Waverider Expedition - Lumekhet
The Waverider lay moored at dusk between the twin waters, the Zareth and the Kenu - the two veins of Lumekhet.
Beyond them, the desert burned down to silence; between them, life still clung - slow, ordered, reverent.
Captain Virellus and a few of the crew had gone ashore to barter for grain and water jars. The village stood low among the reeds, its mud-brick walls gold in the last light. Smoke rose from clay ovens. The air smelled of millet, sweat, and incense.
Everything moved with ritual grace - the living imitating eternity.
Children carried baskets on their heads, adults recited the sun's farewell, and even the river seemed to breathe in rhythm.
As night fell, the moon rose - thin, white, watchful.
It was then that a man came walking from the west.
He wore traveler's robes, pale with dust, and his eyes were calm, almost kind. He smiled easily, though no one remembered when he had joined them. The Lumekheti took him for a pilgrim and welcomed him to their fire.
He spoke softly, and his voice drew people nearer. He asked questions that felt like remembering - about names, about birthplaces, about dreams. Each time someone answered, he smiled faintly, as if confirming something he already knew.
Selene sat close, her hands folded. "You travel far, stranger?" she asked.
He tilted his head. "Far enough to see where the rivers end."
"The rivers have no end," said Eira. "They turn and return."
His smile deepened, but his eyes did not change. "Everything returns," he said. "But not everyone remembers how."
Virellus watched him in the firelight - too still, too precise. The man ate nothing, drank nothing. Yet somehow his presence filled the space, as if he were the center and they, the shadows that circled him.
Later, when the fire had burned low, the Lumekheti guide stood and said he would fetch more wood. He did not return.
By dawn, the village was stirring again. Birds called over the river, and the sand glowed pale as bone. The stranger was gone.
At the edge of the camp, where the guide had walked, the sand was marked by a single line of footprints. They led west, toward the desert. There was no return trail.
No one spoke for a long time. The Lumekheti simply bowed their heads and murmured a prayer for the nameless.
Selene whispered, "He took him."
Virellus shook his head. "No. He followed."
Severin's voice was low, analytical, but uneasy. "If the soul has a path - east for birth, west for death - then what walks beside it when the path is broken?"
Eira looked toward the brightening horizon. "Maybe that's what we saw. The space between."
The crew returned to the Waverider in silence. The river shimmered beneath the sun, smooth as glass. Behind them, the village resumed its prayers, its market calls, its rhythm of living and dying as if nothing had passed through it.
Only Virellus looked back. For an instant, he thought he saw a figure standing on the bank, motionless, watching. Then the light shifted, and there was nothing but heat and water and the hush of the eternal cycle.
By midday, the wind rose. Sand drifted down from the dunes, soft as ash.
The footprints were already gone, the sand undisturbed as far as they eye could see.