“…If anything’s digging into you, tell me.”

Mira’s call tugged Adelaide back from her drifting thoughts, like a hand hauling a kite-line. She looked up into Mira’s tight, worried face.

The girl had probably decided the makeshift shelter was too cramped, a shell pinching at ribs. Adelaide felt a quick warmth rise, then steadied it.

“It’s fine.”

She caught Mira’s spell-ready hand before it touched the earthen wall, and shook her head. A small, nostalgic smile bloomed like an old lantern relit.

“Mira, do you remember why you ran to my room the second time?”

Mira’s gaze slid sideways, like a fish in shallow water. Her half-open mouth tried to shape forgetfulness.

Adelaide tightened her grip. Her eyes narrowed, a soft spark saying, Don’t even think about lying.

Silence stretched like taut silk. The quiet duel broke in Adelaide’s favor.

“Because Tutor Sophie is scary…”

Relief softened Adelaide’s chest. She reached up and ruffled Mira’s hair, petting her like a wolf pup under moonlight.

On the first day Mira entered the Douglas Family, she’d stormed into Adelaide’s room like wind through reeds. Adelaide had coaxed her the whole night until the storm calmed.

Later, after she finally pushed Mira toward etiquette lessons and snatched a few minutes of solitude, the door thumped again.

Adelaide opened it, tired as a candle guttering. There stood the same small black-haired girl. Down the corridor, the family tutor Sophie’s footsteps pounded like a pursuit drum.

Thinking back, Adelaide marvels she held so many sour feelings and still wore the big-sister mask to greet the child meant to replace her place at the hearth. She hadn’t been this seasoned then, her heart still a green branch.

Yet she took the role anyway. She let Mira hide again, and even hugged her into the wardrobe’s dusk, both of them tucked among hanging clothes like sparrows in leaves.

“I remember we watched through the thin seam of the wardrobe door and saw Tutor Sophie stamping,” Adelaide giggled, a bell in dust. “A teacher of manners, yet her private muttering was gutter-low.”

The memory of two girls pressed in a dark wardrobe loosened Mira’s face. Her mouth quirked up, a quick crescent.

Adelaide caught the cue and mimicked her fourteen-year-old voice, light as a reed flute. “Truth always hides in the—”

“—places we don’t see by day.”

The reply startled Adelaide. Surprise pricked like a sunbeam.

She’d used that line to say a tutor wasn’t as terrifying as she seemed. She hadn’t expected Mira to remember, and to speak it now as easily as breath.

Mira lifted her other hand to the sand-made wall. Fine arcs of lightning and a pulse of earth mana flickered like fireflies. The deep brown dulled, then bled clear into glass.

On the far side of the glass, the world overturned.

The sandstorm, dense as near-liquid, had vanished—not because the storm had died, but because they stood in its core. It was an eye like a typhoon’s, windless, yet far from calm.

Two colossal figures, near a hundred meters tall, grappled not far away like mountains wrestling.

They were giant spirits shaped of sand and wind, bodies flipping between human silhouette and warped grotesque. Two faces with twisted features surfaced and sank.

Mouths and eyes flung open with blinding white light, and lightning burst out like spears, the charge born from sand grinding inside them. The tearing thunder they’d heard came from there.

They hammered each other without pause, sand-formed arms locking, skull slamming skull, merging in a heartbeat then ripping apart. Shed sand fanned out like sea spray.

It floated and fell, building new dunes into small brown mountains.

Adelaide stared, eyes wide, voice a hush swept by awe. “Bobbas. Kohmanz… Elemental beings of legend. They really exist…”

In the northern deserts of the Empire, people tell of twin desert giant spirits. The last of their kind, they talk in a secret murmur no mortal hears, and speak truth with flowing sand.

Yet even twins born together and never parted are not the same. On one thing they never agree—elder Bobbas loves humankind, while younger Kohmanz hates humans.

When tragedy strikes the desert, Bobbas weeps for small lives crushed by fate. Kohmanz laughs at mortal frailty and calls it pitiful.

Failing to understand each other on this, the two always come to blows. Their clashes hurl waves of sand up to the sky, swallowing travelers and cities like a tsunami.

