The old man shook his head, watching the strangers stumble into the Stone Grove. Half dead, most of them, past caring that they entered a sacred place. One crumpled, unable to walk another step; another knelt beside her, breathing hard through his mouth. Foolish, wasting his breath’s moisture in the desert, but what else were they to do with those tiny nostrils?

One stayed upright through sheer will, glancing at the tall rocks surrounding the empty circle, eyes suspicious by moonlight. The old man smiled. Stubborn, that one. He must be the appointed guardian. And the others …

“Ngurra!” His wife’s whisper tickled his ear with delight. “Look! One of the Haomane-gaali.”

And so it was, tall and fair, wrought with such grace that thirst and hunger only stripped him to a translucent beauty, his Shaper’s intended essence. Ngurra clicked his tongue. Fair, yes, but could Haomane’s Children find water in the desert? No.

One of the strangers could, though; their old one—or at least, where he could not find it, he could compel it. And he’d done so, the old wizard. From Dry Basin to Lizard Rock, across the Basking Flats, he’d done it, calling drought-eaters from barren sand. The desert was leached where they had passed, struggling for survival. The old man felt it, himself; there, above his third rib, a dull ache where Thornbrake Bore had run dry.

“Did you see—?” his wife whispered.

“Shhh.” He hushed her. “Watch. They have found it.”

It was their old one, their wizard. He leaned on his staff, bowing his head. One hand fumbled beneath the moonlit spill of his beard, drawing forth the Soumanië. It shone like a red star in his hand. The wizard raised his head, gazing at the pile of rocks in the center of the Stone Grove. “It is here,” he said softly. “Ah, Haomane! The Unknown made Known. Blaise, Peldras, come.”

Together, they clambered over the rocks. What they found there, every member of the Yarru knew full well. A cleft, ringed round with rocks, opening onto unfathomable depths, and from it emerging a breath of water, heavy, with a strong mineral tang. A battered tin bucket, sitting atop an endless coil of rope. A faint sigh whispered around the Stone Grove.

“Is it … ?” asked the one called Blaise.

“It is the Well of the World and the Navel of Uru-Alat” The wizard’s voice held awe. “‘Try though they may, one and all, by no hand save the appointed Bearer …’” He halted his recitation. “Let us try, then, and see.”

Among the rocks surrounding Stone Grove, the Yarru chuckled, a soft, soughing sound, like the shifting of desert sands. Ngurra rested on his haunches, watching as the strangers fed the tin bucket into Birru-Uru-Alat, the hole at the center of the world. Down and down and down it went, on a coiling rope of thukka-vine. He counted the heartbeats, waiting as the rope uncoiled.

Down …

Down …

Down.