[Once Timaeous calms down and resumes plodding, Sypha falls into humming a wagon song. Every Speaker caravan has their own variations, a throaty rise-and-fall that sets a pace for the animals and livestock. If she lets herself, the rhythm can carry her into a sort of meditative state, where time passes without notice but irregular flickers of movement snatch at her attention faster than the mule's enormous ears.
They cover ground like that, Sypha and Tim and the wagon, as the sand mounds up on either side of the road, easing from dunes into true hillocks. Scrubby, sunblasted trees replace the shrubbery, really obscuring her line of sight. The beat of the wagon song carries her along the twisting road, until she comes round a tight bend and into a proper copse of leafy trees, boughs stretched out over a bubbling pool.
And next to the pool, a figure that has no right being so pale in all this sun.]
Oh. [Timaeous snorts in confusion - does the man smell much like the wolf, Sypha wonders? Or can the mule simply sense a predator either way?] It was you, wasn't it!
[Her earlier excitement is cut somewhat by confusion: why turn away from her before? Why reappear now? She climbs down from the wagon again, a little more cautiously this time.] Unless this 'you' isn't real either, and nobody told me this desert conjurs up illusions?
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They cover ground like that, Sypha and Tim and the wagon, as the sand mounds up on either side of the road, easing from dunes into true hillocks. Scrubby, sunblasted trees replace the shrubbery, really obscuring her line of sight. The beat of the wagon song carries her along the twisting road, until she comes round a tight bend and into a proper copse of leafy trees, boughs stretched out over a bubbling pool.
And next to the pool, a figure that has no right being so pale in all this sun.]
Oh. [Timaeous snorts in confusion - does the man smell much like the wolf, Sypha wonders? Or can the mule simply sense a predator either way?] It was you, wasn't it!
[Her earlier excitement is cut somewhat by confusion: why turn away from her before? Why reappear now? She climbs down from the wagon again, a little more cautiously this time.] Unless this 'you' isn't real either, and nobody told me this desert conjurs up illusions?