Free Dragonfly: A Tale of the Counter-Earth at the Cosmic Antipodes by Raphael Ordoñez

things out! Do you never weary of asking questions?”
    “No,” I said. “I don’t.”
    “You ought to make a pilgrimage.”
    “A pilgrimage? Where to?”
    “I’m only being half-serious,” she said. “To the Sanctuary of At. They would take you before the Image-Not-Made-By-Hands and let you ply the Last Sybil with questions. Would you obtain the answers you wanted, I wonder? At speaks enigmatically, like the desert wind. At is not as free as I am.”
    “How could that be? You haven’t answered me anything!”
    She gave a strained smile. I was afraid at first that I’d pushed her too much. But she drew a deep breath and began at last.
    “Long ago,” she said, “a great ad or so, before the world was so dry, a star fell into the desert near Moabene. A lone—”
    “What’s Moabene?”
    “A Druin city. It wasn’t Druin then, of course, but Chebite. A lone—”
    “What does ‘Chebite’ mean?”
    “The Chebites were autochthons of the Deserits. You must listen, or I’ll never finish. Well, a lone herder of chebothim found the star and told the Demarch. The Demarch was troubled, and all Moabene with him. He said: ‘Take us to this star, that we may worship it.’ For the thought of their hearts was that it was a dead god. So the Demarch and his wizards and counselors went out into the desert with the herder as their guide. They found the Image at the bottom of a pit.
    “As they knelt down to pay it homage, lo! columns of strange men came up out of the south, the thirsty men of Arras. ‘Surely this is a sign from At,’ they said, and knelt down to worship as well. Under their direction the Image was borne into the city and placed in a high cave, and the Sanctuary rose up around it.
    “For myriads the descendants of the Arrasenes ruled over the Deserits, a people apart. But they dwindled over time, mixing with the Chebites, and the two peoples became one, the Druins. The last archon died, and the demes wander now without one hand to guide them.”
    “It’s strange,” I said. “I’d never heard of any of my people going to seek a new place. We imagined we were the only men in the world. Then again, Arras is dry now, and I’ve often thought it wasn’t always so. Great cities stand along the dead sea bottoms and canyons.”
    “The Sibyl,” said Seila, “tells us that two brothers, twins, split from the same egg at the dawn of time. The Enochites are descended from one, together with the goblins of Nightspore Forest and the wheel-eyed giants of Leng, while the Arrasenes and Eldenes come from the other. The Druins are a mixture.”
    “Who is this Sibyl? Why did you call her the Last Sibyl?”
    “Each Sibyl is the Last Sibyl until the next Sibyl comes. We’re never guaranteed another. For who can make a Sibyl but At?”
    “We have a similar story,” I said. “At the beginning were two brothers made of the same clay. One rose up and slew the other. For this he was doomed to wander the earth, deathless. He took to wife a nephel who had assumed bodily form. She bore him all manner of monstrous progeny, so he murdered her and buried her beneath a mountain. There she lies decomposing. But her body continues to give birth to monsters. It was from the blood of the slain brother that Arras sprang.”
    “If you didn’t know there were other men in the world,” said Seila, “what brought you across the desert?”
    “My people all died. Our wells were blighted. Only I survived. From a high place I looked out and saw what I now know to be Narva. I set out to find its gates.”
    “You came all this way on foot? There are no passes through the Pelus.”
    “I flew,” I said.
    “You flew! You had airships in Arras?”
    “I don’t know what you mean,” I said.
    Seila sketched with her hands. “Crafts that hang from great envelopes filled with something lighter than air. The Enochites use them.”
    “No,” I said. “The idea never occurred to me. I can see now how it would work. Yes, indeed I