The scorch was not an enemy. It was a presence. It lived in the white bone of the sky. It whispered to the clay: Crack. Let go. Be nothing.

Not a river. Not yet. But water, slow as a prayer, falling from a hidden ceiling into a pool that had been waiting for the scorch to end.

The cracks began as fine threads, invisible at noon, but at dawn they stretched across the pan like a nervous system. Each day, the earth contracted, pulling away from itself. The cracks deepened into chasms, then into canyons you could lose a camel in. The ground became a mosaic of tilted plates, sharp-edged and thirsty.