In the great great deserts, there was sand, warmth, and heat, but there was a very far away very far from everything a little oasis. It was just a tree, a small lake and a little formation of rocks that made a little cave with some shade. one morning, she awoke. She didn’t know how she got there. She didn’t know who she was. She just knew that she had pale skin and long blonde hair. She wondered what she should do.

The first day. She took a stroll round the oasis. There was nothing past the tree, the lake, and the cave. She drank from the still, blue water. She sat in the shade of the cave, looking at the distant dunes.

From the cave, the water looked still, but a single line of wet sand led from the lake to the rocks and stopped beneath her shade. A small bronze button lay there, hot enough to sting a fingertip.

This was awfully strange to the woman. She decided this oasis, on top of providing no hint of food, was beginning to look quite suspicious. As the afternoon was well underway and the temperatures would soon drop, she decided to leave the oasis and begin her walk into the desert.

Her intended walk away left the little oasis behind her, yet the bronze button gave a small tick against the stone. On its underside, a grainy crescent of wet sand clung around three tiny stamped strokes, all pointing toward the lake.

But that strange, strange urge was beginning to frighten her. She took off in great strides and soon the oasis grew smaller behind her.

Behind her, the lake remained blue and still, yet the bronze button struck once against her palm and grew hot enough to redden the skin around it. Far back at the rocks, something gave a wet, dragging scrape across the sand.

She realized the story was biased. Something was trying to take over something was trying to insist on this little button insist on the oasis so she threw the button in the ground, kicked the sand on top of it, and started running even faster away from the oasis that was almost invisible in distance now.

The button did not follow: beneath her kicked sand, it gave one muffled tick, then was quiet. Ahead, the dunes offered no shade, only a white horizon trembling in the late heat; by the time the oasis vanished, her tongue had begun to feel like cloth.

She walked and walked and walked until her heads started to hurt until her feet started to ache, and until the sunlight started to dim and evening started to make itself known

As evening bruised the western dunes purple, the heat fled so quickly that her sweat turned cold beneath her hair. A thin moon rose over the white horizon, and far ahead a line of dark stones offered either shelter before night or a mark by which something else might find her.

At the stones, she found a torn white sleeve marked with her initials, and a dry voice said, "No one has been here."

The sleeve’s torn cuff was stiff with salt, and on the inside, beneath the initials, someone had scratched: WATER WALKS AT NIGHT. The dry voice came again from among the dark stones: “Keep the cloth—or leave it for the one who wore it.”

She pulled the sleeve across stones and tore her palm, and beneath it a black thread pointed into a narrow cleft where the wind made no sound.

The black thread drew taut when she touched it, and a flat stone within the cleft slid aside with a gritty sigh. Behind it lay a hand-sized hollow, cool as lake-water, holding a stoppered glass vial half full of clear liquid; her fresh blood made three bright beads on its neck.