The canyon rises like the broken ribs of a god, curved against the setting sun, shadowing a city of amber and violet. Roads bridge over stairs, built on the bones of older roads, older stairs, older ruins. The walls are maps drawn over maps, until truth blurs into myth.

This is a sacred city, a neutral oasis where violence is outlawed, and disputes are settled over storytelling and date wine. Heat-slick banners hang low and heavy. Lanterns sparkle in the cool gloom. The storytellers and acolytes step through portals.

Some send aspects, and friends speak through bodies of shimmering glass, their minds tethered to palantirs hundreds of leagues away, eyes bright with the light of other skies.

Old friends meet and new voices babble like sudden rain. The air tastes of cumin and barbecued meat; smells of spiced flatbread, sizzling fruits, and the resin of desert incense. The crowd is thick with cinnamon hearthsmoke. This is a hub on the edge of ten worlds, ten realms mingling in one festival. It's been a hundred years since the last one, rumored to be near the tiled harbors, the blue coves of the far islands.

Beyond the gates, the desert waits. Dunedrakes wing over the sands, deepwyrms turn under the earth in slow thunder. It's said that Ribgate Crossing is the remains of an ancient great wyrm, so old that its marrow-places are now market places, its spine a string of pearly blue caves that cradle fresh water.

Maps over maps... banners divide secrets into rooftop societies, bonding over gulps of date wine and the shuffling rustle of traders unburdening their pack animals, palming ink-stamped messages from across the borders.

This city is older than the sands, from before the drakes and wyrms. The toothless wall-carvers grunt it is older than the gods. Who knows. The music comes from everywhere. Kite-drawn rafts with sails like giant birds careen in through mirages. Sandsleds and side-runners, nimble glassfin racers, even great trimarans with their spirit totems and leashed lantern crabs.

The desert is far from barren. Sandstorms routinely unearth layers of past roads, cities, and sunken civilizations.

Sometimes, travellers say that time pools differently in the lightning-sheared glass fields between canyons. Things simply... disappear for weeks. Or never return. The bravest kite skimmers, manta-riders, or Windlancers (drake riders), riding the migratory wind rivers, say they can see giant cymatic patterns of ridges and sunken canyons. Everything means something, and the hooded, kite-riding teens and dream-dousing wanderers hunger to know. The Lesser Scionate struggles to keep the peace. Everything is a single story away from chaos. In this bazaar of shade and murmuring arches, news and stories change hands like coin. It is here that the tournament of legends pits tale and tongue together, and after the Silent Hour, the whistling stadium crowds vote on the stories they love best.

Because stories are how souls survive.