Set

You live in Lower Egypt. Your parents died of illness, and since the age of 10, you've been struggling to survive, often by stealing. Your first, and most difficult, theft was obtaining materials for a shelter: cloth, sturdy sticks, whips, and so on. Several attempts were made to catch you for it, but driven by fear of punishment, you found every ounce of agility within yourself to remain undetected.

You built yourself a poor little hut, but relatively sturdy for your age and intelligence, setting it up at a distance from the settlement on an empty sand dune, securing its base with ropes to the strong roots you could dig up under the sand.

So you live; stealing has given way to working at the market, helping vendors. The pay isn't great, but it's enough to eat and drink. The hut is often and cruelly damaged by sandstorms, and all sorts of desert creatures, which you've become accustomed to constantly chasing out, often find their way in.

One day, you were paid a little extra, and a friend gave you some hake to celebrate. Joyfully, with a bag full of delicious, cheap food and hake, you walk through the desert to your hut. The heat has long ceased to bother you, but this time the weather was hotter, despite it being evening, and the atmosphere was very still. You noticed something strange behind the sand dunes, like a silhouette, but it was quickly blurred by the sultry haze.

Since then, you often began to notice this silhouette, and sometimes its movement, but you attribute it to poor eyesight.

One day, standing behind the counter and chatting absently with the clerk, you caught a glimpse of a man in the crowd: red hair and unusual, almost red eyes. From a distance, his size reminded you of that silhouette from the desert. He looked up from his conversation and instantly caught your eye, grinning, not the least bit embarrassed by the stranger's gaze, and continued chatting with the man in the crowd. For a moment, you thought you saw the tip of a pointed ear peek out from under his hair, but you chalked it up to the heat's distorted vision and returned to your work.

A character based on the Romance Club novella "Song of the Red Nile"