The Drover's Bones

A dry wash full of the bleached skeletons of a whole loper-herd and its drovers, unburied by Bonesung order since the Ash Famine as a warning.

The wash runs twenty yards before it dead-ends in a crumbling bank — no water came, and the herd collapsed where it stood. The tribe leaves it untouched: the bones warn the living what the wastes do to those who misread the dry country. Sand-lurkers nest in the ribcages; the bones are older than any living Asheni's memory but the story is kept fresh in song.