That’s a tale every child in the Empire knows, and the source of the name Sand Tsunami. Adelaide knew the story, but hadn’t guessed it wasn’t mere superstition.

The two pure-element desert giants were real.

Adelaide placed her palm to the glass, as if touch could bridge that impossible distance. Obsession unfurled like a silk ribbon.

Gods, they’re so pure, so beautiful, so… powerful…

That power called to her, like a drum under the skin. If only she could make them part of her, claim their cores for herself.

The Blood Mage in her stirred, hunger rising like night tide. She swallowed, mouth suddenly dry.

Honestly, if Mira knew about something this good, why didn’t she tell me sooner…

…Wait.

Adelaide’s entranced face froze. She turned to the black-haired girl beside her.

“Mira, you knew the legend was true?”

Mira paused, then nodded. “I… ran into a Sand Tsunami before.”

In other words, she’d seen these two colossi.

Of course. Why else would she turn the wall transparent right after saying, “Truth hides where we don’t see it”?

The answer settled part of Adelaide’s questions, even as more rose like dust.

Mira came to the Douglas Family at nine, and she hasn’t left Balad since. If she saw the desert giants, it had to be before she turned nine.

But why would a child under ten cross a desert? Was something—or someone—driving her?

Adelaide looked into Mira’s eyes and felt the gap like a cold well. She realized she knew almost nothing of Mira’s life before she arrived.

A hazy idea began to take shape in her mind, a line sketched in sand.

Before she could voice it, a shriek like tearing metal ripped from the giants’ direction.

Adelaide turned. One titan’s fist smashed squarely into the other’s face, and lightning erupted like a white storm.

Sand rain flared and accelerated at blast-speed; harmless grains sharpened into a cloud of bullets.

A wide swath of that storm arced straight toward the convoy.

Adelaide stood before three wrecked wagons, her expression barely holding. Her composure felt like a cracked mask.

The godlike desert giants kept brawling as they drifted away, fists and dunes moving like tides. The charged, accelerated grit didn’t pierce Mira’s earth barrier.

Mira’s and Adelaide’s carriage took only glancing hits, their roof pocked by small holes. Most passenger coaches were the same—ragged but upright, a few roofs torn like peeled bark.

The real problem sat in front of Adelaide—three cargo wagons in ruins.

They were at the heart of the sand-bullet fall. Every wagon there was badly damaged; the worst three were shredded to pieces.

Black fittings littered the ground like burnt leaves. Only the cargo itself was missing.

Because those three wagons carried water.

Spilled water is water lost, a puddle swallowed by desert mouth. Water is life here.

Without it, forget reaching that far-flung village. They might not even leave this desert alive.

General Slandor had thought of water scarcity. She’d sent two people with water affinity to travel with the convoy.

But she hadn’t imagined all three water wagons exploding at once, leaving no reserve at all.

With only two low-affinity water mages, the daily output barely meets fifty people’s minimum. This convoy holds over a hundred.

Half of them might die here.

Adelaide rubbed her throbbing temple, a wave pushing against bone, and sighed.

She and Mira wouldn’t be among the dead. In truth, they could commandeer the two water mages, conjure enough for their hot baths, and let the rest dry out in the sun.

No one here could stop them.

But Adelaide wouldn’t do it. Not out of lofty virtue, but because she saw Mira repairing roofless coaches with steady hands, her stance clear as print.

Watching that, Adelaide’s earlier guess about Mira sharpened, edges carving from mist.

Still, now wasn’t the time to chase thoughts.

They’d been on the move for over a week. The next desert city with supplies sits another week ahead. They were caught at the worst in-between.

Too far forward to push on, too far back to turn around.

“If only Hazel were here,” Adelaide muttered, complaint soft as sand rasp.

She still reached into her bodice and drew out a round iron token. She set its sharp edge to her palm, cool metal like a moon sliver.

A hand snapped around her wrist a heartbeat later.

“What are you doing?” The voice was tight, a chord pulled too hard.

Adelaide looked up, met Mira’s worried eyes, and let a smile lift like sunlight over dunes.

“Me? I still want a hot bath.”