Mira slides her hand into the hollow. The sand is cool — impossibly cool, like plunging fingers into a mountain spring. The melody wraps around her wrist, and she feels it not as sound but as pressure, gentle and deliberate, guiding her palm deeper, past loose grain, past something smooth and curved. Her fingers close around it before she understands what she is touching: a small vessel, clay, no bigger than a fist, sealed with wax and trailing a cord of woven thread. The song softens the moment she lifts it free. Her camel shifts behind her. The hollow seals itself without a whisper, leaving only ordinary desert silence. The vessel is warm now against her cold palm. Something moves inside — not liquid, something lighter. And the melody, quiet as it is, shifts once more: it is no longer a question. It is a name. Her name.