The Last Drop
The water tasted of dust and despair.
Khalid swirled the dregs in his clay cup, watching the grit settle at the bottom. It was the last of the skin, the last of the stores from the deep cisterns of Al'Sahir. Soon, there would be only the brackish, thinning sludge from the oasis pool, and after that, nothing. The sun, a merciless white coin hammered into a bleached sky, offered no pity. It never did.
From his perch on the sun-baked wall of his family's compound, Khalid could see the death of his city. Al'Sahir, the "Dreaming City," was a carcass being picked clean by the heat. The once-lush date palms that lined the central oasis stood skeletal, their fronds brittle and brown. The intricate waterways—*qanats* carved by generations of his ancestors—were nothing but dusty scars in the earth. The air, once perfumed with orange blossom and the rich scent of wet earth, now carried only the fine, choking powder of the encroaching dunes.
"You stare too long, brother. The view does not improve."
Khalid didn't need to turn. The voice, dry and sharp as a flint edge, belonged to Layla. She climbed up beside him, her movements efficient, her practical linen robes dusty from the workshop. She was his younger sister by two years, but where Khalid's soul was etched with the deep, patient lines of a dune-tracker, hers was a spark waiting for tinder.
"I am not admiring the view," Khalid said, his voice a low rumble. "I am reading the sand. It has a story to tell."
"And what does it say today? That we are doomed? I could have told you that for free and saved you the sunstroke."
He finally looked at her. Her face, a mirror of his own sharp features and hawk-like nose, was set in its usual defiance, but he saw the fear in her eyes, the dark circles that spoke of sleepless nights spent trying to devise machines to pull water from air that held none.
"It says the great *Rimal al-Khamsin*—the Dune of the Fifty Days—shifts. It moves not with the wind, but against it." He nodded toward the southern horizon, where a massive, ochre dune loomed like a sleeping beast. "It should be receding. It is advancing."
Layla squinted, shielding her eyes. "Sorcery."
"Do not speak that word so freely," Khalid cautioned, an old reflex. Their faith, the Way of the Well, taught respect for the desert's mysteries, but warned against the arrogance of seeking to command them. Water was life, to be honored and conserved, not conjured.
"What else would you call it?" she shot back. "The river that fed our springs for a thousand years does not just *vanish*. It was stolen. Diverted. By men who think the laws of sand and sky are suggestions." She spat the name like a curse. "Barzakh."
The rival city. A place of sharp angles and sharper minds, built not around an oasis but around a deep, cold canyon where they delved into secrets best left buried. They were water-hoarders, innovators who mocked the old ways. And now, they had taken everything.
A commotion stirred at the city's great gate—a ragged cheer from a dozen parched throats. Khalid's hand went to the hilt of his *jambiya*, the curved dagger his father had carried. But it was not an attack.
It was a return. A handful of his scouts stumbled through the gate, their robes torn, their faces gaunt with exhaustion. At their head was old Samir, his second, his face a mask of grim finality.
Khalid was off the wall and moving before a conscious thought formed, Layla a half-step behind him. The people of Al'Sahir—those who had strength left to move—emerged from the shade of doorways, their eyes hollow, fixed on the returning men.
Samir saw Khalid and stopped, his shoulders slumping. He did not speak. He simply held out a waterskin. It was not one of theirs. It was crafted from a strange, pale leather, tooled with angular, geometric patterns. Barzakh make.
Khalid took it. It was heavy. He unstoppered it and the scent hit him first—not the clean, mineral scent of their aquifer, but something else. Metallic. Ozone. The smell of a lightning strike on dry rock. He poured a trickle into his palm. The water was clear, too clear, and it seemed to shimmer with a faint, internal light.
"They have dammed the Nahreen al-Jinn," Samir said, his voice cracking. "Not with stone and mortar, Khalid. With… something else. A wall of light that shimmers in the canyon's heart. The river hits it and… turns. It flows now only for Barzakh. Their oasis swells, their gardens drown in plenty, while they leave us to drink the dust."
A wail went up from the crowd. It was the sound of a last hope dying.
"How many guards?" Khalid asked, his voice harder now, the tracker assessing the prey.
"Too many. And the canyon itself… it is wrong. The sand sings. It burned the feet of our camels." Samir looked past Khalid, at the desperate faces of their people. "We cannot take it back by force. There is no path for us there."
The Elder Council, a group of five men and women whose wisdom felt as desiccated as the city, approached. Umm Hassan, the eldest, her face a roadmap of wrinkles, spoke. "Then there is nothing. The last well will be dry by next moon's turn. Al'Sahir is finished."
Silence fell, thick and heavy as a burial shroud.
It was Layla who broke it. "Then we leave."
The words hung in the air, blasphemous and terrifying. To leave the oasis was to abandon the Way. The Well was their soul. To die beside it was honor. To flee was… was…
"To live," Layla insisted, her voice rising, finding its strength. "We take what camels remain, what water we can carry, and we go. We follow the old star-paths, the routes of the first caravans. There are stories of other places. A river-city to the east, Al'Qamar, rich and powerful. They trade with all. They would have need of trackers, of builders, of warriors."
"To become beggars in a foreign court?" one of the elders scoffed. "To die as strangers in the sand? Better to die here, as who we are."
"And who are we if we are dead?" Khalid's question cut through the argument, quiet and final. All eyes turned to him. He was the Master Tracker. The one who could read the language of scorpion tracks and predict the coming of the *khamsin*. His word on matters of the desert was law.
He looked at the desperate, dying hope in the faces of his people. He saw Samir's grim truth, the elders' despair, and Layla's furious, brilliant will to live. His flaw, a loyalty deeper than any well, anchored him to them all. He could not let them perish for a principle, no matter how sacred.
He closed his fingers around the strange waterskin, feeling the cool, alien liquid within. The water of their enemy. The proof that the old rules were broken.
"Layla is right," he said, and the words tasted like the dust on his tongue. "We will not take back the Nahreen. Not now. To stay is to choose a grave." He raised his voice, letting it carry across the silent square, letting the decision settle on his shoulders like a mantle of lead. "Gather everything. Every skin, every date, every weapon. We leave at moonset, when the air is coolest. We go east."
He looked south, toward the advancing dune, toward Barzakh. This was not a victory. It was a retreat. A surrender. But as he met Layla's fierce, grateful gaze, he knew it was also a first step on a path from which there was no return. He had chosen survival over tradition. He could only pray to the vanishing Wells that the cost would not be their very soul.