Chapter Text
Sand is not a strange thing to wake up to. Gaara is from the desert. Sand isn’t so much a hazard as it is a fact of life. The sun is hot; water is valuable; there is sand.
The strangest part of waking up in sand is the waking up. Sleeping is not a luxury Gaara experiences—unconsciousness invokes Shukaku, and Shukaku rarely stops a rampage for anything short of Rasa forcing his hand.
When the sand dome collapses, there are no bodies nearby. There isn’t anything nearby. Suna is nowhere in sight, and his sand isn’t bloody or full of fleshy debris.
Gaara doesn’t understand. He reaches out, testing, and calls the sand to him. It comes as easily as ever. A distant howl informs him that Shukaku had not been in charge during his blackout. If he had, there would be much more rage and shrieking at losing control.
This desert… is not Gaara’s desert. There’s nothing to tell him so, but he knows. Somehow. This is not his desert. This isn’t his country. Suna is nowhere close.
His siblings… nowhere close.
Gaara frowns. He starts walking. If he goes far enough in one direction, he might reach the edge of the desert, or find a traveler to point him the right way. The way home. For the first time, Suna is home—he can’t leave it now.
He needs to get back.
—
At first, Iften thinks he’s hallucinating. Once he figures out he’s not—when the figure gets close enough for him to start seeing some detail—he thinks for a horrifying few moments that there’s been another Ebeggi.
Of course, every tribe—and he does mean every tribe—in the Si Wong had heard about Ebeggi, but Iften had seen him that night, all those years ago.
He’d been one of the unlucky bastards who’d watched Ebeggi stumble back into camp sans Agerzam, Aldjya, and the sandsailer they’d left on. If Iften could go back fifteen years and make himself go out scouting, he would. If he had to take himself all the way out to the fucking Si Wong Rock, he would.
Anything to spare himself the sight of Ebeggi’s hair dyed so completely red that when they finally found the scores of torn flesh in his scalp, they looked no different from the rest of his head.
Iften can still see it now, over a decade later, like it’s been carved into the backs of his eyelids. He thinks there’s been another Ebeggi because the figure approaching has hair the exact same color. It’s why he stops.
Well, it’s part of why he stops. Winaruz is more likely than he is to pick up strays and lost travelers. It sits with him wrong to leave them out in the sand when he sees them, though.
But there’s also that… they never found out what happened to Ebeggi. No one ever found Agerzam or Aldjya, or their sandsailer. Not even scraps or blood. And Ebeggi never spoke another word, not until he died of his injuries three days later.
So Iften stops. And it turns out that it’s not another Ebeggi; it’s a child, hair red as blood but not matted with it, with a character stamped in the same color on his porcelain forehead.
Desert spirit, he thinks, mouth suddenly dry.
“Which way to Suna,” It says.
Iften swallows hard. “Where?”
“... Suna. The village in the sand.”
Could that be any less specific, Iften thinks, and then breaks into a cold sweat at thinking so in front of a spirit.
“The- uh, the oasis? Misty Palm?”
Its eyes narrow. Iften flinches. “Show me,” It demands.
Iften hurries to agree.
—
Iften doesn’t recognize the boys outside the Misty Palm, but their clothing marks them as Hami. The spirit—it hadn’t bothered to give him a name, if it even has one, and Iften isn’t stupid enough to give it one without permission—has its legs dangling off the side of the sandsailer when they arrive.
One of the Hami-te gapes clearly even behind his face coverings. “Ebeggi?” He whispers with a wide-eyed kind of horror. He’s definitely not old enough to remember the actual event, but he likely grew up on stories about it.
(Iften hates those stories. They always make his skin crawl, because they turn Ebeggi into something he wasn’t. Better not sneak out at night; you’ll end up like that Ebeggi.
But Ebeggi hadn’t been the type to take off on a joy ride in the middle of the night. Iften hadn’t known his partners quite as well, but they hadn’t ever seemed the type either. Iften has no idea what the fuck any of them were doing that night, but it wasn’t sneaking away to drink or make out or whatever.)
“No,” Iften says shortly. The spirit looks at the Misty Palms entrance, expression as flat as when he’d first picked it up.
“This isn’t Suna,” It says.
Iften’s knee-jerk reaction is to apologize, but a different Hami boy speaks up first. “The hell are you?”
“I don’t think the Hami appreciate you disrespecting their name,” Iften replies coldly, to mask the lurch of panic in his chest. “You’re not even fully fledged members of your tribe yet, and still your arrogance keeps you from recognizing that which is superior to you.”
The spirit tilts its head. The Hami boy curls his hands into fists. “What, you think just ‘cause you’re old as fucking dirt that you’re better than me?”
“No,” Iften says. “Clearly, your instructors have been remiss.” He turns to the spirit, clasping his hands behind his back to disguise their traitorous shaking. “Forgive his ignorance, great one. As for finding Suna… I don’t know things by the same names as you. Is Suna one of the tribe camps?”
The spirit blinks. “... no. Suna is my village. I must return to it. This is not my desert. Where am I?”
The Hami boy stares. Color bleaches from what little Iften can see of his face. He understands, then. “You’re in the Si Wong Desert,” Iften informs it plainly.
‘Suna’ must be in the Spirit World. Had this one crossed over without realizing?
“Ah.” The spirit frowns.
