rayeshka (ra-yesh-kah) noun

Self. Soul. Being.

***

Their people did not believe in coincidences. Everything happened for a reason, and words, when spoken, were intentional. Even a lie.

Because Tomera is sacred.

Nascha, however, wanted everything to be just a coincidence. She stepped out of the door, the gold bangles around her ankles jiggling as she stopped, turned, and walked back into her room to frown at nothing on the wall, thinking with a frown.

It must be a coincidence. She could not have foreseen it, right?

The king burned in his bed. He should not be the only person who burned to death, right? But how many had burned without the fire eating everything else around them?

Her eyes narrowed at a question.

What if she...

She whirled on her feet and shook her head. No, it could not be her. She was the worst candidate.

They were a myth. None had been born for centuries. But then, everyone in Tomesh believed them.

What if she was the one? Born three centuries after just as predicted? She turned and paced again. No, she could not be.

Or she could be.

And if she was, her world would dramatically change. If she could prove she was the one everyone was waiting for, she would live like a princess. She did not have to work in another tomb. Everyone would kneel at her feet, everyone would praise her. She would live in the palace in Kgosi, dine with the royals, and seat beside the reigning king. She would be higher than any administrators, even the advisor.

She turned around and stepped out of her room, this time reaching the kitchen where her mother was cooking. "Prepare the table, Nascha," her mother said. "We have much to do later for the ritual." She did not hear her mother's words. Her mind was elsewhere, living in a dream again. A possible future. A beautiful one. "Nascha."

Nascha the Great Oracle.

"Nascha!"

She blinked and found her mother sternly looking at her. The woman was wearing her most beautiful headdress today, a yellow silk cloth wrapped around her head. Her earrings were especially bright, as well as the gold cuffs around her arms.

"Yes," she absently said, setting the table not because she heard her mother, but because she knew it was what the woman wanted. "Mahl," she called later as she ate her meal. "Do you believe the Oracle will come soon?"

"Of course," her mother said, kissing her thumb and raising it in the air. And Nascha knew her mother had been praying the Oracle would be born within the Yakine family. "Why do you ask?"

"I'm curious. What if the Oracle is already here with us?"

"It's possible."

She swallowed. "How did he discover his gift?"

"He had strange dreams that came true, of course. Visions given to him by the sand god. He saved Tomesh many times. He objected to his sister's marriage with a man from another tribe. That was, of course, as we know, a very good premonition. The man turned out to be Ashmun."

The destroyer.

"And because of him, the entire Umoji empire was saved from Ashmun and many others like him."

"Do you know if he has ever...carved?"

"Carved?"

"The last Oracle."

Her mother shook her head. "No, of course not. He was a priest. Why are you asking things you already know?"

"Has he ever told stories and they came true?"

"An Oracle's visions are not stories. You know that."

"But what if he made up stories or gossips and they started to—"

"No such thing as coincidences, Nascha," her mother said, shaking her head. "The Oracle always knows they are seeing the future and they share what they know to save us all." With a sigh, her mother added, "If the Oracle is here among us, I hope their gift reveals itself. With King Amatif gone, the empire may be in danger once more."

Nascha forced her food down her throat and did not speak again. She thought about the king and how he died. The hairs at the back of her nape stood. It happened two months ago. The news only reached Tomesh a week ago and by then, the royal entourage had already been traveling for a month to take the king to his resting place in the Belt of Temples.

Here. In Tomesh.

After her meal, she left her mother writing a Tomera prayer for tonight's ritual—and stepped out of their stone cottage. The sky was dark blue above with a hint of stars, turning orange on the horizon where the sun was setting. The desert was calm; the air growing cold. Torches were lit everywhere: outside the other stone houses, the roads, and even far beyond in the desert. A sign of mourning and welcome.

Nascha thought of the tomb and coincidences.

"Swajeh!" Peru's voice called from somewhere. The girl ran toward her in a gold wrap, gold cuffs, and sandals with strings crisscrossed around her legs. "It happened! It happened!"

She frowned. "What happened?"

"The scorpions," Peru breathlessly said. "They appeared! Outside old Gaera's house—in her garden. They ate everything!" Peru swallowed, eyes wide with amazement. Then alarm registered on her face. "B-but we don't know who Nari is in your story. What if she—what if she is you?"

It took her a long while to answer. "Silly," she said with a laugh. "My stories are not true, Peru."

"But they are true! Tell me who Nari is. We should warn her!"

Nascha shook her head. "Go home, Peru. It's just..." She paused. There is no such thing as coincidences in Tomesh. "It's just a story."

"But—"

"Go," she said, her heart at her throat, her mind slowly realizing what was happening. She ran back inside the house. "Where's Pahl?" she asked her mother.

"He's in the tomb—Where are you going?"

"To the tomb."

"But it's closed."

She stopped cold, heart a big lump in her throat. "What do you mean? You said father is there."

"Yes, for the threshold ceremony. They closed the tomb for the arrival of the king tonight." Her mother frowned at her. "What's the matter? Why are you so pale?"

She shook her head and rushed to her room. She needed ink and paper.

She had to remember all of them. As she rummaged through her room for her writing articles, flashes of things she only imagined came back to her. And without regard for handwriting, she wrote and wrote. And she did not know how long she spent doing that, remembering the stories she made up and carved in the tomb.

