It was mostly elders who tended the shrine in the desert of black sands, their faces wizened and weathered under their red cowls. There was a quiet contentment in their deeply lined faces which, at first, Sumira mistook for resignation. But now, sitting at the foot of the effigy of the Ghaunt with a soft-spoken accolyte beside her, she could see the clear gentleness in the old woman's smile.

The old woman's knobby fingers were less so: more deft and firm as the wove a pattern of knots around the smooth, black tusk, binding it tight with a blood red cord.

"This will protect me in the desert?"

The accolyte nodded. "Protect, and guide you if need be. If you become lost."

"But you said they eat... dreams?"

"Dead ones, girl. Dead dreams, dead hopes. They scavenge, not hunt."

"I'm not sure I understand," Sumira conceded, her voice low. She heard a howling beyond the dunes that could have just been the wind.

"For the paths we tread, we pass up others. For the doors we open, others close. Some futures die, a promising fruit withering on the vine. And these go the Ghaunt, these corpses of what could have been, picked clean and left to the dust of the ages..." She trailed off, something whistful in her face as she raised it to the moons.

"Are dreams ever truly dead?"

The accolyte sighed like the wind that scattered the black sand on the flagstones. "Everything dies. And what dies, we mourn and then we bury. If we do not... in their own way these things putrify, they fester. We can never find the way forward if we lay ourselves down beside them. And some... some want nothing more. And yet the world carries on. It offers us tomorrows, if we can rise to receive them."

The twilight of dusk was deepening into night and a pair of accolytes in white lit the lantern in the idol's hand. Its light was soft as a whisper, as a candle in a distant window calling her to shelter. Sumira rubbed at her eyes.