For three months Kael Sunborne had chased one image from his dreams: a black spire of rock, split down the middle, standing alone in the sand. Someone had planted that vision in his head and driven him into the dunes. He meant to find the spire, and then find who sent him. This morning he saw it at last, a dark shape on the horizon. Then the wind rose. The sandstorm swallowed the spire in minutes. Grit stung Kael's eyes and blue sky turned brown. His camel groaned and folded its legs, hiding its face against his knee. He pressed his hand to its warm neck and waited. When the wind finally died, the horizon was smooth. The split rock was gone, buried under fresh dunes. Kael's stomach dropped. He had crossed too much desert to lose it now. Every hour the shifting sand would bury the landmark deeper, until no digging could reach it. He had one guess where the spire stood, and one chance to be right. He knelt and studied the ground. Sand looks the same everywhere. Then a small orange fox trotted from behind the camel, ears sharp, tail high. It had followed him for weeks, always circling wherever water or buried things lay hidden. Now it stopped, sniffed, and pawed the sand in one exact spot. Its eyes fixed on Kael like a question. "You feel it, don't you," Kael said. He trusted the animal more than his own eyes. A lizard scuttled to the same patch and pressed its pale belly flat against the sand. Its throat pulsed. It held there, still, reading the tremor of something solid deep below. The fox and the lizard agreed. Kael marked the spot. He pulled the pale bone shovel from his pack. The blade was cracked and old, cut from some animal's shoulder, but the edge still bit. Kael drove it down and threw sand behind him. His arms burned. Sweat ran into his eyes. Each scoop slid half back into the hole. He dug faster, racing the wind that was already picking up again. Half an arm deep, the blade struck stone. Kael dropped to his knees and cleared the sand with his hands. Black rock. Cold, smooth, and split down the middle, exactly like his dream. He had found it. But carved into the buried face were words, and they were in his own handwriting. "Turn back before it wakes." Kael stared. He had never been here before. He would have remembered writing that. He rocked back on his heels. The vision had not been planted by a stranger. Somehow, it had come from him. The fox pressed against his side and whined. Kael wiped the last grit from the carved letters and made his choice. He would not turn back. He would find out who he had been when he wrote them.