Iften sorts out what he wants to say before he starts, in case he offends. “If I may ask… did you mean to cross into our world?”
The spirit frowns deeper. “No. How do I return?”
How- Iften’s brain short circuits. “You’ve never crossed before?”
“No. Why would I?”
… good question. Iften supposes the less interest a spirit has in the affairs of his people, the better. “I don’t know how,” He starts slowly, “Because I can’t do it myself. But if there’s any place you could find out-"
Iften breaks off to check the entrance to the Misty Palm. The Library isn’t a secret, really, but as far as most travelers are aware, it’s a myth. “If there’s any place you could find out how,” He continues when he’s sure there are no lurkers, “It’s Wan Shi Tong’s Library.”
The spirit considers this. “How far?”
“Not very,” Iften assures it. “We can be there in an hour.”
The spirit nods. “Then take me.”
So Iften does. The spirit, once they arrive, tells him, “Don’t wait.”
“Understood,” Iften says. He watches the spirit walk over to the spire… and then right up the side, like it’s no different from the knowledge-seekers.
If Iften had needed any proof, that would have been it. And it had told him not to wait, so he leaves, and he thinks that’s the end of it. He truly does.
The spirit had crossed accidentally, and he’d helped it. His wife would slap him silly for ferrying it around, but she understands that angering a spirit is a death sentence. He’ll endure it because he knows she doesn’t have another way to express her worry.
—
“Did you wonder…” Bakhta starts later, and stops.
Iften, wide awake despite the hour, rolls over to face her. He lifts a hand to run it up and down her arm, slow and steady. “Of course,” He says, because it’s stupid to lie to her.
He had wondered. If the spirit, hair red as blood, had been what attacked Ebeggi. The options for his death had been spirit or animal, even though some said it could have been a crash that was buried so thoroughly no one found a trace.
There were never any more attacks either. None that anyone saw, anyway. Iften had entertained the possibility, too, that the spirit was the remains of a victim of the same thing.
But who’s to say, really—Ebeggi has been dead for fifteen years, and the spirit is long gone by now.
—
Usem hears the gossip from Izlan. Izlan says she heard it from Siman, who says she heard it from Amalu, who says he heard it from his brother, who says he heard it from three of his friends who were messing around by Misty Palm.
The Si Wong rumor mill never fails to impress.
Anyway. Usem hears it from Izlan: some Hami kids think they’ve seen a second Ebeggi. Izlan tells him that they think it was either another Ebeggi or a desert spirit, and what similarities those two things might have are lost on Usem. She heard it through four or five layers of story-telling anyway, so he takes it with a grain of salt.
This doesn’t mean he doesn’t pass it on, however. The faster the information makes the rounds, the faster Usem gets answers. The Wofia ought to address it eventually—apparently one of their people was guiding it around.
Still, he’s a little bit curious, and the Hami kids seem to think the Wofia tribesman was heading for the Spirit Library. So maybe Usem’s original travel route… deviates, slightly.
It’s not like he’s on a schedule—no one to be upset if he’s a little later than planned—so there’s no harm sweeping past the Library.
That’s his thought process until he actually reaches the Library. By the time he’s close enough to make out the figure sitting at the base of the spire, he’s close enough to make out the red.
There’s a dread in his gut that wants him to turn around. It battles the urge to see if the red is a bright wrap or turban.
Usem brings his sandsailer closer. The figure watches. The gaze becomes more unnerving the closer he gets. The dread in his gut gets heavier and heavier as he’s forced to acknowledge that the figure isn’t wearing any sort of turban.
Bloodied hair and the dullest eyes that don’t seem to blink. Usem thinks for a terrifying moment that it is another Ebeggi, that maybe the spirit responsible for his death has returned, that it is a corpse propped up against the spire there.
Until the figure stands and shatters the moment like glass spun too thin. It’s almost worse.
This is no Ebeggi. The spirit, because it must be with that hair and skin and horrible blank stare, starts towards him. Usem doesn’t dare flee.
Its form is that of a child. Skin pale as bone, and eyes—once the spirit has drawn near enough to make out the color—bright teal, and some stamp or marking on its forehead.
Usem feels like he should be able to read it. The character looks similar to the written language, but at the same time, impossible to place.
“You’re different,” The spirit says.
Usem swallows hard. “Different how?”
“You’re different from the one who brought me here.”
“... I am, yes. I hear he was Wofia-wa. I am Mishi-wa.”
The spirit hums. “Interesting,” It says, inflectionless. “I understand there are ‘tribe camps’ throughout the desert. Take me to one.”
Usem isn’t completely stupid, so he quickly agrees. “Which camp?” He asks.
“Any.”
Usem decides to continue on his previous route for the Hami camp. If the spirit means trouble, and they nearly always do, he doesn’t want it in his camp. He’d take it to the Wofia, but they were the home tribe of Ebeggi—it’d just be cruel.
The others are much farther away, so the Hami camp it is.
Usem has never been as religious as the rest of his family. He believes most of the stories, but he has never dedicated time to praying or any such other things.
He takes a moment now to pray anyway. Just a brief thought directed heavenward. Let me make it home, he thinks. He doesn’t add if you will it, because he is not his mother and he doubts it would help his case if anything is listening to him.
Let me make it home, he thinks, because he might have few people to call his own, but he lives for them all the same.