Fierlok and Sand

Squatting on their haunches, the fierlok cupped their narrow hands and scooped up some of the white desert sand. They held it up to me and said, “Weekin maykmanee foci from thees.”

“How? It’s only sand,” I said, and looked around nervously, adjusting my goggles. We had not passed any villages between here and West Edge, but that did not mean there were no people. This desert could be owned.

They shot me a look as if to ask if I was daft, and then something happened I had only heard about in stories. 

The sand in their hands began to glow, orange at first, and then brilliant white. A wall of intense heat pushed at me and I closed my eyes and backed away. The acrid smell of something burning filled my nostrils. When the light faded a moment later, I opened my eyes to see the fierlok held a clear, almost perfectly spherical, glass focus wreathed in blue fire. The heat seemed not to phase them at all. They blew out the licking flames, then held it up and looked through it. Their black eye magnified and stretched across its surface. Then, they wrapped it in a scrap of cloth and put it in their satchel.

“Thees maybee thee layst of thee puursands. Wee shulled payk mutchin satchulls entaykbaak.”

I nodded, swung the first of four empty leather valises around to my stomach and spent the next five minutes scooping fistfuls of the white sand into it. When it was full, I reached for another only to find they were already full, and heavy. I had not accounted for the weight, and fell on my back 

The fierlok approached, smiling vaguely, and offered a thin, three-fingered hand. Around the fingers of the other, a thick band of white sand grains swirled forming the infinity symbol in the air.

The bond this people had with sand – with the earth – was strange to me, but I was beginning to understand it. Until the sun swallowed it, this world belonged to them and those that came after. Me and my kind were holdouts in the ruins; relics of an age long gone. Our knowledge of this was now passed from generation to generation, and those who refused the Oath of the Meek, or broke it, were culled. 

The Oath and the culling were why I was in this mess in the first place.

I stood with the fierlok’s assistance, and handed them one of the valises to carry. As they reached for it, the bottom split open and a harpoon struck the desert floor between us, spraying sand into the side of my face. 

The fierlok’s obsidian eyes traced the trajectory of the projectile with supernatural speed. They pointed to the ridge about fifty yards away.

There were ten outcasts. Like many I had seen, they wore scrap metal armor covered in jagged spikes, but the gold face masks, and scalp ornamentation were unique to this group. 

The outcast with the harpoon gun, was reloading.

The fierlok’s orange hair crackled with blue arcs of electricity as they channeled the elemental power they used. Sand swirled in rings around us, forming into a high spout. The hair on my arms stood up, and the metal bolt on the end of my crossbow shocked me as I unholstered the weapon from my back.

Afterward, we left by the old, cracked, sand-blown road on which we had entered, now weighed down by satchels of sand, and ten gold plates pressed into the shape of human faces, strung on leather cords through the eyeholes. We would wash the blood from them when we returned home.