ON THE DESOLATE PLAINS, wanderers were an uncommon sight. Few set foot into the desert, and fewer still pressed on toward the ruins and lighthouses that lay broken along the coastline. They were dead sentinels, scattered corpses stripped of meaning and memory, dismantled to their bones with no one left to mourn them. Whatever histories these lands had once sheltered had long been taken from them. There was no life, other than the wild beasts that had reclaimed what remained. You came here to die, or to disappear from the world. Or you came at a Witch Mother’s command, like Yves.
The world was scorching heat and heavy sandstorms. The sand was everywhere; in his boots, his clothes, his hair, his teeth, and in the cracks of his thoughts. Yves hated every waking moment of it, and since he had not slept for three days, there was plenty of hating to go around.
In his hand lay a glass-etched Adhar leyliner, its narrow rings inscribed with sigils meant to answer to the deep currents of the world’s stray energies. He stood with his back to the boiling white disc that was the midday sun, so that his own shadow fell over the artefact as he tried to read it. Under ordinary conditions, the faint inner glow should have aligned itself toward the nearest leytrace. Here, the light faltered. The further Yves had advanced from the heart of the desert toward the northern coast, the less reliable the instrument had become. Its readings wavered, forming not distinct lines but hesitant curls. They spun, froze, flickered, reoriented, then twisted and reformed again, as though caught between contradictory directions of pull.
Magic, metal, and mind; out here, everything lost integrity. Steel and wood degraded, delicate mechanisms seized, and enchantments thinned. Even the most refined artefacts survived mere months at best; lesser ones came undone within weeks or days. 
drew from everything — crafted or living.
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