Sind

the last settlement before the desert.

a trapezoidal hill before a river where once families of fishermen lived in mud huts.

when gold washed up with the commotion of these fishermens' nets, 

the casteless out of the lower depths of Tapo Meru crossed the desert on the prospects of merchants' stories:
of stars shining in the mud, 
a constellation of gold chinks.

these were the ones who made bricks from the mud, and walls from the brick.

these were the ones who named the hill Sind and the river Ket.

These were the ones who traded gold dust, and succored the caravans halfway to Tapo Meru

the hill grew crowded with walls and smithy holes and whore stews, 
and the river a sewer.

it was this way until a year an invader army lit the river afire, and tore down the town

and by the winter had built a balustrade out of the bones of monsters, stodged up the Ket, and squatted there for one hundred years.

this exists in a library.

today the hill is what it always was.

an outcropping of limestone overlooking a lethargic brown wash south to the sea.

on the nights we rested there we shared our camp with other merchants bound for Tapo Meru.

they shared wine, and we held a contest of telling tales, the subject the ghosts just outside our fire.

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