Kharis Sandstrider pressed her palm against the crystalline surface of the scrying bowl, feeling the heat that radiated from its core—a fragment of concentrated ruby dust that held the memories of a thousand desert storms. The bowl’s surface shimmered with heat mirages, but these weren’t the false visions that plagued ordinary travelers. These were deliberate constructions, each one showing a different potential future for the Wandering Clan Ashara.
“Show me the worst that could come,” she whispered, her forge-fire eyes reflecting the crimson glow that emanated from the depths of the scrying medium.
The mirages responded, coalescing into visions that made her copper skin prickle with recognition and dread. She saw clan members scattered across impossible distances when the morning dunes shifted, their calls for help lost in the vastness of a desert that had dreamed itself into new configurations overnight. She saw children wandering into mirages that promised water but delivered only deeper emptiness. She witnessed the sacred oasis of Qetesh dissolving into probability as competing possibilities warred for dominance, leaving her people without their most crucial gathering point.
As the newly appointed Emergency Coordinator for her nomadic clan, Kharis bore the responsibility of preparing for disasters that defied conventional planning. How did one create contingency protocols for a landscape that obeyed dream-logic rather than natural law? How could emergency supplies be cached when the very ground might shift into alternate configuration by dawn?
“The old ways served our ancestors,” Elder Amara had told her during the appointment ceremony three days ago, “but the desert’s dreams have grown more restless. We need new wisdom for new chaos.”
Kharis withdrew her hand from the scrying bowl, her palm bearing temporary impressions of the ruby crystals embedded in its rim. Around her, the clan’s evening camp spread across what had been a valley this morning but might become a plateau by sunrise. Goat-hair tents glowed like amber lanterns in the perpetual sunset that painted Pyrrhia’s sky, while children played games that helped them practice the internal navigation techniques essential for survival in their homeland.
She retrieved her writing materials—specially treated parchment that could withstand the desert’s harsh conditions and ink mixed with memory-preserving spices that would ensure her words remained clear despite sand and heat. The emergency plan she was crafting would need to account for challenges no other realm faced.
Primary Principle: The Internal Compass
In a landscape where external landmarks prove unreliable, survival depends on cultivating the inner navigational sense possessed by all true children of Pyrrhia. Emergency protocols must strengthen this innate ability rather than depend on geographical markers that may not exist tomorrow.
Kharis paused in her writing, remembering her own childhood training. Her grandmother had blindfolded her on her seventh birthday, spinning her until she lost all sense of direction, then demanded she find her way home using only the pull she felt in her bones. It had taken three terrifying hours, but eventually she had felt it—the subtle tug that pointed toward family, toward safety, toward belonging.
Water Cache Protocol: The Seven Scattered Springs
Rather than establish permanent water sources that may vanish when the desert dreams new geography, rotating water caches will be maintained at seven shifting locations. Each cache will be marked not by visible signs but by emotion-storing gems that resonate with the clan’s collective memory. Clan members will locate these caches by following the harmonic pull of shared experience rather than visual navigation.
The approach represented a fundamental departure from traditional emergency planning, but Pyrrhia demanded innovation. Fixed emergency shelters would become useless when the ground beneath them shifted into alternate configurations. Static meeting points would fail when the desert rearranged its valleys and peaks overnight. Instead, her plan relied on the unique magical heritage of her people—their ability to navigate by internal compass and their cultural practice of storing emotions and memories in crystalline form.
A commotion near the clan’s edge drew her attention. Two riders approached through the gathering dusk, their mounts’ hooves striking sparks from ruby-sand that glittered like fallen stars. Even at distance, Kharis could see the tension in their posture that suggested urgent news.
“Coordinator Sandstrider,” called Javid as he dismounted, his usually steady voice tight with concern. “The morning scouts report something unprecedented. The Mirage of Infinite Sorrows has moved thirty leagues closer to our projected path.”
Kharis felt her stomach clench. The Mirage of Infinite Sorrows was one of Pyrrhia’s most dangerous phenomena—a heat distortion that showed not alternate realities but concentrated despair, drawing viewers into visions of their deepest fears and regrets. Most desert dwellers knew to avoid its traditional territory near the Obsidian Cliffs, but if it had somehow become mobile…
“How many scouts encountered it directly?” she asked, her emergency training taking over.
“Two. Yasmin is recovering—she managed to break free before full immersion. But Tamir…” Javid’s voice trailed off as he gestured toward his companion, a young man whose forge-fire eyes had dimmed to the color of cooling embers.
Kharis moved quickly to Tamir’s side, recognizing the symptoms she had only read about in the clan’s most ancient texts. The young scout stared straight ahead but didn’t seem to see the physical world around him. His skin had taken on a grayish pallor that spoke of someone caught between realities, trapped in the borderland where mirage and truth became indistinguishable.
“Bring him to my tent,” she commanded, her mind already racing through the emergency protocols she had been developing. “And gather the emotion-readers. We’ll need to anchor him to our shared reality before the mirage claims him completely.”
As Javid helped guide the entranced scout toward the center of camp, Kharis realized her theoretical emergency plan was about to face its first practical test. The situation demanded immediate adaptation of protocols she had designed for different scenarios—combination of mirage-sickness treatment with mobile hazard response.
Within her tent, she arranged seven emotion-storing gems in a precise pattern around a central depression filled with memory-preserving spices. Each gem held recordings of powerful positive experiences from clan members—births, celebrations, moments of profound joy and connection. Together, they would create an emotional anchor strong enough to pull Tamir back from whatever despair the mirage had shown him.
“Tamir,” she said softly, placing her hands on either side of his face and forcing him to meet her gaze. “Feel the clan around you. Feel the love that binds us together. The mirage shows only fragments—we are the whole story.”
Slowly, carefully, she began drawing him back from the edge of infinite sorrow, using techniques her emergency plan had outlined but never expected to employ so soon. It was delicate work, requiring her to project not just her own emotional strength but the collective resilience of their entire community.
When Tamir’s eyes finally focused on her face, when the color returned to his copper skin and he whispered her name with recognition rather than despair, Kharis understood that her emergency plan had passed its first crucial test. But more importantly, she realized the plan itself would need constant evolution—not just written protocols, but living wisdom that could adapt to whatever new impossibilities their ever-changing homeland might dream into existence.
As dawn approached and the camp prepared for another day of navigation through shifting possibilities, Kharis returned to her writing with renewed urgency. The emergency plan she was creating wasn’t just about survival—it was about preserving the essence of what made her people who they were, even as the very ground beneath their feet transformed from day to day.
Final Principle: The Clan Endures
No emergency protocol can account for every impossibility that Pyrrhia may manifest. Our ultimate survival depends not on perfect planning but on perfect unity—the recognition that we are bound together by something stronger than geography, more permanent than landscape. When the desert dreams new configurations and familiar landmarks disappear, when mirages show false hopes and true despairs, we navigate by the compass of belonging that points always toward each other.
In the end, the greatest emergency preparation is the cultivation of unbreakable bonds between clan members. We survive not because we can predict what the desert will become, but because no matter what it becomes, we face it together.
The scrying bowl caught the first rays of dawn, its surface reflecting not just light but the shimmering possibilities of another day in a realm where preparation meant embracing uncertainty with wisdom, courage, and the unshakeable knowledge that home was not a place but a people who would never abandon each other to the beautiful, terrible dreams of the Crimson Wastes.
Chadwick Rye 
Leave a comment