By the smoke of the duskfires and the hum of dream-drunk flies, HOME breathed again.

In the shadowless yellow haze of the Mhojave, beyond where the sand
falls into silence and the sky boils like a lidless eye, two sisters
kept a tent of bone-lace and ashcloth. Evisi Uraian'Gattar wove moss
into hooks and hung them from the ceiling, while her elder sister
Harenae sat still on a floating stone bench, her eyes swollen with sleep
or fever.

They were caretakers of HOME, an outcasts' mirage and sacred meeting
ground, and upon Harenae's head: the Crown of Thorns, a tangled circlet
of living barbs, glistening with the slow, wet hunger of a patient
carnivore. It pulsed with a rhythm independent of her heart, and when it
thirsted, it bled her.

"Did you feed it?" Evisi's voice cracked as she stirred incense into the
hearth.
"Did I feed it?" Harenae repeated, then smiled in a direction that was
not her sister.
"Yes. You know it starves in silence."

"And yet silence never starves. Unlike you." A bead of blood dripped
from her temple, soaking into the cracked leather of her seat. "You
twist, twist, twist like the wind in a bottle. Have you forgotten how
she set it on my brow?"

"I remember," Evisi whispered. "She spoke through the wasps. Her mouth
was full of earthworms."

"'The land devours its own to be reborn,'" Harenae hissed through her
teeth. "She said nothing. She buried me."

That night, as the desert inhaled and the stars pressed low, the sisters
welcomed pilgrims into the tent. A Xoran widow brought a pot of
marrow-jelly and asked to sit beside Harenae, her own scaled hands
shaking as she offered it to the crown. A Mhaldorian novice knelt, naked
and humming, slicing thin lines into his chest in ritual. A Satyr with
sand-encrusted hooves came only to cry. "I saw a tree weep salt in the
dunes," he said. "It spoke your name in sap."

"Was it my name?" Evisi asked him, already knowing he would not answer.
But Harenae answered: "It was mine. Everything weeps my name now." Evisi
pouted.

Later, when the tent was empty again, the wind began to tear at the
seams. "I am tired of bleeding," Harenae muttered. "Let it bite someone
else."

"You always say that, and yet..." Evisi circled her slowly, weaving
strands of burnt kelp into a noose that was not meant to hang. "You
never give it away."

"Would you wear it?"
"Would you let me?"

They locked eyes. The crown twitched.

"No," Harenae said.
"No," Evisi echoed.

And then together, both speaking, not echoing: "But one day, one of us
will."

The tent walls rattled as the desert exhaled. Something deep beneath the
sand groaned like tectonics twisting. And then, the final visitor
arrived: barefoot, wide-eyed, teeth like polished ivory seeds. The child
said nothing at first, just stared.

Then: "I dreamed of two sisters. One hollowed. One full. One wore the
crown." Evisi knelt, voice trembling. "Which am I?"

The child grinned, and behind their teeth, petals bloomed. Harenae
screamed. The crown shivered and burst open like a bud with new thorns
unfolding wetly, hungrily. The sky cracked above HOME, lightning forked
from a dark black sky. The child laughed.

"You still don't know?"

And was gone.

When morning came, no footprints remained. Only blood and flowers no one
planted. HOME breathed and the sisters did not speak.

Penned by my hand on the 2nd of Ero, in the year 1014 AF.