Twilight in the Rust-Dunes came not as an absence of light, but as a violent shift in color.
The bleached zinc sky bruised into deep indigo, then curdled into dark violet along the western rim. Within thirty minutes of the sun dipping behind the dunes, the heat crashed sixty degrees. The scorching red sand lost its heat to the clear stratosphere, turning into an endless sea of cold, iron-scented gravel that whispered in the rising northern wind.
The caravan had made camp in the deep trough of a crescent barchan dune. A natural tiered arena of sand sixty feet high that sheltered the two handcarts from the scouring gales.
A tiny fire of dried scrub-roots and camel dung burned in the center of the camp, casting flickers of orange light across the exhausted faces of the refugees. The children were already asleep. They were wrapped in wool blankets on the beds of the overturned barrows, their fever broken by the afternoon’s stone damp.
Ren sat six paces away from the fire, out on the open slope of the dune.
His legs were crossed, his scuffed cobbler’s boots resting in the cold sand. In his lap lay the three-stringed gourd resonator that Nomad Ren had lent him. The dried rind was cold and smooth, polished by decades of blowing sand.
