The Standing Mirage

A ring of wind-polished standing stones on a rib that the heat-shimmer makes walk — at midday they seem to advance and recede across the pan, a famous navigation-killer.

The Reshi steer by the Standing Mirage precisely because they know the stones do not move — it is everything else that seems to. A dead man sits propped against the nearest stone, having walked toward what he took to be water all afternoon. The stones are old; whose empire raised them is a question the Reshi are content not to answer.