The Lioness of Shadi

4 - The Mother of Night Winds

To exist without water for days in the Desert of Kings was a torment beyond that any torturer could devise. She endured it for longer than most, but there was only so much a body could take. Her seconds stretched on, each one its own eternity.

    The sands had ended stronger and wiser intruders. They made meek the gods of civilization and devoured armies. Nothing could step across them without paying a cost except those things that were already a part of them.

    Forgotten was everything except the desert. Ilati crawled on her hands and knees across the burning sand, too dizzy and weak to stand. She was burned to blistering from the sun on the backs of her hands and her legs, but that was just a whisper of pain against the pounding in her head and the screaming fury of her own thirst. Cramps seized the muscles in her back and legs as she moved, slowing her progress even more. The world around her twisted and shimmered to her eyes as if the very substance of it was coming apart. She knew even through her haze to stay in the shade, but that was not going to save her.

    She had no memory of how long she had been in the desert, nor how far she had gone, except that she had gone as far as she could. She barely ever knew she was dying. Her throat and mouth burned with an unquenchable drought that robbed her of all sane thought.

    All she wanted was for it to stop.

    Ilati, daughter of King Amar-Sin, granddaughter of the most powerful king that had ever lived, crawled like a beggar through these titanic ziggurats of sand and wept dry tears. Her lips were cracked and abraded by windblown grit. There were no more brave declarations in her thoughts: oblivion was here, draining her dry one drop at a time.

    She had space for only a wordless prayer, a desperate plea inside the pounding confines of her heart to the goddess of this desolate place. An end was all she wanted.

    Wind scoured across Ilati's face with a sudden force, cooling her feverish flesh. She looked up and saw her answer.

    There, moving towards her like a cresting ocean wave, was a great wall of churning earth and wind: a sandstorm. Perhaps she wouldn't die of thirst, but suffocate. What was it like to drown on land, lungs filled with sand? Or would it rip her apart instead?

    At the top of the wall, purple-white lightning crackled from cloud to cloud. The stories said that sometimes the storms of the desert could be both sand and thunder. They were said to be the very expression of Ki-sikil-lil's rage at her most towering.

    She had no strength to run, not that it would have saved her anyway. Ilati pressed her face to the sand as if groveling in front of an enraged king as it approached, faster than even the waters of a flood, then covered her face with the scarf she carried. She closed her eyes and continued the only prayer she could manage.

    Please, make it stop.

    The wind hit her like a falling tower, knocking her back with its force. The sand was everywhere around her, scouring at her eyes and the cloth covering her nose and mouth. She stayed in her position curled up on the ground, aware distantly that the storm could carry things larger than just grains of sand with its howling winds. All sense of direction except the direction of the earth beneath her vanished. She screamed in a hoarse bark as it tore across her already damaged skin, but the storm drowned all hint of it out with the violence of its own roar. Then came the voice of thousands speaking at once, tearing through the sands.

"Hail Ilati of Kullah, Queen of Thorns, Lady of the Floodwaters.

Hail the Devastator, the Destroyer, who breaks chains and kingdoms alike in her teeth.
Hail the Exile who shatters the cages of her people.
Hail the Mother of Havoc who stirs the dead from Ersetu and sets mountains aflame."