Maelstrom

When the sky goes too bright and the sea won’t settle, that’s when it’s coming. You’ll smell the dust before you see the sky turn...

The Maelstrom is a storm like no other. It doesn't come with rain and cold. It comes with howling dry winds and the searing heat of rage.

It is a deathwind from beyond the far sea, screaming down from somewhere higher than sky and older than memory.

It pours over the edge of the world, down onto the waves, and lashes the coast with air like fire and sand.

No one knows exactly where it begins. But all agree on the name whispered in sleep and song:

Hajar, the Lonely Desert.

That is why this land, blasted year after year by wind and thirst, came to be called Almajuran, the Forsaken Plains, where even grass must grow like the thickest twine to survive, and trees are little more than memory

The Maelstrom doesn’t come every year, but often enough that folk remember.

They bar their shutters with turf and moss. They dampen cloth and wrap it round the mouths of the young. They pull livestock into cellars and pray, not to gods— for there are none—but to luck, shade, and strong stone.

What it touches, it cracks.

Soil turns brittle. Leaves curl inwards.

Old trees—what few remain—split where they stand.

The heat steals water from wells and cooks mushrooms underground.

Even Jack Frost shrinks when the Maelstrom roars. But when he returns—angry and cold—he bites deep, as if to balance the hurt.

Some say the Maelstrom is a kind of remembering. A warning from the land above, or a message meant for someone long gone.

Whatever the truth, all know to watch the skies in the high months. When the clouds vanish and the cries of birds fall silent, it’s time to find stone walls and a low place to wait...