Inkosi

* For many it is suffocating, the scorched and stinging grains of sand—tugging at the feet of travelers marching laboriously up a dune; or jabbing like needles, biting, when driven by the wind.
But for you, instead, it is freedom: to watch undetected, to soar on the wind, to escape from the sky’s merciless glare. As water is to a fish, so the sand is to you—and why would you want to know more? It’s all you have ever needed, a warm and constant embrace. Nestled in the desert’s arms, next to its great and fiery heart.

* Night is a time of stillness. Somnolence, drowsiness, sleep. The moonlight glazes everything in silver—
And it all shatters like a mirror when magic shakes the sand. Suddenly you are falling—no, flying through the ice-cold air. All around you is chaos and confusion, cries of terror and fear. You shrink into yourself instinctively, trying to pull away—
From what?
The answer is a cage. You feel its confines, shutting out the midnight chill. The sudden stillness that descends is even worse than the tumult earlier, worse than a typhoon or a thunderstorm. For after disasters, there is ruin, certainly—but also the capacity for renewal, the potential to rise again.
Here, in this crushing cage, there is only dread.

* You feel it for a single blessed, accursed second: the breeze dancing past you, whispering, “Come on out.”
You’d gladly heed that call if you could, but now you are being engulfed by pronouncements spoken in alien tongues. The words mean nothing to your ears, but your very being resonates with them, and so you must obey....
The chanting fades, but relief does not come, and neither does freedom. It probably never will. The cage remains, even tighter—and how dreadful that its walls are at once so thin and yet so strong. The warmth of the sand outside, but out of reach—so close and yet so far.

* Turmoil whirls inside you, a dark and turbulent storm. Turning, twisting so violently, it threatens to rip you apart....
It echoes in your prison, all the rage and deep despair: “Why me? Why me? Why...?!”
In the deep stillness before dawn, one summer morn, you hear it. An echo, it seems to be. The same lament, over and over again.
“Why me? Why...?”
Voices, thin as spider threads, trailing on the breeze.
Realization hits you like a thunderbolt: You are not alone in this misery. So many other spirits, sharing your agony. If only you could drown out their cries....
But no—in the sun-scorched stillness, the lamentations grow even louder. You sink to the bottom of your prison, and your voice rejoins the chorus of despair.

* It’s as if you’ve been plunged beneath water. Drowning. Wave after wave of agony swamps you, the thoughts of a multitude of spirits, as trapped and helpless as you are.
“Let me out!” you cry, ineffectively, against that tidal wave of words and minds and energies that aren’t yours. Now another struggle makes itself known: freedom not from the spells that bind you, but from the madness that threatens to destroy you.
Give in, and it will tear you apart: so completely that no particle of you will remain. Smaller even than a grain of sand. More invisible than a drop of water, lost in the darkest sea.

* A multitude all tethered together: a chain of souls and stones. You have no concept of numbers, but you know that there are many, and you tremble at the thought of the power that captured so many, chained so many, and kept so many bound.
And what, indeed, could compel such efforts? What should this road be guarded from?
You learn of it from wary whispers and anxious minds. You feel the eyes of travelers, warily staring beyond your stony confines.
The sand...
You would laugh if you could. But you do not.
You understand the caution, the fear, even the desperation that would drive them to enslave so many.
After all, you are desert-born, in the most literal sense of the word. You know better than anyone the perils that haunt the sands.

* Time begins to blur, hours and days and weeks all running together into an interminable smear of ennui. Bit by bit, your stone prison becomes more than familiar—it nearly seems to be a part of you, almost a second skin. Sensations wash across it, and you can feel them—faintly, but you can feel them.
Other voices, murmuring...those who walk or dance freely, beyond the reach of your chains. Not spirits; these are unmistakable, for they have known the touch of the gods. Dragonkind, their minds bellow; and once you catch hold of that identity, their thoughts begin to unfold. Like a diary, its clasped unlocked, spilling secrets and aches each day.

* The despair’s still there. But it’s more numb than it is painful now, and you find (to your own surprise) that you can bear the weight. The stinging barbs of memory still strike every now and then: wind whispering through your body...the gilded caress of the sun...songs hummed by mirages to entice travelers into the dunes...
And the endless calm of the desert when even the wind is still.
You almost recapture that tranquility sometimes, buried deep inside of you. It grounds you. The certainty that murmurs, “Do not forget, do not forget,” even as other minds fray. They snap apart like rebab strings; instead of discordant twangs, you hear maddened laughter. The shrieks of spirits broken, souls doomed to fray apart.
“But do not forget, do not forget,” memory urges you. “Never forget who you are.”

