Nahum rose slimy skinned and green. When he spoke, he spoke not in his own tenor but with the voice of the wind, with the whir of insect wings, with the heart of the desert king’s dreaming daughter, and with the rumbled wisdom of sand and sea and Time. “I am Nahum, “ he spoke to the king, “I come to you from the stomach of the world, from the deepest places, brought by a creature born when your desert was a sea. Heed me. Leave these people unharmed and deliver your own men to their families.” In that moment the king’s hateful greed died for he heard only his daughter’s voice in what Nahum said. The king saw her – just for a moment, laughing on the edge of the oasis far away.

Falling before Nahum, the king wept, salting a salty sea.

In the silence that followed, each soldier turned his back to the sea, dropped his weapons in the sand, and began the long march back through the desert. The swords and shields lie their still, covered now in fathoms of water and centuries of sand.

Three days later, Naseelah woke and rose from her bed,  pushing past the soothsayers and her weeping sister. She ran out to the oasis and looked westward. And there they were: the army in one great ragged line, her father at their front.

As for Nahum, he went home. He became just as sullen as he’d been before the great storm. No one believed his story about a great fish and a desert king and a god of sacrifice and forgiveness. Nahum grew all the more sullen because of it.

The fish was never seen again.

When the sun rises at the right angle; if the moon shows full her face; when Polaris drops two degrees below the earth’s horizon, then when a dragonfly bears a wish, it will grow wings. Those wings will bear breezes to blossom into storms and they will wake something magical in the forgotten depths of our hearts and the dark bellies of our secret souls.