The morning of their departure was cold. The wind bit at my skin as I stood outside the caves, watching as the small group of pioneers made their final preparations.

Kino stood with them, his pack slung over his shoulder, Krikhi at his side. They looked ready and determined.

I felt like I was watching my own shadow fade from his life.

I didn’t want to say goodbye. I didn’t want to stand there and watch him walk away, knowing that part of him would never come back, knowing that whatever we had before was changing into something I couldn’t control.

But I couldn’t just let him leave without saying something.

“Kino.”

He turned, ears perking up at the sound of my voice.

“Don’t die,” I said. The words came out rougher than I intended.

His mouth quirked into that lopsided grin, but there was something sad behind it. “Wouldn’t dream of it.”

I forced a grin of my own, though it felt like a mask stretched too tight. “If you do, I’m taking your share of the next mastyrial hunt.”

Kino let out a bark of laughter. “I knew you were just waiting for an excuse to steal my kill!”

And just like that, the tension broke, even if, just for a moment.

But the moment passed too quickly.

“Eitros.” Kino hesitated, then reached out, clasping my arm the way we always had, the way brothers did. “Take care of yourself, alright?”

I squeezed back, holding onto that brief, fleeting connection. “You too.”

And then he was gone, disappearing over the ridge with the others.

Soso’s Offer

I was still lost in thought when Soso found me. The wind-shaman never walked anywhere. He arrived, as if carried by the very gusts he claimed to follow.

“The winds are changing,” he said simply. “Kino is flying toward them. You are staying behind.”

I sighed. “What do you want, Soso?”

“To offer you a place where you won’t feel like you’re drowning in stone,” he said, stretching his arms. “My pack and part of the Wild Erdlu pack are merging. We will be moving often, traveling far. Not settling like Rabekela’s people.”

I frowned. The Wild Erdlu were famous among the tari for their ability to herd and tame erdlu, the tall, flightless birds of the desert. They had built a system unlike any other tari pack, living a life of movement rather than settling in caves.

“And you think I belong with them?”

Soso grinned. “I think you belong where the wind is free.”

He crouched beside me, tapping a claw against my forehead.

“You were never meant to live inside stone,” he murmured. “You think too much in straight lines. Like a man who believes the ground won’t shift beneath him.”

I bristled. “I am not—”

He laughed and waved me off. “No, you think you know. But you feel like someone who still holds onto walls. Let them go. The wind doesn’t need them, and neither do you.”

I did not answer him.

For all my time among the tari, I had never truly thought of where I belonged. I had followed Rabekela because her pack had saved me. I had lived in her caves because she had given me a place.

But now?

Kino had found his path. Krikhi had found hers. Even most refugees, struggling as they were, had found purpose in their new home.

But what about me?

The caves would never feel like home. That much I knew.

And Soso’s offer…

The idea of living among the Wild Erdlu, of traveling the wastes, of never being tied down again… that… that stirred something.

For the first time in a long while, I felt the weight of a real choice before me. Stay with Rabekela and continue to struggle in the darkness of the caves. Or follow Soso and let the wind carry me toward something unknown. The answer, I realized, had already been decided.

I turned to Soso, who grinned as if he already knew.

“When do we leave?” I asked.

He clapped his hands together and let out a wild laugh.

“Ah, the winds whisper! Tonight, Tail-less! We leave with the moons!”

And just like that, this chapter of my life in Okarath ended.

By that night, the moons Ral and Guthay hovered high in the night sky, their light bathing the gathered tari in a pale, ethereal glow. The pack, a newly forged collective of outcasts and believers, moved quickly yet quietly. Some adjusted the harnesses on their erdlu, securing supplies for the uncertain journey ahead. Others huddled near the fire, seeking comfort in its warmth and sipping the last of their rakra. The air was thick with the scent of charred wood, the tang of fermented drink, and the quiet murmurs of departure.

Kue’er spotted me first. He waved me over, his sharp grin flashing in the firelight. He stood beside two erdlu, their dark eyes blinking lazily in the night air.

“This one’s yours,” he grunted, pushing the reins of the larger beast into my hands. He kept the smaller one for himself, which suited him just fine. “Tried ridin’ these bastards a few times,” he admitted, clicking his teeth. “Still makes my tail wanna crawl up my own ass.” He let out a chittering laugh, shaking his head at his own fate.

I ran my fingers over the coarse skin of the erdlu, feeling its warmth beneath my palm before I swung myself onto the erdlu’s back, feeling its muscles shift beneath me. Then, Soso Y’Likolo’s voice cut through the air, filled with boundless amusement.

