They left before sunrise.
Luzia walked ahead at a pace that was neither fast nor slow—it was exact. Every footstep chosen, every detour calculated. Cícero tried to keep up while also taking notes in his notebook: the slope of the land, the position of the stones, the direction of the wind. Luzia looked back once, saw the notebook open, and said nothing. But her silence had a texture—the silence of someone who thought she was guiding a tourist to his own death.
The Backlands in that direction were different. Drier, if that was even possible. The mandacarus grew smaller and more twisted, as if the earth were squeezing them. The ground changed color—from its usual red to a chalky, whitish gray that cracked beneath their boots like old bone.
“Why do they call it the Silent Well?” Cícero asked after two hours without a word between them.
“Because it’s silent.”
“I figured that out.”
“Then why’d you ask?”
Cícero put away his notebook. He tried another approach.
“Have you been there before?”
“Once. Tracking a goat that ran off there.” Luzia adjusted the knife at her belt without slowing her pace. “I found the goat dead. Dry. Not from thirst—it was dry inside. Like someone had sucked all the water out of its body and left only hide and bone.”
“And the old woman?”
“I didn’t see any old woman. I saw the ruins. Black stone, just like that one of yours.” She pointed toward the pocket where Cícero kept the map fragment. “I felt something strange near them. Like the air grew heavier. Hotter. I left and never came back.”
“Until now.”
“Until now.” She glanced at him over her shoulder. “Because now someone’s paying.”
They reached the Silent Well in the early afternoon.
Luzia hadn’t exaggerated about the name. The place was silent in a way that went beyond the absence of sound—it was as if the air itself had forgotten how to vibrate. No wind. No insects. Not even the crack of the ground beneath their feet, which seemed to be swallowed up before it reached their ears.
The ruins spread across a natural depression in the land, as if the earth had sunk around them. Blocks of black stone, some the size of a house, others smaller, all with the same polished surface and the same engraved lines Cícero recognized from the map fragment. But here the lines were larger and more complex, covering the stones like scars.
At the center of the depression was a circular hole—the well that gave the place its name. Dry. Too deep to see the bottom.
“There.” Luzia pointed with her chin.
Sitting on the edge of the well, motionless as if she were part of the stone, was a woman. Small and hunched, dressed in unbleached cotton that had once been white and was now the color of earth. Barefoot. Her eyes were open, but white—without pupils or irises. Blind.
Beside her on the ground was a clay canteen.
Cícero moved closer. Luzia stayed behind, one hand on her knife, her eyes sweeping over the surrounding ruins as if expecting an ambush.
“Ma’am, are you—” Cícero began.
“I know who you are.” The old woman’s voice was dry as a dead leaf, but firm. Not the voice of someone talking to herself. The voice of someone waiting. “You have her scent.”
Cícero stopped two steps from the old woman. His heart sped up.
“Whose scent?”
The old woman extended her hand. Her fingers were thin and dark, with nails thick as tree bark.
“Let me touch your face.”
Cícero looked at Luzia. Luzia shrugged—a gesture that said, “Your problem.” He knelt before the old woman and let her touch his face. Her fingers were cold. They traveled across his forehead, nose, cheekbones, and chin. Then they stopped.
“Same mouth. Same chin.” The old woman smiled, and it was the saddest smile Cícero had ever seen. “She came here too. A long time ago. A very long time ago.”
“My mother?”
“Your mother.” The old woman drew back her hand. “My name is Iracema. And you, Cícero Alencar, are a Raincaller.”
“A what?”
“A Raincaller. Someone who hears water speak.” Iracema turned her face toward him, and even without eyes, Cícero had the feeling that he was being watched. “You’ve heard it already, haven’t you? When you touch water. When you wet stone. You see things that aren’t yours.”
Cícero swallowed hard. Beside him, Luzia stepped closer, the suspicion on her face giving way to something more like attention.
“They’re memories,” Iracema continued. “Water carries memories. Everything water has ever touched leaves a trace in it. And whoever has the gift—whoever is a Raincaller—can read those traces. Your mother could. You can.”
“That’s crazy,” Luzia said, but her voice lacked its earlier conviction.
“It is.” Iracema nodded. “But in the Backlands, madness and truth share the same bed, girl.” She turned back to Cícero. “Did you bring the stone?”
Cícero took the fragment from his pocket. Iracema couldn’t see it, but she extended her hand in exactly the right direction.
