From the Sentient Library
The Lamp at the Listening Desk
Some nights it burns lower, like it’s remembering. Steam curls from a cup left warm beside it. The shelves answer in whispers—pages turning themselves to the place you didn’t know you needed.
After a few miles, the wash opened into a broad dust plain. Here, one could hike all day, and the flat-topped rock buttes on the horizon would appear no taller than they had at the journey's onset. Esperidi was grateful for the cloud cover on the second day; it spared her some of the sun's glare. By the time she reached the outskirts of Magda's Oasis on the third afternoon, she'd emptied her waterskin.
Peace, or at least its facade, graced the Oasis. A few milky cumulus clouds lurched across the sky. The land’s instability was difficult to conceive while the honey mesquite trees swayed and the cactus wrens chirped contentedly.
Esperidi noticed that most of the settlement’s labor was done in the main thoroughfare. Buffalo roaming the Virgoda Plains and cattle from the more verdant pastures in the Savwain—like the land surrounding the Oasis—provided most Vandrene necessities: clothing (down to moccasins), meat, shelter, and bone and tooth ornaments.
Hides were smoked, stretched, and soaked in oily water to keep skins from hardening into rawhide. Other items were crafted with flax, such as the rush mats laid before the cavern-like adobe homes and the backrests for repose, woven of willow shoots and held up with wooden posts. Children labored as diligently as their elders, stirring pots, fleshing hides, weaving, and carving. They wore tunics and leggings of buffalo or buckskin. Many of the adult males, skin bronzed from the desert sun, were bare to the torso.
Ophia’s Sister-Soul - “Sajna of the Savwain Desert”
