Chapter 15: Beetle juice

Sylph jolted awake with a harsh twitch, as if stung. Thin streams of sand flowed down her face as she lifted her buzzing head. What little remained of her blurred vision spun around her. She swallowed on a dry mouth and all it did was intensify the painful rasping down her throat and the dry pelt on her tongue. She checked her water skin, knowing too well that it was empty, but squeezed the leather with a thin sliver of hope. It was bone dry.

Her gaze darted over to Brandon and towards his backpack. He slept soundly, and he had a little water left. Maybe she could- she stopped and forced her arm away from the backpack. What was she thinking? It was not hers to take. He needed the water as much as she did, maybe more.

A beetle, the size of a large walnut, darted between their heads and stopped in the shadow under her wing. Its silver-green shell blinked as it cleaned its face with hair-thin legs, oblivious to all danger.

Sylph peeked at Brandon to make sure he was asleep and could not witness what she was about to do. She lunged forward with her head and caught the beetle between her teeth. It was not quite what she had in mind when she thought about hunting yesterday, but any water was acceptable at this point.

The little beetle struggled between her teeth. She squeezed just a little more, and it popped. A viscous liquid sprayed into and coated her mouth. She recoiled. The liquid burned on her tongue as if she had bitten into a festering boil. She gagged and heaved as her insides turned upside down and spat the beetle into the sand. It landed on its back, legs flailing through the air. Sylph squashed it deep into the ground and absorbed the few drops of liquid it held through her pfod.

She gagged once more and threw up nothing but a splat of bile. What followed was the smell. The scent of a twice digested, thrown up, rotten cadaver entered her nostrils. She twisted and turned and pushed her face into the sand. Anything to escape that smell. She should not even be able to smell it that intensely, but that mixture of stench sent even her nose into a burning uproar.

Water gushed into her mouth as she tried to gargle the taste away, but all it did was spread it further down her burning tongue. She did not dare to swallow, absorbed the water instead. As much as she tried to dilute and filter it, the burning liquid remained stuck to her mouth.

She stuck her tongue into the sand to scrape the taste away and cursed herself a second later. Now her mouth was crunchy and tasted like week old stewed wyvern dung.

Accepting her fate, she waited it out and a few seconds later, the taste and smell lost intensity. A minute later, it had faded to an uncomfortable but acceptable level. No wonder the little thing had no qualms about approaching her. No one in their right mind would eat that. How bad would it be for someone with a better sense of smell and taste?

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Brandon awoke an hour before sundown, and it took some time to convince him that the faint smell of rot and decay was not her breath, but originated from a little dead bug she could not find in the sand.

He held onto his idea from last night and hoped to make it twice as far, but not even three hours later that hope had all but vanished as he had to watch her lurch through the sand behind him.

She could not help it. Her weight seemed to have tripled overnight and with every step, her muscles threatened to give away. Her dragonheart sat hot in her chest. At first, it had twitched every few dunes to help her over the top. Now, it happened to every muscle she moved. She played a dangerous game, but what else was she supposed to do? Breaks would not get them any closer to water, they would only take away from the precious chilly night.

Water. The mere thought made her conscious of her mouth, that was as dry as a rag of cotton and just as fuzzy with no spit. A constant dull headache tortured her, throbbed rhythmically with her steps and made her dizzy.

A little while, or a lot of whiles, later, she lost track of the passage of time. All she did was follow Brandon’s sure and loud steps. He kept turning, watching her, making sure she was following and not lying on the side of a dune.

Sylph bumped into him as he stopped to rest for the day, or night, whichever it was. They repeated the world’s most awkward water purification, and it did not produce more than a small vial and her body refused to let the water leave. Her ability absorbed it all without mercy and as hard as she tried to focus through the fog in her mind, it would let none of it go.

She laid down without a word and stared upwards. Starlight ebbed and flowed, growing and shrinking in a beat. Everything hurt, from exhaustion, from lack of water, or it just hurt. She noticed Brandon standing to the side, looking down. How was he still fine? She knew humans were hard to tire, but she had never witnessed it besides fighting. Brandon was not a trained fighter, or in good shape. Sylph had the endurance and muscle of a trained duelist. And now she was the one lying in the sand.

Brandon stared at her face longer than usual. His gaze flicked down and up and around as though she were a rude painting. She closed her eyes for a mere second and when she opened them again, Brandon stood above her with a bottle of red liquid.

“It is high time to try this, isn’t it?” His voice was frantic, almost desperate. “It shouldn’t be too acidic anymore, but be careful. If you can be careful.” He uncorked the glass bottle and pressed it against her arm. An icy wave rushed through her muscles, only to vanish a second later. “You have to filter it.” She grabbed the water in her arm and anything that was not dropped to the sand in a silent patter.

His face hovered inches above hers. “Better?” he asked and clutched the hem of his tunic. “Please, say yes?”

Sylph watched his eyes twinkle and widen. He paced around her, forehead wrinkled in thought, until he stopped at her side. “I’m sorry.” He grabbed her arm with both hands to lift it up to his chest. He then dropped it and it fell back into the sand. “That is bad,” he whispered, and crossed his arms. “Very bad.”

“Stay,” he commanded in a harsh tone that made her mind jump. Was he allowed to do that? Nobody could command her like that.

His wild hair vanished behind a dune. “Buay,” Sylph waved, but he was long gone.

The sky changed color before her eyes and her eyelids grew heavy, but something stopped her from falling asleep. Something deep inside told her she might never open them again if she fell asleep now. Her dragonheart flared up once more, fighting the pressure on her eyelids. She blinked; And fell asleep.