Book One – Chapter 19

The second drink he knew was Sharran Vey, a desert spirit drawn from sastan pulp. Yu recognised the bottle before he read the label. It always came in an odd square block of dark glass that looked more like a small casket than, well, a bottle. The thing had a broad mouth, made to contain the preserved areole of the sastan cactus within. Distillers packed the pulp whole, so the spirit matured around it without decay, but if the areole rotted in direct sunlight, burst or were crushed, the liquor turned lethal. With that, the colour and shape of the bottle was half safety, half spectacle. It spoke of skill as much as risk. Every indulgence was a wager with death.

And the risk was real. People died from this, every year. They deserved it. Well, not the poor who had nothing else, but the ones who took to it deliberately. Some people sought that very risk, drinking Sharran Vey daily for just that reason. They were the ones who believed backwater was for bathing, the sort of people who claimed that the desert ran in their blood and such. They needed to dignify their shit life and glorify their suffering, just to taste some purpose, however disgusting and deadly. Yu was not one of them, and neither was Tria, though she pretended otherwise when it suited her public image. To Yu, Vey had always been a last resort, the drink of desperate desert wanderers who had run out of water and faith alike. It was vile, kin to the Grainthistle but more bitter. And yet, it was familiar. There had been a drought seven years past, so severe that everyone had been forced to drink it for weeks.

Yu wanted to drink it now, if only to summon that memory of home, that scorched familiarity. But he hesitated. The areoles inside looked right, pale and dense like preserved flesh, with no broken bits floating around, but the label was wrong. The letters warped into something that read more like Sharny than Sharran Vey. It unsettled him enough to step back from the shelf. Again, he would not risk it.