The journey to the Malwa Dunes wasn't exactly an easy or straightforward undertaking. The location itself was situated in a way that made access extremely difficult and navigation remarkably challenging. The perpetually shifting sand landscape proved to be considerably harder to traverse than any of us had initially anticipated, despite our preparations and planning. Even when we had deliberately brought along the most experienced soldiers from our ranks—men who had walked these desert paths for years, who had crossed the Great Sand Desert multiple times and survived to tell the tales—we still found ourselves struggling with the constantly changing terrain.
We got lost several times over the course of our journey, forced to backtrack and try alternative routes when we found ourselves at dead ends or facing impassable dune formations. The frustration was palpable among the soldiers, who clearly felt embarrassed at their inability to navigate successfully despite their supposed expertise. The problem was that the desert itself was inherently unstable—winds constantly reshaped the dunes, creating entirely new configurations that bore little resemblance to what might have existed days or even hours before. Landmarks that travelers might have used to orient themselves simply didn't persist in this environment.
After the third time we found ourselves circling back to terrain we had already covered, I decided to try a different approach. I went ahead of the main group and began actively using my heightened new senses to try to find the correct path. I listened carefully for any sounds that might indicate human habitation—voices, movements, the sounds of animals or activity. I sniffed the air, hoping to catch some scent that would distinguish our destination from the endless expanse of sand surrounding us.
But as it turned out, that wasn't the right methodology to employ. Or rather, it worked, but not in the way I had hoped or intended. Because what I eventually caught on the desert breeze was a thick, unmistakable whiff of blood in the air—specifically human blood, and not just a little of it. This was the heavy, overwhelming scent of someone being actively slaughtered, of life being violently drained away in that very moment. The smell was absolutely nauseating, hitting me like a physical blow and making me want to empty the contents of my stomach right there on the sand.
I had an extremely hard time composing myself and maintaining my outward calm when that scent first registered. My body wanted to react viscerally—to gag, to retch, to flee from the source of such horror. But I forced myself to remain steady, to breathe through my mouth to minimize the overwhelming smell, to focus on the tactical importance of what I had discovered rather than my emotional response to it.
Despite my distress, I managed to indicate the direction we needed to travel to Arvid, pointing toward where that terrible scent was emanating from with as much certainty as I could project.
Don't misunderstand—I had already experienced my fair share of exposure to human blood by this point in my journey. I had Katherine's blood on my hands, both literally and figuratively. I had beheaded Sofia in that courtyard duel, her blood spraying across my face and clothes. I had witnessed violence and death in various forms throughout my travels. But something about this particular smell felt fundamentally wrong in a way I struggled to articulate or describe adequately.
I didn't possess the vocabulary to properly express what made this scent so distinctly disturbing, so uniquely horrifying compared to other blood I had encountered. But I was absolutely certain of one thing: whatever was producing this smell was considerably more gruesome and grotesque than anything I had personally witnessed before. The wrongness of it went beyond simple violence or death—this was something that violated basic human dignity in ways that made my soul recoil.
So we finally located the Malwa Dunes thanks to that disgusting, terrible smell serving as our unwilling guide. We dismounted from our horses carefully, trying to make minimal noise that might alert anyone to our presence. We secured the animals by tying their lead ropes to large stones we found scattered near the base of a particularly stable-looking dune formation. Then we began moving forward on foot with extreme caution, creeping toward the source of that overwhelming stench with weapons ready and senses alert.
As we drew closer, my enhanced hearing began picking up additional sounds beyond just the wind and our own carefully muffled footsteps. I started detecting voices—many voices, perhaps fifty or sixty distinct speakers based on the overlapping tones and pitches I could distinguish. The language being spoken was unfamiliar to me, harsh-sounding and guttural in ways that suggested it had developed in isolation from the more common tongues spoken in settled regions.
Then I heard something that made my blood run cold: the sound of women wailing. Screaming and crying with the particular quality of anguish that comes from witnessing something absolutely unbearable. One woman in particular was mourning—I could hear it clearly in the tone and rhythm of her cries. She was grieving her husband, I realized with terrible certainty. Mourning a man who had been killed right in front of her eyes, whose death she had been forced to witness while being unable to prevent it or even look away.
Additional painful moans reached my ears from multiple sources positioned near that first grieving woman. These must be the merchants who had been captured from those abandoned caravans we had discovered. They were alive, but clearly suffering—injured, perhaps, or simply traumatized by whatever horrors they had been forced to witness or endure.
