Featured in The Copper Press, 19 March, 2159 A.M.

When a courier arrives bearing a letter tied with silver twine and no return seal, you either pretend you are not home or fetch ink before curiosity curdles. I fetched ink.

The parchment smelled of myrrh and hot iron. Inside, one sentence: “Come to Al-Ramla Oasis and learn why the dunes bleed.” Below, a sigil I did not know—half crescent, half set of jagged fangs. No signature, only a down-payment of ten amber coins, each stamped with an unfamiliar sultan’s profile.

I, Sabirah el-Khayyam, itinerant naturalist for hire and occasional hoax debunker, have followed stranger invitations. Besides, a cryptid that makes the desert sand bleed? That promised a chapter fit for *The Wandering Ledger*.

Al-Ramla lies where the Sea of Ghosts winds south into sandstone channels before being swallowed by dunes as tall as cathedrals. Caravans seldom stop there; the oasis shifts on maps the way mirages shift on horizons.

I joined a spice caravan escorted by the Bronze Mamluks—mercenaries who trade sword service for coin and coffee. Their captain, Tariq of the Seven Scars, warned me of recent nightmares: jackal howls echoing from empty wells, and travelers waking to find every glass object in camp reduced to powder. The locals blamed Al-Saqq—the Glass Jackal, a creature whispered of since pre-Shard times. It prowls moonlit dunes, devours reflections, and leaves footprints that bleed sand-made-glass.

Superstition, perhaps. Yet three nights into the journey, something ripped open a cargo crate and shredded crystal vials without scattering the cumin beside them. No footprints. The mamluks muttered prayers older than their scimitars.

Al-Ramla greeted us as a cluster of date palms around a lake no larger than a banquet table. At noon the water reflected sky with unsettling clarity; at dusk the reflection vanished altogether, leaving only black glass. Tents ringed the grove, each stitched with talismans of obsidian. My mysterious patron waited there: Elyas ibn Harun, scholar of the unseen, eyes rimmed red from insomnia.

Elyas led me to a low ridge where a dune had collapsed. The exposed interior glistened: rivers of ruby glass ran through the sand. Where the glass ended, so did spoor—canine paw prints, large as lion pads, imprinted not downward but upward, as if molten glass had risen to meet invisible feet.

“The oasis is dying,” Elyas whispered. “Each time the Jackal drinks the moon, more water turns to mirror. Soon dates will taste of sand and the well will reflect only hunger.”

He believed the cryptid to be Shard-born, drawn to reflective surfaces that echo the night sky. He needed proof—and, more importantly, a way to ward it off. My task: document the beast without getting devoured.

We laid traps of polished bronze bowls filled with date liquor, arranging them like stepping stones across the dunes. I set trip wires of silk attached to phosphor flares—silent, bright. Then we waited beneath a rag-stitched blind as the desert cooled and the sky unfurled.

Past midnight, the air vibrated with a sound like a wineglass stroked by wet finger—soft but rising. The moon reflected off every grain of sand as if the entire desert had become a single sheet of glass. A shape emerged: four-legged, lean, faceted like a gemstone carved into the idea of a jackal. Its body refracted starlight; organs were impossible to see—only overlapping planes of translucent green glimmer.

As it padded toward a bronze bowl, glass solidified beneath each step, leaving crimson sand oozing up to fill the mold. The dunes bleed, because he wounds the desert with his own existence. My quill could barely keep pace with my astonished eyes.

The beast lapped liquor—tongue a shard sliver that left hairline fractures in the metal. A flare snapped alight, bathing it in magnesium brilliance. Instead of fleeing, the Jackal looked directly at us. Its eyes were voids alive with pinpricks—an inverted star field. Then it howled.

Sound became shrapnel. My spyglass burst in my hands; sand whipped upward, vitrifying into needles that rained in all directions. Elyas’s protective obsidian charms cracked like eggshells. In the confusion, mamluk guards rushed from camp, scimitars drawn, but metal blades snapped on contact with the creature’s hide, turning to glitter that spiraled into its body. It fed on reflections, and polished steel was an easy meal.

I saw Captain Tariq raise a mirrored shield—an heirloom from coastal wars. The Jackal lunged, jaws wide, and bit into its own distorted visage. There was a blinding flare: shield and beast fused, the reflection swallowing the source. When sight returned, Tariq lay in the sand, breathing but glassy-eyed, shield gone. The Jackal retreated, limping, its form flickering like a candle behind faulty glass.

Elyas dragged me to the date palms. “It’s wounded—see the cracks along its flank. A shard beast feeds on reflections; deny it mirrors and we starve it.”

We doused every reflective surface—dagger blades, water skins, even boot buckles—in mud. The oasis became a dull blot. Under starlight the Jackal prowled the perimeter, searching for anything to drink sky from. At dawn it staggered, leaving not ruby glass but clear quartz in its tracks—a sign its power waned.

Yet the more it weakened, the darker the oasis water grew, as though its hunger siphoned color from the well itself. Children cried that their own reflections no longer smiled back but grimaced in hunger.

Elyas confessed then: the Jackal was no discovery—he had summoned it months prior while experimenting with star-reading shards, hoping to create a living mirror that could forecast the future. Instead he birthed a predator of light.

“I only wanted to know tomorrow,” he said, hands shaking. “But it showed me nothing—not because it would not—but because tomorrow is a desert once the Jackal feeds.”

With no mirrors left, the beast fixated on the one surface still reflecting celestial light: the Black Well. Elyas proposed luring it inside with the brightest reflection of all—the full moon caught in the water. Then he would collapse the well mouth with alchemic salt-petre charges.

I objected, noting that the well was lifeblood of Al-Ramla. Without it, the oasis would be uninhabitable. Elyas answered, “Better a dead oasis than a desert that devours every mirror in the world.”

The plan commenced. Flares ringed the well, chiseling moonlight into the pool’s black surface. The Jackal approached, ribs visible cracks. It leaned to drink its fill of sky. Elyas shouted the ignition word. Charges boomed, walls collapsed. Water, sand, and glass cascaded inward, entombing beast and reflection both.

When the dust settled, the oasis was gone, replaced by a bowl of fused obsidian. The Jackal was nowhere, but in the glass I saw points of starlight moving behind my own mirrored eyes.

Caravans left. Date palms withered. Elyas stayed, cataloguing the obsidian bowl—until one morning I found him staring at his reflection, unmoving. His eyes had become polished glass; his body, an empty vessel holding only night sky. The Jackal survived, not in flesh but as echo, living within the largest mirror we had created.

I buried Elyas in sand that rang like chimes when the wind blew. Then I packed my notes, careful not to let moonlight linger too long on my inkwell.

Now I travel with mirrors wrapped in cloth, and every night the stars inside them shift slightly, as though a jackal-shaped constellation searches for gaps in the dark. The bleeding dunes are silent, but rumors spread of merchants whose faces vanish when they look into calm water.

Mystery solved? Hardly. Mysteries do not die; they migrate. And somewhere beyond the next caravan route, a child will polish a shard of glass and wonder why the moon wears fangs.