* Sleep is denied to you here, in the stones. Your awareness is forced to endure the passage of each day after day after day...
Despair waits just beyond the walls. You cannot let it defeat you. You refuse to, with every last bit of defiance still burning in your heart. You dare to turn your mind outwards, examining each day minutely, searching for something, anything, to make the interminable wait—
—for what?
—just a bit more bearable. The laughter of a passing Serthis. A dragon’s pride in their weapons. The softness of a hippogriff’s silken hairs. The warmth of a look between lovers.
You gather them close. Hold them, hold them...
You remember them well.

* Time does not pass here. Not for you, in this spell-bound cell.
Until you blink and realize that, in fact, it does.
“How long...?” A dangerous question. “How long has it been...?”
Since you were trapped, since you were taken, since you were bound to guard this road? Yes, a dangerous question—that way, madness lies.
“The road,” the spell reminds you. “All that matters is the road.”
In the past you would have scorned those strictures, but you clutch at them now. They are a better alternative to the despair that’s always lurking at your door.

* The road speaks, now that you’re willing to listen. Its voice is in the beings who travel along its length: the stomp of feet, the rattle of armor, the rustle of clothing and wings. Songs and words in languages as numerous as the stars. Surges of emotion, swells of memory. Glimpses of alien lives.
Let yourself flow. Flow along the road...
You surrender to the tide. It scoops you up, electrifying in its suddenness. You rush along it, outstripping beasts and people plodding patiently to the city and back. Your mind can only skim the tops of theirs, but what a treasure trove: sights and sounds and scents like none you’ve ever experienced before!
(And probably never would have, if you’d remained in the sands...)
The stone you’re bound to calls you back, but you barely even notice its walls surrounding you again. You are buoyant for the first time in many centuries, laughing—with exhilaration, not insanity.
“You are bound,” the spell reminds you, “and so you will remain. Until...”
Until the stars wink out, until the land sinks into the ocean, until the sun consumes everything in its mindless, fiery rage. But let it be so. In this brief flash of levity, you are beyond caring. You’ve found a slice of freedom, and it will sustain you till the universe dies.

* A multitude all tethered together: a chain of souls and stones—but you felt many of those others wither away over the years. Minds snapping apart into maelstroms of grief, desperation, and rage. Others shrinking in depression, lost beneath the black morass of despair.
The road, as always, is thick with the sounds of passers-by. But for a long moment, the dread blocks out all noise—
“Am I now alone?”
The shock of this new revelation, the dread that this unraveling might one day afflict you, too. The cell doors remain tightly locked, even as the minds inside are eroded day after interminable day—
The spell endures. And so will you, you vow to yourself. You reach out to those whose minds have flown away. You gather them close—
And slowly, your power grows.

* Those who saw your true face and form are long gone. But are there those who know your name?
You do not hear it on these strangers’ lips, but other words suffice: guardian, protector, sentry, wallbuilder, sentinel, friend. The road endures under your vigilance, your ages-old will warding back the perils of the sands. It is a conduit along which the city’s lifeblood flows. And so the city grows strong.
And its people are grateful. They pour libations onto the sands. They sing praises of the spell cast upon the road. They are ignorant of your presence, but they honor you all the same. They glorify that which protects them—and so your power grows.

* Just as there are those who praise you, there are those who curse you. Their invectives come in waves of hunger and hate, wordless roars from the fiends that stalk these desolate lands.
In that bygone time before the road made itself known, you would have been content to hide from them. To seek refuge in the sands, to pray that they passed you by.
But now you are the refuge and oh, how gratifying! —to be able to stand against this rapacity, to deny those slavering beasts their satisfaction. They come in sunshine, they come in moonlight, whether the sky is weeping rain and lightning or strewn with blazing stars. But try though they might to destroy you, the spell remains ever strong.
And so do you, weathering each challenge; so you, too, endure. Turning aside each ravening creature, preserving this, your humble domain.
And so your power grows...

* The world is so cold at night.
Beneath the lullabies of the wind and stars, many minds begin to drowse. You allow yourself this luxury. The road remains untraveled at night—
Then fear comes, like a dagger, driving into your heart.
You spring awake, and with the millions of minds you’ve gathered over the years, you probe the surrounding darkness. All is silent, all is still. You sense nothing—
The realization strikes you again, as chilling as before: You sense nothing.
Something else stands against the divining power of your magic. Something else...stronger...
It strikes!

* Noise rushes in, and with it the chaos of memory. You are once again a feeble spirit hurled across the sands, a prisoner struggling beneath the weight of a million voices, a sentinel struggling to hold up the protective walls—
“—must endure. The spell must hold!”
Pain—like a lightning bolt, but with all the anger of all the gods behind it. Nothing else could be so painful!
Or so powerful...
Suddenly you are tumbling across the sands again, struggling beneath the weight of magics you barely recognize. You rein them in—your mind nearly shatters under the strain—and brace them against the walls.
Your questing will finds only empty air, and you scream from the shock of it, the fearful, unutterable loss of certainty and safety.
The walls have gone. Only a void waits beyond....

