On the first pass, as he followed one of three trails leading away from the city gates, Curdle marvelled less at the speed of his travel – which seemed sometimes to be on wings of wind and sometimes more upon the whims of the wind – than he did at the array that swept across his vision. 

The sand and sky were as they always had been. Nothing had displaced them. Yet, for all that it would have been an impossible task, the jinni might have believed it had someone told him then that a spirit or god had reached down while he was sleeping and turned every dune to glass. Not the clear, smooth panes that he had seen only three times in his whole life, no. There was form and shape and colour beneath him. Breath. And it spun together a thousand colours he could not name. He had caught glimpses of the same in the desert glass occasionally found by travellers, sparks trapped in time.

Fire annealed. 

The desert had somehow turned to light. 

Ahead of him, specks in that brightness, whorls of blues and greens and star-silver resolved themselves into mules and camels and oxen, humans and jinn, making their way across the sand. He could see the red-orange glow of hard light, magic, lingering beneath the sand stretched out behind them. It was the trail he’d followed from the gate, though the nearer he came, the brighter it grew. It formed a strange shell between the travellers and the glittering sand beneath their feet. And as he rushed past, wondering how he might even recognise that woman if he could not make out faces, that light shell flickered, foundering for a moment, and he saw one dark, jadestone silhouette that paused in the middle of a mincing bird step to turn towards him huge, round eyes the same bright light as the sand, looking right through him the way he could through them, and he fled upwards again on another rush of wind. There’d been no donkey in that group. 

As he rose, vista spreading once more beneath him, looking for the other three groups to cut across to them rather than go back to the city, he realised he did not know for sure that she had even left. That she would eventually, he’d had no doubt, but that it would be today… How could he know? He’d not bothered to ask. She likely would not even have told him. 

Well, two more caravans to search, and then he must go back if she was not in either. He did not know if getting too close to his body would pull him back to it or not, but if he had no other means of becoming himself, once more, it might be his best option. Or he could remain like this forever. It was not, in truth, an unenticing opportunity.

The next caravan, led by a male with a snake’s tongue, had some promise, but there were three in and around the cart pulled by one donkey, and a child in the other. The woman had not been a mother, so far as he’d been able to tell in their brief meeting. Motherly, she might have managed with anyone other than him, younger too, but not a mother. 

He flew high to find the last caravan, dazzling himself with the faint spray of clouds turned crystal, and spun in a dizzying spiral back down to the heated brightness of shattered stone when he finally spotted them. He left billowing cloth in his wake, and a briefly motionless jinni, staring like the deer she resembled before a slight rattle of the chain reminded her that the day was not yet done. One donkey, stolidly silver, and a woman of shifting, faceted sapphire in the cart. He passed again, slower, and recognised the broken magic around the urn before he did her, shrouded as she was. He’d not seen enough of her to recognise her shadow. But the urn was there, and he was nearly certain it had not changed hands either, though she must have found it. 

He thanked the North Wind that she’d done nothing with it yet, and lifted again to track them as the sun, a strangely dim orb to his eyeless sight, dipped towards the horizon. When they camped for the night, he would try to join them, if he could.

[hr]

He’d watched the night’s shadow steal across the sand, stretching over the light as though devouring it, and, briefly, he’d mourned the loss. But soon enough, the caravan had begun tiny fires that snapped and sparked like golden stars, though they covered only the tiniest fraction of visible desert, it was enough. And gradually, as he looked further, waiting for the travellers to tumble into sleep, he saw other tiny stars, other spots of life, wandering over the shadowed sand. There was life still.

Now, slowly, he drifted lower, and lower still. Until he was floating above Miria’s sleeping form. He reached out to her, but succeeded only in ruffling her covers. He tried to shout, to startle her awake that way, as though her waking up was somehow the key to his existence. But she did not hear him. Nor did anyone else, save, perhaps, the other jinn. Then, he sank too low and her breath caught him, drew him in. Not into her lungs, he was no use there, but into her Self. And he fell sideways through her, brushing past emotion and thought and dreams as they dragged at him in turn. Despite his earlier ease of movement, he learned too late that a lack of form gave him nothing with which to resist that pull. 

He was sent headlong into her sleeping mind.