, and every one of those crossings had come with the same sound underneath it — a dry running whisper as the top skin of the dune moved with the night wind, grain over grain, the noise a realm makes when it is quietly getting bigger. He had heard it as a boy. He had heard it the year the margin took the last of the northern holdings and the families came down the road with their doors on carts, because a door was worth more than a house you could not carry.
Tonight it had stopped.
