Chapter 13: The Great Desert

Somebody had set her on fire. That was the first conclusion she came to as she regained consciousness. A moment later, a throbbing headache split her head and a corny feeling spread through her mouth. She heaved and coughed up a thick mixture of blood, mucus, and sand. Her eyes struggled to open, burned and stung until she had wiped and blinked away the dust.

Her first gaze went towards the horizon. Sand, fine sand, in a reddish yellow hue; it stretched endlessly in all directions in a pattern of dunes and valleys. She blinked. Something was not right. No cloud survived on the pale-blue sky, no shadow to stop the leaden blanket of heat resting on top of her. Her right pfod raked through the soft sand and the realization approached like the first drips to a heavy rainfall. No sound raced through the desert but the beating of her own heart.

“Fuck!” She jumped up and slipped into a combat stance. Her body stopped. The world did not. It spun further. Her legs slipped in the sand and a wave of nausea crawled up her throat. The hammering in her head intensified enough to blur her vision. Her breakfast tickled her throat, but she swallowed and forced the contents of her stomach back down. She had no time to be sick. “Brandon!” she yelled out and had to swallow down her stomach contents once more. She scanned the bright sands and spotted a figure lying a few meters down the dune. His face rested in the sand and crusted blood glued his wild hair together.

Sylph inhaled sharply and coughed as her lungs filled with dust. There was no doubt it was Brandon. She slid down and listened. One second passed, two seconds passed, then a half of a third, and he finally drew a breath. Her heart thumped hard, and the tension faded from her body. He might not be fine, but he was breathing.

Brandon twitched, grunted, and then rolled onto his back. “What by the six happened?” he moaned and cupped his head. His hands brushed against the crusted blood and he paused.

Sylph recalled the past few days in her head to see where it went wrong. The old captain had told the truth and set them up with a rather shady looking but charismatic individual that made trips to the desert. The journey itself was uneventful. Her exhausted dragonheart forced her to sleep through most of it. All because she got too angry in Linz. Maybe she would have realized something was up otherwise. She could recall nothing suspicious after going to sleep last night. Since she felt safe enough, her ears saw no reason to wake her for something as trivial as footsteps. “They knocked us out and threw us out of the airship, am I right?” Sylph closed her eyes to get rid of the pulsing in her skull. It barely helped.

Brandon winced in pain. “That’s my working theory as well.”

Sylph let herself fall onto her behind and into the soft sand. She checked the bag on her side. The paint was there, as was the wing-paint. She brought the two iron containers to her forehead to alleviate some of the pain. The pleasant cold barely passed through her scales in the heat. And, as she had expected, not a single bead of currency was left in her bag.

She stared ahead into the endless dunes and poured all her swelling emotions, disappointment, and anger into a singular word: “Fuck.”

“But they are not the smartest of thieves,” Brandon said. He rummaged through his backpack and judged the vials for damage. “These are worth more than what little money I had on hand.”

“Then let’s hope a city accepts those for payment.” She removed the already warmed cans from her forehead and looked around, which revealed as little as the last three looks.

“Maybe we are closer than we think.” Brandon propped himself up and surveyed the desert along with her. Judging by her memory of the map, they had approached from the north. Prina had to be south of here.

“Or we are right on the edge of the island.” Sylph rose to her feet and her head protested in pain. The frills on her tail twitched at the touch of the blazing sand. They had landed on the crest of a dune twice as high as a house and fifty times as long. The thin sand flowed like water, it engulfed her pfods and threatened to take her downwards with every step she took. To her surprise, Brandon did not fare better in the flowing sand despite being lighter.

After several minutes of sliding and stumbling, they reached the bottom. Brandon stopped and sat down in the middle of nowhere. “We should stop.”

“Brandon?”

He slid his hand across his forehead and held it up towards her for inspection. “You can’t even see me sweat. It is too hot. We should wait out the heat. Or we risk exhausting ourselves even faster.”

She sat down right next to him and raised her crippled wing like a small sun sail for both of their heads. While it did not block the sun completely, the shadow covering their heads seemed so much colder. “What if the city is just behind that next dune? Stopping and waiting for the sun to set seems like a terrible idea when we could move forward.”

Brandon picked at the crusted blood in his hair. “You’d hear a city for miles, wouldn’t you? We have little more than a hunch where it is and we have very little supplies. So we should be smart about this.”

He was right. As much as she concentrated, she could not hear any sign of life other than their own. Much like the nausea, the silence drove a hard mass up her throat. “But it should be about that direction.” Sylph pointed vaguely down the valley. “We came from the north.”

