With a brittle snap, the iron tire of the right wagon wheel struck a buried skull and cracked it like a dry gourd.
A cloud of rust-colored dust puffed from the dry clay, swirling across the tracks before the hot desert wind tore it apart.
Behind them, the ruined border castle of the Great Yong was already sinking below the eastern horizon.
Its watchtowers were hollow stone teeth, gutted by fire and clogged with drifting sand. The guard post guards who had manned those walls were long gone, their dried ribs protruding from the ditches like broken wicker baskets.
Ahead lay only the Western Desolation.
The dunes rose like stone-hard tidal waves, vast and waving, their crests sharp as scythe blades against the pale sky.
The sand here was not yellow.
It was the deep, rusted crimson of dried liver and powdered rust, ground down over ten thousand years from ferric stone and ancient bone.
