“Light cannot be chained,” they intoned with him. “A small group of us fled into the Atashian desert, across the Cracked Lands, pursued for more than a month into the wastes, until our pursuers gave up and we found ourselves without enough water to make the trip back home. So we pressed on. We found the Great Rift the day after we’d drank the last of our water. We climbed down it, losing two more brothers in the hike. And at the bottom, we found an ancient, abandoned city, carved into the faces of the cliffs themselves. We found great cisterns of water, renewed by a small stream, and we found
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