“This is a piece of Ibiraci’s map. The city beneath the earth. Built by people who knew that water was more than water—it was memory, language, life. They built everything around a spring. The Mother Spring.” Her voice changed, growing deeper, as if the words came from somewhere farther down. “When the city fell, the guardians remained. But without purpose. Without direction. Now they only do what they know how to do: gather the water. All of it. Back to the spring. Every thirty years, they wake up and drain everything.”
“The Devourers,” Cícero said. The name came out on its own, as if it had already been inside him, waiting to be spoken.
Iracema nodded.
“You can stop them. You can reach the Spring and reactivate it. Return the water to the surface. End the cycle.”
“How?”
“First, you need to learn to listen properly.” Iracema pointed toward a puddle of dark water between the stones, fed by some underground moisture that still resisted. “Touch the water. Not with your hand. With your intention. Want to hear, and the water speaks.”
Cícero knelt before the puddle. The water was dark and still, with a reflection that didn’t show the sky—it showed darkness. He reached out his hand. His fingers touched the surface.
The world opened.
It wasn’t a flash this time. It was a flood. Images, sounds, sensations—all at once, all mixed together, as if someone had poured a thousand lives into his head in a single instant.
He saw Ibiraci.
Not the ruins. The living city. Channels of luminous water cutting through corridors of black stone. People—dark-skinned, with light eyes and woven-fiber clothing—walking, talking, touching the water as if it were an instrument. The water answered. It glowed, changed color, sang. It was a city that breathed through water.
Then he saw the guardians being created. Columns of compressed air, shaped by hands trembling with fear and rage. A war. Screams. The water in the channels turning cloudy, dark, poisoned by memories of hatred. The guardians breaking free, leaving the channels, rising to the surface. Sucking everything dry.
Cícero tore his hand from the water and fell backward, gasping. Luzia caught him before his head struck the stones.
“Hey. Hey!” She gripped his shoulders, her face inches from his. “What happened?”
“I saw it,” he breathed. “I saw the city. I saw them. The Devourers. I saw how they were made.”
Iracema didn’t move from the edge of the well. She merely nodded, as if confirming something she already knew.
“Now you know what they are. Now you can choose.”
“Choose what?”
“Whether you’ll go there. To the Spring.” Iracema picked up the clay canteen beside her and held it out to Cícero. “Take this. It knows the way. The water inside it comes from the Spring. It will guide you.”
Cícero took the canteen. It was light and simple, made of red clay. But when his fingers closed around its surface, he felt a pulse. Weak, rhythmic, like a distant heartbeat.
“And the price?” Luzia asked. She stood behind Cícero, arms crossed, her face hard. “There’s always a price.”
Iracema smiled again. The same sad smile.
“There always is.”
But she didn’t say what it was.
Cícero stood up. He secured the canteen to his belt beside his own. Then he looked at Luzia.
“You don’t have to come with me.”
“I know.”
“You can go back to Tamboril. I’ll pay you what we agreed.”
“I know.” She uncrossed her arms. “But if I go back and you die, I’ll have to return the money. And I’ve already spent half of it.”
It wasn’t the real reason. They both knew that. But it was the reason that fit in her mouth, and Cícero accepted it.
They prepared to leave. Iracema remained where she was, sitting on the edge of the well, as motionless as ever. Cícero looked back one last time.
“Iracema. My mother. Did she make it to the Spring?”
The old woman didn’t answer right away. The silence of the Silent Well swallowed the question and returned it empty.
“She did,” Iracema said at last. “And she paid the price.”
Before Cícero could ask anything else, Luzia tugged him by the arm.
“Come on. Before it gets dark.”
They left the ruins and began climbing the northern slope toward the Dry Moon Range. The sun was sinking, the air hot and still, and the clay canteen pulsed against Cícero’s hip like a heart that wasn’t his.
They were two hundred meters from the ruins when Luzia stopped.
“Do you feel that?”
Cícero stopped. He felt it. The air had changed. Not the temperature—the texture. As if the little moisture that remained had been ripped away all at once. The skin of his face tightened. His lips cracked. His eyes burned.
He turned toward the southern horizon.
There, against the orange sky of late afternoon, something was moving. It wasn’t an animal. It wasn’t a person. It was a distortion—like the shimmer of heat rising from asphalt, but vertical, walking. A column of dry air that bent the light around itself, erasing the horizon wherever it passed.
It was coming against the wind.
“What is that?” Luzia whispered. Her hand was on her knife, but the gesture was instinct, not strategy. Against that, a knife was useless.
Cícero stared at the approaching distortion, slow and inevitable as thirst itself. He felt his mouth dry out. Felt his skin pull tight. For the first time in his life, he felt what it meant to be afraid of something that couldn’t be drawn on a map.
The first Devourer had awakened.