Brandon undid his backpack, placed it down, and rested his head. “You are pointing more east than south.” He massaged his temples. “And, not to offend you, you get lost in Halfhill.”

“I always get where I want to go in the end,” Sylph huffed.

“Navigating by gut until you randomly stumble upon the tavern is not navigating. It takes twenty minutes from the harbor to my shop.”

Sylph scoffed. “The desert has less unnamed streets and alleys.”

“And fewer taverns to serve as landmarks.” He sighed. “It could be days of travel.” Brandon’s gaze wandered to the empty waterskin slung around Sylph’s neck. She cursed herself for not filling it back on the ship. She put it off, not wanting to leave her comfy corner for something as trivial as refilling her water supply when water was available in abundance. Now it came back to bite her tail.

“I’m not clothed for the desert.” Brandon pulled on his orange tunic. “I’ve never been in a desert before. What do they wear here? Something lighter perhaps, and something to cover their heads.” He fumbled around in his backpack and produced one of his green, crumpled tunics.

“I envy you. I am very much not into clothes, but I hate this sand. It’s irritating and so fine that it gets everywhere, everywhere.” She wished for a cold tub of water. Not only to cool down, but to get rid of the sand in the ridges of her scales and everywhere else it found a nook to hide and chafe in, like the base of her horns, and gums, and eyes, and nostrils. She could not believe that others lived here willingly.

“I don’t feel much better about it.” Brandon tied the tunic around his head and her gaze fell on the contents that had spilled from his backpack, mainly the flasks and vials of liquid. “There’s water in some of them, am I right?”

“Sylph, that’s literally poison and acid. But yes, some of them have a little water in them.”

“I think I could get the water out.” She picked up a flask of almost colorless liquid. Its label read: “Laydicum. It’s the lewd flask again,” she laughed, “have to buy it, do you?”

“I am not equipped to make it myself,” he answered, thinking nothing about what he said.

“That’s what I thought.” She smirked and shook it teasingly. “The poor ladies.”

Brandon eyed her for a second, shook his head, and snatched the flask away from her. “You pronounce it very wrong,” he sighed and coughed a laugh before scrunching up in pain and massaging the side of his head. “This would melt the flesh off your bones if you touched it.”

“And you keep it in a thin glass bottle in your backpack?” Sylph eyed the other flasks in suspicion. Always the careful one, unless it came to transporting dangerous chemicals.

“I did not expect to drag it into the desert. Some of these might go bad because of the temperature.” He turned back to Sylph and handed her a small bottle. “Try to remove the water from this.”

The liquid was bright green and yelled “Do not touch”. But if Brandon said it was fine, it was fine. Sylph removed the cork by piercing it with one of her claws and tipped the open vial against her scales. Absorbing liquid happened without a second thought, but separating the water from the rest was different; A task she had not completely figured out. The velvety flow of water had disturbances inside of it. Like rocks in a riverbed, the tiniest grains in Brandon’s chemical ripped up that harmonious flow. All it took was to move the center of water up above and leave the grains in the muddy riverbed, ready to drop away. She opened her eyes to see a few drops of a pure green liquid fall from her arm. “So, what kind of acid was in that bottle?”

Brandon’s gaze followed the green drops until they mixed with the fine sand. “Food coloring.”

“Of course. You are the only person I know that would put food coloring and acid in one bag,” she snorted. “Why do you even need food coloring? Why do you color food?”

He scooped up the tiny clumps and rubbed the green sand between his fingers. “I think you nearly absorbed all the water. It is more like a sludge. I am impressed. It works, but it enters your body. I don’t think trying that with the rest of the bottles is a great idea. A single, unfiltered drop of some of those could kill you.”

She laid down on the hot sand and rested her head in her own shade. It was not a lot of water. And after a few more minutes of consideration, the city could be anywhere. “This would be far easier if I could fly,” Sylph murmured and looked up at the pale-blue sunsail above her and the sky beyond. Her wings and scales matched the sky here so perfectly. She chuckled; Nature was an ass.

“Neither of us can,” Brandon said.

“But I should be able to. I am an Aer, for Waila’s sake. You know, the ones known for beautiful flowing wings and graceful flying and all of that nonsense. I can barely fall at an angle.” Her wings whipped up the sand below with a single sorry beat that overstretched her muscles enough to hurt. “The storyteller was right. No one wants to be me.”

Brandon sat up halfway, carefully ducking under her wing. “You should stop listening to them. They do not know what they are talking about.”

