Gooseflesh popped up all over my body at the use of my real name.
I tried to lower my gaze, to look away from that piercing knowledge, but… I couldn’t. I had the horrible sensation of falling. Right into those twin lights. Deeper and deeper, until I didn’t see the pink hue of the lantern, didn’t feel the rough wood of the floor.
I was falling, falling, falling…
And then a hot breeze whipped around me, and sand tickled my cheeks.
I blinked and turned my head, lips parting in shock.
I wasn’t in the Seer’s hut, though she still held my hands in her unwavering grip. When I looked out, I saw sand for miles and miles. Dunes stretching to meet the horizon.
“It was greed that brought you here,”Zarqa said in that same disturbing hiss. As she spoke, the wind intensified, kicking up the sand around us, stinging my skin.
But the Seer appeared unaffected. Her lit-up eyes stared, unblinking.“It is greed that will seek you out. Greed destroys, greed burns.”
The sand was nearly a cyclone around us, doing much more than stinging. It scraped over me so rapidly, it burned. Blood ran down my arms, and when I opened my mouth to scream, sand funneled in. Choking me, suffocating me.
I turned to run—my feet wouldn’t move. I looked down and saw that I was sinking. I jerked against the sand, but some unseen force kept me locked in place.
Zarqa’s grip on my hands became a vise. I cringed as the bones in my fingers groaned.
The sand was up to my knees, my thighs, my hips. It crushed my chest, and I couldn’t breathe. When I gasped for air, there was only sand.
And then the blaze of the sun vanished as I was swallowed up.
Silence. Deathly silence. A tomb’s silence.
Zarqa’s voice whispered by my ear,“But out of fire were you born, out of water were you found. To both must you return before all is razed to the ground.”
I lurched, digging into the sand. I didn’t know which way was up or down, but I dug and dug and dug. My nails cracked, my skin bled, my lungs burned. And still I dug and dug—
My head burst through the sand. I gasped and felt like sobbing when oxygen surged past my lips. I tried to open my eyes, but they stung with the sand cascading off my head.
I forced them open all the same.
Zarqa was gone. I wasn’t holding her hands anymore. But I was holdingsomething…
I held up my hand, and a chain unraveled, a large spherical pendant hanging from it. An amulet. A globe glinted at its center, reflecting a glare. I shielded my eyes with my hand and turned my head—
My jaw dropped.
To my right, at least a mile or two away, stood walls. Bright, metallic walls made of gold. They encircled a city. I could just make out the domed roof of a citadel at its center. It glinted against the sun’s rays, made of bright gold. Thewholecity was made of gold. I had never seen such a place before.
But I had heard stories of it. Legends. And so had King Zaid.
The Buried City. Filled with more riches than anyone could count even if they lived three lifetimes, meant to be paradise on earth. Within its walls, there was an abundance of livestock, water, shelter. There was no famine, no disease, no evil. No dehydration.
And it stoodright there.
But then a shadow loomed over me, stretching impossibly tall, a line of black coating me. Stomach dipping, I turned.
A being of darkness rose up behind me, like a shadow cometo life. It was giant, only its torso rising out of the sand as if the world couldn’t contain its full form. I craned my head far back but couldn’t make out its eyes—if it even had any.
“Hello, Samira,” it greeted me. Its voice was an indistinguishable wheeze, rasped out with great effort, a person’s dying breath.
A chill passed over me. This being knew me. “Who are you?”
The shadow curved forward so it blocked out the sun, the sky, until I was bathed in its cold darkness. “You know who I am, Samira. But you do not know yourself. Let me show you.”