I quietly relayed all this information to Arvid, keeping my voice barely above a whisper as I described what my senses were telling me about the scene ahead. There was also a crackling sound that I could now identify—the distinctive noise of a massive fire burning, wood popping and snapping as flames consumed it. And interspersed with the crackling were sounds of laughter and words spoken in that same unfamiliar language I had noted earlier. That must be the Dergu's native tongue, I concluded. The language of these bandit tribes that had made the desert their hunting ground.
We carefully maneuvered ourselves through the dunes until we found a good vantage point—an opening in the sand formations where we could finally see down into the Oasis below without being immediately visible ourselves. Arvid and I positioned ourselves side by side and looked in, trying to take in and process everything we were seeing.
The Oasis itself was remarkable in its own right, quite apart from the horrors being perpetrated within it. This hidden water source had apparently never been officially discovered or documented by anyone from Selon or any of the other established kingdoms. Nobody outside the Dergu themselves had known this place existed. The reason for this prolonged secrecy was fairly straightforward: people who crossed the Great Sand Desert never strayed significantly far from the established, known routes. Everyone understood that getting lost in the desert meant facing certain death from exposure, dehydration, or starvation. Even the Malwa Dunes region itself remained largely unexplored despite being noted on certain maps.
The dunes had actually been named after an unfortunate explorer who had attempted to chart this territory approximately fifty years ago, Arvid had explained to me during our journey. That man—whose name had been Sathish Malwa—had died without ever finding the Oasis, wandering lost in the desert until exposure and dehydration claimed his life. His desiccated remains had been discovered about a year after his disappearance by another group of travelers. Among his preserved belongings, they had found a detailed notebook and several hand-drawn maps documenting his journey and the terrain he had covered before his demise.
The Malwa Dunes had been named in his memory—a posthumous acknowledgment of his courage in attempting to expand human knowledge of this harsh environment, even if that attempt had ultimately cost him his life. His maps had been added to the official cartographic records, combined with existing documentation to create a more comprehensive picture of the Great Sand Desert's geography and layout. Yet even with these additions, much of the desert remained completely unmapped and unexplored. Most people simply weren't willing to risk embracing the same certain death that had claimed Sathish Malwa, so they stayed on the known paths and left the mysteries of the deeper desert undisturbed.
But now, looking down into what the unfortunate explorer had died searching for, I almost wished it had remained hidden forever.
As my eyes adjusted to the scene below and my mind began processing what I was actually seeing, I felt shock rippling through my entire body. I genuinely didn't know what I had been expecting to find—some kind of bandit camp, certainly, probably crude and violent but still recognizably human in its basic organization and behavior.
What we actually saw was something else entirely.
The Dergu tribespeople were clearly visible throughout the camp, many of them wearing clothing fashioned from animal hides—practical protection against the brutal cold that descended on the desert during nighttime hours. They were gathered in clusters, drinking some kind of liquid from crude wooden jugs and oval-shaped cups that appeared to be fashioned from large, hollowed-out seed pods or fruit shells. Their behavior suggested celebration or at least casual relaxation rather than any sense of guilt or concern about their activities.
But what truly horrified me, what made bile rise in my throat and my hands clench involuntarily, was what occupied the center of their largest fire.
They had constructed a makeshift rotisserie using sturdy wooden poles. A human body—a man who had probably been one of the captured merchants—had been impaled lengthwise on a thick wooden spike. This spike had then been suspended horizontally over the flames, supported on both sides by a wooden frame structure that allowed the body to be slowly rotated over the heat. The positioning was sickeningly deliberate, clearly designed to cook the flesh evenly on all sides.
The sight was far more grotesque than anything my imagination could have conjured. I felt overwhelming nausea building inside me, threatening to overcome my attempts at self-control. My stomach heaved, and I had to clamp my hand over my mouth to prevent myself from making noise that might alert the camp to our presence.
"Cannibal bastards," Arvid hissed under his breath beside me, his voice carrying a mixture of disgust and cold fury that I had rarely heard from him.
The terrible truth became inescapably clear: these Dergu bandits had decided to feast on human flesh. That was the source of the wrong smell I had detected, the nauseating scent that had guided us here. They were roasting their captive over an open flame, preparing to consume him as they might cook any animal they had hunted. And that dark liquid they were drinking from their crude cups, the substance that left their lips glistening with a dark red sheen—that was the murdered man's blood, drained and collected and consumed as though it were wine.