“I got us trapped in a desert,” she said and turned her head away to stare out into the sand. She wished for another intervention, another Void to save her from this mess. So much had gone wrong lately. First that wyvern, now this. It made her wonder what would come next. But unlike the young Sylph from the story, all of this directly resulted from her own decisions.

“We got robbed. It’s not your fault.”

Sylph turned back around. “You can stop trying to not blame me.”

“I’m not not blaming you. We had bad luck.”

“Which I seem to attract.”

“I’m sure you would’ve handled it if you had been awake. You could fight off twenty fully armed bandits,” Brandon smiled.

His impression of her abilities was flattering, but she would surrender or run from twenty idiots with sticks. “Not that my glorious fighting skills helped us so far. I’m happy that we are alive after a blow to the head like that.” She watched a tiny black bug crawl through the shaded sand and squashed it with her pfod. “It stops there, am I right? All I can do is hurt people and be saved by others.” She examined the freshly scarred cuts and squished bug on the underside of her pfod.

Brandon struggled for an answer. “The storyteller really got under your skin, did he? You are honest, you are funny, you are-,” he swallowed whatever he was about to say and her head was all too eager to fill in the rest with degrading terms that Brandon would never utter.

“You are a freaking pathwalker now. You are here, or rather, we are here to find and save your parents. Focus on that. You shouldn’t let storytellers tell you what you are and what you are not.”

Her chest burned hotter. He was right, but it did not feel right. “Me trying to do something on my own for the first time is the reason we are stranded in a desert hot as Solan’s blazing arsehol-!”

“Language! Don’t use the six to swear.” Brandon interrupted. “Do you actually believe what you are saying? The Sylph that I know doesn’t mope around like this. Sure, this situation sucks, but blaming ourselves for it won’t get us any further.”

She snapped her mouth shut, and they both kept silent. Maybe he had a point. She was not exactly helping their situation.

“I’ve been trying to figure out what that smell on the ship was.” Brandon switched the topic after the silence grew uncomfortable. Sylph could recall a slight chemical smell, which might just stem from her imagination.

“It think it is pyrrith bark. Or commonly known as Smoke.” Brandon gesticulated with excitement and pulled a small vial from his backpack.

“I’m not sure how that helps us.” Sylph strained her head to get a better look, but the vial remained obscured by his hand.

“It doesn’t, but it bothered me. It is a byproduct of a dangerous pyrrithium reaction.” He held up the small vial in his closed hand and felt around it, searching for cracks.

Sylph recognized the term. Veria talked about a Smoke problem in the barracks once. “It’s a drug, isn’t it?” she realized. “That was their cargo. They smuggle drugs.”

“That,” Brandon snapped to attention, “makes a lot more sense than my idea.” He nodded, but slowed down as his mind worked through the backlog of far too many thoughts happening at once. His gaze flicked to and from her face and he opened his hand to show a small piece of the black, bark-like chemical in the vial. His expression crumbled as if a thought had just shattered him. “I- I think I did something terrible by scooping it up from the floor. They might’ve noticed and figured I knew what it was.”

He stared at the vial. “Were we thrown out so we don’t talk? Was it my fault?” His head drooped downwards. “Myria help us, I messed it up.”

“You think they wanted to shut us up?” Sylph turned towards him and he did not react. He stared at the vial in disbelief. She blew into his face and, by the way he fanned himself, remembered that she had not cleaned her teeth in a long time. “Don’t go moping around after trying to make me feel better about being at fault. We can’t change it. So better make a plan and get a little rest.”

Hours passed in what felt like days. Even though she was the one to suggest it, she could not sleep with the pressing heat suffocating her. Brandon was soundly asleep. His gentle and rhythmic breaths were the only sound left.

The dry pelt of thirst had settled on her tongue about an hour ago. She had been over-hydrated when she woke up, but now that extra water held in her body by her ability had already gone into her system. A stray thought looked back longingly and remembered the taste of the thin and hot tea and how it felt as her scales bulged outwards.

If thirst got past her ability this fast, Brandon must be utterly parched. She quietly rummaged through his bag until she found his water bottle and pulled out the small cork. Compared to her leather water skin, his flask was made from very clear glass and, most likely, was repurposed alchemy equipment.

Holding it in one pfod, she placed the other on top and watched some of her own water pour down into it. “This is weird,” she thought as she watched the water level rise. She filtered it to the best of her abilities, but knowing that it had spent who knows how many hours somewhere inside of her felt a little strange.

Sylph returned the bottle and made sure that Brandon was fast asleep, before she cleaned herself of the finest and most uncomfortable sand in a crude and most uncivilized manner.