Earlier this evening I wandered through Redthread Hollow alone because I could no longer tolerate sitting quietly inside the tent pretending the desert was not slowly reshaping all of us.
Deep Red exhausts people in subtle ways.
First conversation disappears.
Then laughter.
Then eventually even curiosity begins drying at the edges.
The camp itself was almost invisible beneath the evening sands.
Low red tents.
Small fires.
Thin figures moving slowly between shadows carrying water containers like sacred objects.
Everything here survives through restraint.
Even kindness feels measured carefully before being spent.
One of the Sandwalkers called out to me while I passed his tent.
At least—
I think he did.
Their voices always sound halfway between speech and breathing.
I hesitated briefly before approaching.
Not because he seemed dangerous.
Because Sandwalkers always make me feel slightly uncertain where humanity ends and adaptation begins.
Still, refusing someone inside a survival camp felt rude.
So eventually I entered.
He stared at the journal beneath my arm for several seconds before speaking.
“I rarely see travelers carry books,” he said quietly.
“Usually they carry trade goods. Or weapons.”
I explained that I was neither merchant nor hunter.
That I travel to collect stories.
Something changed in his expression after that.
Not surprise.
Recognition.
Then he invited me to sit and offered me food called sand brick.
After biting into it, I spent several moments genuinely uncertain whether I had been handed preserved rations or construction material.
I still finished it politely.
Mostly because survival inside Deep Red appears heavily dependent on not insulting people who own water.
For a while we simply listened to the wind outside.
Then eventually he asked:
“Would you hear a story?”
I nodded immediately.
He told me the story was ancient.
Passed down through generations as collateral for an unpaid debt.
I did not fully understand what that meant.
But he seemed relieved after I agreed to listen.
Then he began.
“In the early age years of the Monastery of the Open Palm, a quiet novice named Veyrak sought peace in silence and discipline.
But peace he never found.
During a bitter winter, as monks fell ill and prayers went unanswered, Veyrak learned something the others refused to see.
When his hand slipped into a prayer brazier and pain burned through him, his thoughts sharpened.
Fear vanished.
Doubt fell away.
In agony he felt clarity.
So he began to seek it.
What started as endurance became devotion.
Kneeling on stone until blood stained the floor.
Holding flame until the smell of burning flesh filled the hall.
When others begged him to stop, Veyrak asked them to strike him instead—
believing pain shared was pain understood.
He was exiled from the monastery.
Thus he left his old name behind and took a new one:
Ashenstride.
For he believed his former self had already burned away.
He learned that he was blessed by the Maiden of Pain.
Ashenstride wandered from village to village preaching that pain was the only honest prayer.
The desperate and broken followed him.
Scars became scripture.
Suffering became sacrament.
And when guards finally came to arrest him…
he did not flee.
He thanked them.
The beating should have killed him.
Instead—
it revealed something terrible.
With every blow, Ashenstride grew calmer.
Stronger.
The more pain he endured, the less human he became.
He did not fear weapons.
He welcomed them.
And the harder others tried to stop him, the closer he came to enlightenment.
The priests of pain and their followers grew stronger the more damage they suffered…
until one day they realized only the rest of nature itself could still hurt them.”
When the story ended, the tent became quiet again.
Only wind remained.
Then the Sandwalker spoke once more.
“Long ago,” he said softly, “one of our ancestors saved a traveler inside Deep Red.”
“A strange traveler.”
“He carried books.”
Something inside me tightened slightly at those words.
The Sandwalker explained that the traveler stayed with their people briefly after losing supplies during a sandstorm.
Ink.
Quills.
Travel equipment.
Even portions of his maps vanished beneath the storm.
Before leaving, the traveler apologized because he could no longer properly record their stories as promised.
But he swore something before departing.
“If I cannot return,” he told them,
“then my descendants will.”
The Sandwalker looked directly at my journal afterward.
“He said they would not return carrying goods.”
“He said they would not return carrying weapons.”
“Only books.”
For several seconds I could not speak.
Because suddenly—
I remembered another book.
An old leather journal resting quietly among countless others inside our family archives.
Never hidden.
Never forbidden.
Just…
treated differently.
I first read it when I was eight years old.
I barely understood anything inside it then.
The writing felt too precise.
Too observant.
Like someone desperately trying to preserve details before the world changed around them.
Most storytellers in my family refine stories naturally.
Shape them.
Smooth them into forms easier to carry.
But that journal felt different.
Less like storytelling.
More like witnessing.
Father jokingly calls it “the cursed book.”
Not because anything inside it is dangerous.
Because apparently every DeLuna who becomes strange reads it too early.
Including me.
According to Father, that ancestor could never decide which Council to join.
So eventually—
he left.
Not to abandon home.
To continue something he believed had already begun long before him.
I think…
that was the first time I truly understood why I wanted to travel too.
Not to discover something entirely new.
Not to become special.
Not even to escape Isla de la Luna.
I simply wanted to continue the journey someone else failed to finish.
The Sandwalker reached beside him afterward and carefully unwrapped something old from faded cloth.
Then he placed it into my hands.
A broken compass.
The needle no longer moved correctly.
The metal was worn smooth by age and sand.
“The debt has been repaid,” he said quietly.
At first I still did not fully understand.
Not until later tonight.
After returning to my tent.
After cleaning the object carefully beneath lantern light.
After turning it over slowly in my hands.
Then I saw it.
A tiny engraving nearly erased by time.
DeLuna.
For several seconds my heart genuinely stopped.
Not because the story was true.
Because suddenly—
the distance between past and present felt terrifyingly small.
That ancestor once stood beneath these same red skies.
Listened to these same winds.
Sat inside this same desert carrying the same family name written inside a journal no one expected to matter generations later.
And now somehow—
through storms…
through memory…
through unfinished promises carried by stranger.
his journey reached me anyway.
Ryn once told me my travels sometimes feel less like exploration and more like continuation.
At the time I laughed.
But tonight…
I think she may have understood something about me before I did.
I am not beginning a story.
I never was.
I am walking inside one already in progress.
One carried forward through journals.
Through memory.
Through people refusing to let certain promises disappear completely.
Perhaps that is what the DeLuna family truly preserves.
Not stories themselves.
But continuity.
The fire outside is quieter now.
Not smaller.
Just…
further away.
And somewhere beneath all this sand—
someone who walked this road long before me has finally arrived at the end of his promise.
Because after all this time—
I came back carrying a book.
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