“Ah, Tail-less! I hope you are listening, for the wind is already singing!” Then, with a wink, he reached into his pouch and grabbed a handful of sand. With a sharp flick of his wrist, he cast it into the air, and just as he did, a gust of wind arrived, swirling the grains into twisting patterns before carrying them into the night. Soso lifted his staff to the sky, holding it aloft for a moment before slowly lowering it, pointing in the direction where the pack would ride.

The chimes fastened to his staff jingled as if in answer.

And so, beneath the light of the moons, I left behind a place of safety to follow a future I could barely understand.

A New Beginning

The desert made a liar of memory. I used to believe the pitch-black tunnels of Okarath would break my mind, but now I found myself longing for a cool ceiling of stone instead of an endless sky. The sun bled us dry by day, and the two pale moons mocked our sleeplessness by night. Even the proud Wild Erdlu handlers, cloaks of scavenged feathers flaring behind them, lost their jaunty strut by the fifth sunrise.

Soso alone stayed irrepressible. The Wind-touched shaman prowled the column, muttering to gusts no one else could hear and correcting our pace with cryptic flicks of his staff. “The wind counts your heartbeats, Tail-less! Slow them.” he told me after one brutal climb, as though exhaustion were a choice. His original pack members took the command literally, breaking into irregular halts that left the others muttering but too spent to complain. I knew that travel with Soso was a dance of sudden stops and inexplicable detours, but living it was another lesson entirely.

Kue’er fared the worst of us. In Okarath he had been loud, irreverent, and impossible to shame. However, the wastes silenced even him.

We paused beneath the shade of a bent stone outcrop, where the heat dulled just enough to breathe without pain. Kue’er’s children slumped against their packs, they all seemed on the verge of crying. His sat apart, fussing over their wrappings with exaggerated care, as if proper knots could shield them from the sun itself.

“Quit fussing over ‘em like they’re prize kanks at the market,” I said, easing down beside him.

He didn’t look up. “Little turds are still soft as rotten fruits. But the desert’s working on them.”

I crouched beside him, watching the eldest - Vritrik - with his sand-cracked paws and eyes that never stopped scanning the horizon.

“Working on all of us,” I muttered, brushing grit from my water gourd. “Doesn’t mean it’s making us better.”

He grunted. “City raised ‘em like cave rats that always skulk, hiding in some shadow or another. They need the wind to crack their bones straight. Need the heat to burn the soft right out of ‘em.” He gestured roughly at the children. “Give it two seasons of this, and they’ll be leaping rocks like the old packs. Long stride, light step; proper field-tari.”

I looked at him askance. “Field-tari? You mean like Soso’s old pack?”

He nodded, pride flickering in his eyes. “You saw them - tall as spears and fast as sand-devils; move like they’re made of wind and spite. Wasn’t breeding that made ‘em that way, wasn’t some fancy bloodline.” He tapped his temple with a gnarled claw. “Desert sculpts you, if you let it. Makes you into something the city never could.”

I looked at him.

Kue’er was a slab of a tari. Thick chest, broad paws, and the thickest neck I’ve seen on a tari. If the wind sculpted him, it must’ve used a shovel.

“But you don’t exactly float over dunes yourself,” I said, not unkindly.

He smirked without humor. “Think I don’t know I’m built like a damn brick shithouse? I’m an old Raam sewer-stone, friend. Made for tunnel fights and digging in trash, not dancing over sand like some pretty wind-rider. Came out all wrong for the surface.”

“So what makes you think they won’t?” I said, nodding toward his children. “Think a few scorched hides and cracked paws’ll turn them into those long-legged types?”

He looked at his children, now picking at the dried roots Soso had scrounged for them.

“Not the burns,” he said, voice dropping to seriousness once more. “Nature does it. Wind does it. Hunger, distance, all those things grinding you down day after day. Ain’t about what’s in a tari’s blood, it’s about what we let ourselves become.”

I didn’t answer right away. I’d seen enough to know the desert rarely gives anything. It takes, reshaping through pain and loss. I doubted Kue’er’s plan could work, although his belief didn’t seem to be a marginal one among the pack. If anything, they all seemed to take it for granted: tari were meant to be one with their environment. If they couldn’t shape it, they’d let themselves be transformed by it.

“You know what you’re doing here?” I finally said. “This is closer to faith than training.”

He shrugged, that crooked grin creeping back. “Faith, training, or desperation: call it whatever makes you sleep better. But I’ve seen what nature does to the tari who let it work.”

The next days would test his theory about transformation more than either of us would have liked.