“Child, you think those cooling tunnels run by clever hands alone? Pah. Bricks and chisels only get you so far in the desert. The first masons tried — oh, yes, they tried. Walls collapsed, wells dried, and more than one digger went down into the sand and never came back up.
So the old masters went to a conjurer. A bold fool, he was, with copper dust in his beard and ash on his hands. On the salt flats, under a full moon, he drew his circles and he called out, not to God, not to angels, but to something older; a djinn, wind-born and storm-eyed.
The djinn rose up taller than the dunes, laughing so loud the stars shook. ‘What do you want of me?’ it said. And the masters begged for water, stone that holds, tunnels that breathe cool air.
‘What will you give?’ the djinn asked. They offered silver, spice, their own lives. But the djinn spat at that. ‘What is silver to the wind? What is spice to the flame? What is your life to one who does not die?’
So the bargain was struck. One scholar every hundred years — the brightest, the most promising, the one whose name would outlive their bones. The djinn would take them, erase their words from every page, their names from every tongue, until even their mothers forgot them.
In return? The water would flow. The tunnels would stand. The desert would not reclaim this place.
And so it has been, child. The first vanished was the conjurer himself. Snatched, some say, as payment before the ink was dry. Since then, every century, one is taken. A poet, a healer, a philosopher; gone, like smoke on the wind.
Don’t believe me? Ask your professors. Oh, they’ll deny it. They have to. But look at the old records, if you can find them. You’ll see gaps, blank years where someone should be, and isn’t.
So listen well: do not boast too loudly of your gifts, not in Tulara. The djinn still listens. The djinn always listens.”
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