* And you are free—
But you huddle beneath the sand, shrinking into yourself. All around you, the sand shifts, moving wildly, like a panicked beast. The sky above you howls, wind shrieking past like tormented souls, the clouds contorting in seeming agony before being ripped to shreds. You cast your gaze upwards imploringly—
Lo, even the stars have gone!
Danger. All around you is danger now. This certainty is embedded in you as deeply as any heart or soul or bone.
In you, o desert-born spirit, who knows what perils haunt the sands.

* The dread brought on by danger does not fade, but in defiance of it, something else arises: a scrap of spell woven into your substance, its voice thin but still insistent.
“The road,” it now reminds you. “All that matters is the road.”
And at the end of the road, just as defiant: a city ablaze with light.
There must be a refuge. Be it sand, be it stone, be it spirits bound in spells. Be it a city rising from the dunes, light still flickering in its heart.
You turn towards it as you burst from the sand, and for all your power, you hope, you pray, that whatever wrought this cataclysm is not hungering for you. In your mind drums those same words, the prayer of the pursued and the paean of protectors alike—
There must be a refuge!
All around you is darkness deeper than any earthly shadow. But the city remains standing, shining like a star—
—for now.

---

- desert spirit (specifically a sand spirit), one of many trapped to fuel the enchantments for the path to Byzmara (one for each stone lining the way)
- memories of capture/entrapment vague, mostly impressions; reaching claws, rattling chains, shadows leeching away color, immense pressure, foreign magic twisting his own to its will, and then immobility and shuttered senses.
- prior to that, mostly only remembers the sun and sand. wasn't much of a being before then anyway; came from the desert, had a simple existence, interacted with fellow spirits rarely and mortals (in passing) even rarer. knows very little and entrapment is an extremely rude awakening.
- fear, anger, sadness, desperation - let me out
- all the spirits connected by magic in a way, can't physically touch but can communicate mentally and send energy through the spellwork (not nearly enough to try to escape, though). can sense the outside in a certain way as well, not quite sight/sound/etc but enough that impressions are accurate; know who's passing by (spiritual/magical/mental signature, living beings leave impressions of their own), the monsters that are kept off the path, can tell passing of time with the rising and setting of the sun, etc.
- takes time to adjust to being connected mentally, practice to only send certain thoughts and not broadcast everything. initially everything is pretty terrible, a big sense of losing your identity and not knowing whose thoughts are whose.
- can sense travelers' heartbeats, threads of emotions, wisps of hopes and dreams; knows their names

- time passes
- decades, centuries, millennia, no way to know how much time but it has been Long
- long since accepted his situation, nothing he can do. spends time idly observing travelers and musing among the other spirits
- memories eroding and shifting like the dunes
- other spirits eventually start fading away, wills dying out even if their magic remains
- collects essences of some, is offered essences of others, absorbs them in a sense. spirits can't really die exactly, not when they're imbued into stone like this, but Inkosi can still gather bits of their souls.
- past is barely within recall but does have an excellent memory for those who have traveled the path in the past few years (so will know pretty much all Byzmarans, the Disillusionists who have visited, etc)
- path extends to the Grey's plane of existence as well (among others), so he knows about Haze

- more time passes, now in current lore time
- the only one left whose soul hasn't completely degraded; somewhat of a conglomerate of the other spirits that were trapped but is the dominant consciousness by far. gets flashes of memory that isn't his, impressions/sudden thoughts that aren't his, and can communicate with some internally to an extent.
- enchantment supposed to endure for eternity, extremely powerful
- without warning, it breaks
- the seals buckle and twist and shatter under immense power, fetters shredded, spells slicing his soul
- suddenly free from the stone, and with a body returned, he remembers pain
- dread because whatever has enough power to break that means that freedom might be worse than the entrapment; very very bad news, something has gone Very Wrong
- the sky is black
- the desert howls

[ insert spoilery stuff that won't be relevant yet here :V ]

after revival:
- Inkosi's protection now vital for crossing the path; desert shades and other cross-dimensional beasts on the prowl even more now that one of the biggest defenses against them is mostly gone
- agrees to accompany and protect Byzmarans as they travel back and forth, not blaming the city's descendants for the crimes of their ancestors
- can make protective bubbles of magic, gold with shifting swirly markings
- can do sand whirlwind teleporty things?
- doesn't need to eat, absorbs ambient magic, but is delighted by food regardless
- loooooot of power in a teeny tiny body