I forced myself to look away from that central horror and assess the rest of the camp with tactical eyes rather than emotional ones. There were wooden structures forming a rough fence or palisade around the perimeter of their settlement—posts driven into the sand and bound together with rope and leather, creating a barrier that would slow any approaching force and provide defenders with cover. The camp itself contained approximately ten to twelve buildings, all constructed from clay bricks and salvaged wood, their architecture crude but functional.
On one side of the camp, near the visible water source that made this location an oasis, a group of horses had been left relatively unsupervised. These were undoubtedly the animals stolen from the caravans—the Dergu had no tradition of horse breeding themselves, so any mounts they possessed must have been taken from their victims. The horses were drinking from the water, oblivious to the horrors happening nearby.
And behind where the horses were gathered, I could see the captured merchants who still remained alive. They were bound together in a miserable cluster, their movements restricted by ropes. I counted carefully, trying to get an accurate number. Thirteen people total, I determined. Among them I could distinguish two women and at least one child—a young boy, from what I could tell at this distance.
I didn't dare allow myself to think too deeply about the fate of other merchants who had been captured in previous raids, those who weren't visible here now. They had clearly already experienced the same terrible fate as the man currently being roasted over that fire—their lives ended and their flesh consumed by these monsters wearing human form.
I quietly shared the location of the surviving captives with Arvid, describing their positioning relative to the other camp features and the guards I could see patrolling nearby. Our absolute first priority had to be rescuing those thirteen people before they could be subjected to the same horror.
An idea occurred to me, and I whispered it to Arvid: "I could teleport them directly back to where we left the main force. Get them to safety immediately without having to fight our way in and out."
He hesitated, clearly weighing the risks and benefits of this approach. Teleportation magic was powerful but not without its complications and potential failures. Eventually, though, he nodded his agreement. The potential to save all the captives instantly, without risking their lives in a protracted rescue operation, was simply too valuable to dismiss.
I focused my attention and my magical will on the location where the merchants were being held, trying to establish the connection I would need to transport them. But despite my concentration and effort, I couldn't make the spell work. The magical link simply wouldn't form, and I had no idea why.
"You cannot teleport to places you have never physically been before," Aiona explained in my mind, her tone suggesting this should have been obvious. "That's the fundamental limitation of that particular spell. You need to have personally visited a location to create the magical anchor point necessary for teleportation. That's exactly why you had to physically sneak into the Saintess's chambers rather than simply teleporting directly inside—you had never been there before, so direct teleportation was impossible."
"But I teleported to this desert region successfully," I protested mentally. "And I had never been to the desert before our current journey."
"That worked because I had been to this general area during my lifetime, centuries ago," Aiona clarified. "My memories and magical imprint on these sands allowed the spell to function through our connection. But I was never in this specific Oasis, so I cannot provide that anchor for you. You'll need to physically travel to where the captives are being held before you can teleport them away."
So I had to explain this limitation to Arvid, admitting that I would need to infiltrate the camp physically, reach the location where the merchants were imprisoned, and only then could I activate the teleportation magic to transport them to safety.
"Absolutely not," he said immediately, his voice firm with protective instinct. "That's far too risky. If you're discovered, you'll be captured or killed, and we'll have lost our best chance at saving these people. We need to find another approach."
"I'll be perfectly fine," I assured him with more confidence than I actually felt. "Please, let me try this. I have magic to conceal myself, I have enhanced senses to avoid patrols, and I can move more quietly than your soldiers could. This is our best option for getting those people out safely."
We went back and forth several times, Arvid raising objections and me countering each one. Finally, after what felt like an interminable argument conducted in furious whispers, he reluctantly agreed to let me make the attempt.
Before I could depart, he reached into his pocket and withdrew a small metal object—a medal or seal of some kind, bearing an intricate design that I couldn't make out clearly in the darkness.
"When you return to the main camp with the rescued merchants, show this to whoever is in command," he instructed, pressing the cool metal into my palm. "Tell them that fifty soldiers are to immediately march to battle and that you will lead them back here to this location. Can you do that?"
"Yes," I confirmed, understanding his intent. He had decided to launch an offensive assault on the Dergu camp this very night while we had the element of surprise, while they were distracted by their grotesque feast and unprepared for organized resistance.
And I could not have agreed more with that decision. These monsters had forfeited any right to mercy or quarter the moment they had decided human flesh was acceptable sustenance.
Tonight, the Dergu would learn that there were still consequences for such violations of basic humanity.
Tonight, they would pay for every life they had taken and consumed.