Kesai Driftwalker's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Kesai Driftwalker had walked the caldera's ridges for nine days, and the tooth-rod in their hand had stayed dead the whole time. The rod was carved from a giant's tooth, cracked and yellowed, bound at the grip with dark cord. It should have twitched near the buried titan. It should have shown Kesai where the great skull lay under the sand. Without the skull, no waking ritual could begin, and waking the sleeping titan was the only reason Kesai had come this far. They knelt at a ridge of pale stone that curved like a huge rib. Four narrow eyes swept the dunes below. Kesai lifted the rod and turned slowly. Nothing. The charms on their crooked staff clinked in the wind. Nine days of searching, and the bones under their feet gave no answer. A dry cough of a bark broke the quiet. Kesai's hound trotted up the slope, ribs showing pale as old bone through thin fur. The animal had followed Kesai across the flats since Kesai was a child. Now it stopped and stared past the ridge, ears stiff, tail low. "What is it?" Kesai asked. The hound growled at a crack in the stone. Kesai leaned close. Inside the dark gap, tiny shapes hung upside down. Bats, no bigger than a fist, with sandy fur and skulls for faces. They stirred and squeaked. As Kesai watched, one dropped free and flew out over the dunes, then another, and another, until a small stream of them poured south into the falling light. Kesai remembered an old saying from the drift camps. These bats nested only in hollow bone. They roosted in the caves of dead giants. If they flew home each dusk, they flew to the skull. Kesai ran after them. The hound loped alongside. The tooth-rod stayed cold in their fist for a hundred paces, then two hundred. Then it jerked. The pull came slow at first, a faint tug forward. Kesai gripped harder. The rod leaned toward a low basin where strange plants grew: glassy reeds, black fan-shaped leaves, and a fat water-bulb heavy with stored rain. The bats vanished into a black mouth in the rock beyond the plants. Inside the mouth, the rod bucked hard and warm. Kesai stepped through and stopped. A vast curve of bone rose above them, taller than any tent, pale and smooth, pierced by two hollow eye-sockets wide enough to walk through. The titan's skull. A small translucent creature perched on a ridge of bone, its crystal fins catching the last light, watching Kesai with huge black eyes. Kesai pressed a palm to the ancient bone. It was warm. But the skull was sealed. Every socket, every seam, every crack was packed tight with hardened sand and stone, fused as if by long-dead hands. The waking ritual needed an open mouth to speak into. Kesai had found the skull. Now they had to break into it.