Hann held her gushing nose with one hand as she yelled,

"I just wanted to check your scar out, see if it all healed up! Since when were you such a light sleeper."

"I'm sorry I didn't mean to I–"

"Don't worry about it, I've had worse. This just means you've been taking my lessons on board. Don't leave it up to chance, if you think you're in danger go for it."

After the initial shock had passed Hann calmed down. Her medical satchel was popped open and she quickly fetched the necessary tools. Two sticks slathered in healing ointment were used to keep her nostrils open and realign her nose. When she set it in place, she rubbed a thick herbal paste onto the outside of her nose. Once in a while, she would remove the sticks and blow out thick chunks of blood before inserting clean ointment covered sticks back into her nose. By noon she had healed just enough that she didn't need the sticks to keep the shape anymore.

Hann had a mountain of skills that didn't seem to belong to any one profession. Emergency first aid, a maker of healing poultices and salves, knowledgeable in many different types of combat, survival skills and her bevvy of secrets. Involvement with the super shady Shryke alone was more than enough cause for concern but her dealings with it were so casual. I wasn't going to go out of my way to spy on her or dig up her secrets, I would rather she told me instead. At the same time, I had no intention of pretending that I didn't see anything strange. No matter how I looked at it my mother, father and Hann had too much that they wanted to keep hidden.

What did I want to achieve by learning my family's secrets? The answer was simple, I wanted to know if I came from good people. My time in Fleur had me looking at the world more sceptically. As a child, there was only ever a hard line between good and evil but I had started to see the depth and complexity that people held. I needed to know that my parents were as good and righteous as my bedtime stories led me to believe. I felt it deep in my bones that my father's flamberge held some of the answers that I sought but the invisible pressure when I sang stopped my progress entirely.

The rest of our journey by wagon went on like normal, as we travelled there was a gradual shift towards drier and less fertile lands. The change was so slow that I didn't know when it happened but the arid plains I knew from my village were nowhere to be seen. A lot of the hard and cracked earth had split into coarse dust that was swept up in the winds making it hard to see and breathe. I had never seen the rock dust before, it was my first encounter with sand. Venturing further saw more and more of the solid ground beneath the wagon turn into uneven and unstable sand. The strangest thing to me was the lack of life. On our way here I noticed how scarce the animals and plants were getting but I hadn't seen anything for a while now. Usually, we would hunt and forage twice each day but today all we did was ride.

As the suns began to set, the sand started to be whipped up into a constant storm. Despite all of the flying sand, the air was hot and still, I couldn't feel a single breeze. We pulled into a cave along a rocky cliff face to shelter from the growing storm. Much of the stony exterior was polished flat by what must have been more than hundreds of years of natural smoothing. The inside was different than I expected. It had many blue crystals lining the walls just like the dwell, the smoothing didn't extend far past the mouth of the cave as the sand couldn't reach its depths.

"We will shelter here tonight. Jo, whatever you do, don't leave the cave until morning."

We usually travelled all day and night, making use of Shryke and the cat beasts, boundless stamina and lack of need for sleep. It made sense to me though, the sandstorm was pretty aggressive.

"I won't, that wind looks pretty nasty."

Hann pulled out some wood from the wagon and started setting up a small fire.

"You don't know the half of it. Do you know what an elemental is?"

Of course I did, living embodiments of the natural elements were present in many different stories as powerful monsters for heroes to conquer.

"Like lava golems and stuff right? I've got a couple of stories that have them."

Hann finished setting up the fire and patted the floor next to her, beckoning me over, I sat down and she began to regale me.

"Well this isn't a story, so don't treat it like one. I know you, you won't listen without a good reason so hear me well. All elementals gain strength from the moon's light, it feeds them. The biggest elementals require so much energy to move around that they often spend thousands of years napping. When something like a mountain golem decides to move it's a natural disaster, our biggest cities would be flattened instantly.

This land used to be home to the largest mountain golem ever known. It had been asleep for longer than humans existed and never woke up. We only found out the mountain was alive when people started mining and the ores came to life. Golems don't die when they are split apart, the broken pieces gain their own life and they are usually pretty angry at the one who broke them. The small chunks were… well they were dumb as rocks, unlike the mountain they had come from.

So people came up with an idea that seemed good at the time. Kill the mountain golem, if it ever woke up it might destroy everything we ever built. The tale goes that we prayed to the forge mother that the mountain be killed and she smote the monster after seeing how united we were in our prayers. She reduced the great calamity to sand by sending down one of her animus-beacons to crush it. The newest beacon also gave us a foundation for a new city, it seemed like all was good.

But the sands were still alive. During the day the sand golems only have the energy to mindlessly jump once before they hibernate. But at night… The first settlers of the city disappeared by nightfall, not just them but every living plant and animal was erased overnight. As long as the moon shines each grain of sand has no limit to its energy and each grain of sand has only one thought. They hate living things.

If you are caught outside at night you will be ground into nothing. Not a single trace of you will be left, not even a red smear. Do. Not. Leave. This. Cave. When we arrive in Crakston city you cannot sneak to the surface at night. You will die. Simple as. Do you understand?"

"Yes."

I turned around and looked towards the mouth of the cave. It was now significantly darker than when we arrived and the sands buffeted the entrance. Instead of the howling of wind, I heard what sounded like the most intense rainstorm. Hann's story was a piece of history I'd never heard before and one that many wouldn't be keen to tell. If this was true it was a clear case of the perfect forge mother making a calamitous mistake.