What happened after the king's death? Was it rain? When did the fire start? And the prince...what happened to him again? What else did she carve? Dragons? Wars?

A huge part of her felt stupid. Dragons? They were not true!

But what if they were not, and they only came true now?

"Nascha, I have to go," her mother said from outside. "Charan's daughter was dragged to the chief. I can't believe this is happening! Of all time, it has to happen before the night ritual!"

She froze. "Charan's daughter?"

"Karei. You know her, don't you?"

"Old Gaera's neighbor."

"Yes, the one. Gaera's garden is gone, covered with scorpions, and now she's accusing Karei of witchcraft. We can't have this tonight..."

She did not hear the rest of her mother's words because her own blood was rushing to her ears. The names in the story she told Peru and her siblings were fake. But she imagined old Gaera and Karei's faces as she narrated her tale.

"Oh, I'm dead. We're all dead," she murmured under her breath as her eyes wandered around the paper and her handwritten texts.

"Calm down," she told herself, holding her writing stick firmly over the paper to keep her hand from shaking. "Oracles foresee the future. You cannot be an Oracle. You did not foresee anything. No vision, no dreams. You just told...stories."

And they were coming true.

Nascha swallowed through her constricted throat. She had every reason to be frightened because her carvings inside the king's arnucc were not just fantastic and magical... They were also mortifying.

***

Kgosi was filled with canals built for transport. They ran all over the land, further down south, to the west, and to the east as far as Han'ia. Months of travel could be reduced to mere weeks. But the canals could not pass through most of Tomesh, not when the dunes blocked the path to the Belt of Temples.

The entire royal entourage had to disembark their boats and step into dry, loose sand. Against the cold, with the stars to guide them, they traveled through the night. They slept in the heat of the day and awoke as the sun set to continue the journey. No one complained, not even the queen, who stayed quiet inside her closed carriage tent, because, for centuries, the dead had to be carried through the desert.

Prince Laku knew very little about the dunes in Tomesh, but he knew it was a sleeping monster. "The wind could eat you alive," his father once said. But danger was not his priority at the moment. There were people to guide them through the dune belt. His mind was elsewhere, scattered like the sands that blew low across their caravan.

As they neared the Belt of Temples, located at the foot of the last dune they had to cross, he looked up at the sky. He decided to travel on foot for the remaining of the journey, tired of sitting inside his carriage. Beside him walked his young advisor. "If I meet an unfortunate fate now and step into a pocket of air and get buried alive, it will be a problem," he told Kalesch.

The young man did not smile at his humor. "If you fall, the first thing you should do is stop talking."

Laku snapped his head at the man. They may be of the same age, and the man may be a scholar and a mentor, and now advisor, he was in no authority to talk to him in such a way.

"If you talk, the sand will enter your lungs and you die faster," Kalesch added, the Kgos words rolling out of his tongue in the way it always did with those who spoke Tomera—curly and smooth.

"Ah, yes, of course," he said, clearing his throat. "I know that."

"And you do not move."

"Or the sand will eat me faster."

Kalesch did not say more. They both looked on, at the line of yellow lights at the foot of the dune. The torches made a clear path toward the tomb from the nearby village. Other villages not far behind the Belt of Temples were also lit yellow, mourning the loss of their king.

King. That was his father. And soon it would be him. What a shame.

He did not want to think about that for now. It was enough that his father's death was still a great mystery, one he would be forced to face after this trip. There were things he had to settle, one of them he dreaded the most—taking a queen.

"Are you going to visit your wife while we're here?" he asked Kalesch.

The young man's face did not change. It remained unreadable like the foreign desert. Laku sometimes wondered if his advisor was capable of laughter. Now that he thought of it, he had never seen Kalesch smile, not even once. The man seemed to find no joy in anything, not even Laku's jokes.

"No," Kalesch said. "It's not the time."

"But she's your wife."

Kalesch looked at him, as if to reprimand. "In Tomesh, we only meet our wives on their twenty-first rain."

Laku blinked in wonder. "Really?" Kalesch only nodded. Silence followed them for a while. "What is wife in Tomera?"

"There is no word for wife in Tomera."

"Husband?"

"None." At his silent confusion, Kalesch said, "There is only rayeshka."

"Spouse?"

The young man looked on at a distance, as if he finally encountered something he had no answer to. When Laku thought he would not answer, Kalesch finally spoke. "Self. Soul. Being," he said in Kgos. "Rayeshka is all that."

"Hm," Laku muttered thoughtfully. "Rayeshka." He looked at Kalesch. "And you treat her as your being?"

"Once she turns twenty-one."

"How do you do that? Force yourself to treat one other person as your...soul, your being?"

"I do not know."

Laku made a dramatic stop, staring at Kalesch with eyes wide open. "You just admitted you do not know something, Kalesch."

"I know you are delaying us all, Your Highness," his advisor said. "We should move along before the sun rises."

He ran after the man with a grin. "You should teach me more Tomera." His advisor refused to answer, as he always did whenever Laku was talking nonsense. But the prince wanted to talk nonsense. He could not yet face his father's death, nor his mother's grief and fears.

And most especially the visitors that would soon arrive in Tomesh.