35 Harvest, 385 - Midlands, Charan

Brazen Hold had been a strange stopover in their journey, but the awakened didn’t seem to want the group from Texas to stay around for long. They weren’t rude to Cora and the others, just cold. They spoke in clipped tones when they spoke at all. The shopkeeper and Hastor seemed to be the exceptions rather than the rule. It was dawn when Hastor helped them pack up and guided them to one the westward gate.

“I wish you luck in whatever you decide to do.” Hastor said. “You are not unwelcome here in Brazen Hold, but I doubt you will return.”

“Thank you for helping us.” Sophie said.

“Remember that the awakened helped you.” Hastor said, bowing his regal head slightly. “That is all I ask.”

“We won’t forget.” Jet said.

It was shortly after that they headed out. Each of them carried a spear, nearly as tall as themselves. Tillie ranged ahead of the group, almost like she was purposely scouting for them. Jet walked behind with the women fanned out in front of him. Each still wore their brightly colored pack filled with new supplies.

“This is like playing in the world’s first full immersion virtual reality game.” Jet ran his free hand over the white tufts of the strange grass.

“I’m positive it’s real.” Kat’s eyes were constantly moving, keeping a watch in nearly every direction.

“I know it’s real. Unless we’ve all lost our minds.” Cora said. She was roaming off a little bit to the let of the others, keeping her eyes on their left flank.

“That’s not impossible.” Sophie was off to the right, minding that flank. Kat was in the middle, behind Jet and kept glancing over her shoulder. They had taken up the formation almost without thinking.

“I don’t think any of us are crazy, but we probably shouldn’t rule it out.” Cora said. “Our best bet is to just deal with it and get to Ward as quick as we can. There’s more going on here than we’ve seen so far and I bet there’s something we can do about it.”

31 Harvest, 385 - Midlands, Charan

When Salidda came to herself once more, she was laying face down in syrupy mud. She could feel a dampness lapping against the skirt of her dress and she could feel the icy water sapping at her strength. In those first jumbled moments of consciousness, there were no images among those that surfaced in her mind that made any sense. She could see many of the members of her tribe, their expressions filled with horror, she saw acres of the prairie whipping past below her bare toes. She saw the night sky, filled with countless stars.

At first, neither the strange memories nor the chill to her flesh made any sense to Salidda. She blinked dry, aching eyes and tried to push herself to a sitting position. As she brought her hands under her to push off the slick, slightly rancid mud, Salidda felt as though a burning brand had been shoved into her chest. She could not hold back the shrill and piercing scream that escaped her. It echoed, strangely, back upon her and suddenly it seemed, to her ears, that the vast plains screamed in unison.

In agony, Salidda flopped lifelessly to her back. Dusk had fallen over the plains and Salidda knew that even in the dry harvest months, she should find shelter before too much longer .The plains, in addition to unpredictable weather, were a dangerous place to be once night fell. Despite the urgency of the situation, especially when she considered the blood likely oozing from her wound, Salidda couldn’t find the strength to rise.

She spent a long moment, laying on her back in the mud staring at the familiar stars that were slowly coming to life. Those stars were the only thing that felt familiar in this strange situation. Eventually, she managed to gather herself and sit up. She discovered that the mud she sat in was the bank of a wide, slow moving river, her legs were in the water near the bank. Her side of the river, the north bank, was very dense with reeds. The south bank gave way to the familiar grasses of the great valley.

Looking at her unfamiliar surroundings, she tried to figure out how far she had come from the tribe. Judging by her surroundings, she had come terribly far. To the east, was the river’s source. A deep pool of icy water that bubbled strangely before splashing down a short fall and into the riverbed. Salidda couldn’t tell quite where she was, but she knew of no source fed river anywhere near the tribe’s camp. She couldn’t clearly remember traveling.

In truth, there were few rivers in the great valley, all of which the tribes paid close attention to. Water, the lack of it, and the dangers of floods during the spring rains, made the rivers and lakes of the valley an important part of life in the many tribes. This river was completely unfamiliar to Salidda. That meant that she was no longer in the great valley. She had never left her homeland before.

She looked around, peering at the quickly darkening horizon, searching in vain for some familiar landmark. Salidda forced herself to her feet, wincing at the pain. Whether or not she knew exactly where she was, she had to find some sort of shelter. The darkness seemed to grow deeper around Salidda as she shuffled from the slick mud among the reeds on her side of the wide, shallow river. The reeds rode to about waist height and ticked gently against one another as she passed through them. Surrounded by the strange music of the reed bed, Salidda struggled to hear as she came aware of something deeper in the night. A sound, half-heard and puzzling. It echoed strangely around her.

There had been times during her journeys with her tribe that Salidda had come across terrain formations that threw back echoes, such formations were always a novelty to be enjoyed. They also tended to be difficult to navigate and treacherous. She moved deeper into the reed beds, the soft mud struggling against every step of her bare feet. Salidda could feel the energy draining out of her. She understood, on some deeper level, that the wound inflicted by her father had been grievous. She understood, on that same level, that if she did not soon strike a fire and tend to her wound she wouldn’t survive the night.

The ground to her right, toward the source, rose sharply up, above the reedy marsh she currently navigated and onto a rocky promontory that overlooked the surrounding territory. The high ground, at that moment, seemed to be the best place to set herself up. She forced her drained body to navigate the incline, stumbling twice and nearly losing her will in the process.

The last lingering lights on the eastern horizon had faded entirely from view by the time she reached the top of the low promontory, her breathing came in ragged gasps and she could feel drops of blood running down the side of her ribcage from the wound high on her chest. At the top of the rocky promontory, there were several trees bunched near the center of a small plateau. Determined to continue on, Salidda dragged some kindling and a few branches together into a pile. She didn’t bother with a ring of stones she knew she should put down to prevent the fire from spreading. She didn’t believe that she could carry them.

She fumbled in the small pouch that hung at her right hip, inside was her flint and steel. It took her several tries, her weak arms fumbling with the process. Once the spark had taken, she sat back, panting. Time, she knew, grew short. She could feel the damp stain of blood ever expanding on the bodice of her dress, feel it dripping down her ribcage and even trickling down the side of her leg.

Salidda put a twig between her teeth, bearing down against the pain, as she gently tugged at the bodice of her dress. She barely bit back a scream. The fabric was stuck to the large wound and resisted all attempts to remove it. She shuddered with pain as she tried to ease the fabric away. She finally gave up and just ripped it away from the wound. Her scream was muffled by the twig between her teeth.

The only way she could see the cruel wound was by tucking her chin all the way into her chest and looking down at a close angle. The arrow her father had shot had skipped off her upper ribcage, just along the swell of her breast. The would was jagged and deeply dug, but it had not penetrated beyond the sheltering cage of her ribs. With agonized curses, Salidda did the only thing she could for the wound. She cauterized it with a hot brand from the fire. As she worked the ember across her flesh, she could see darkness creeping in at the edges of her vision. The pain, so intense that it felt as though it engaged her entire body, swelled up and over her and she cried out for a second time. This scream was unencumbered by the twig as it was crushed between her clenching teeth, the sound echoed back at her. Her scream rebounding off distant landscape and overwhelming her senses.

32 Harvest, 385 - Midlands, Charan

Salidda came to, for the third time since her father had shot her, slick with a fever sweat. She was shivering in a chill morning wind, high atop the promontory The fire she had light before treating her gruesome wound had gone out. She rose cautiously to her feet, swaing with the effort. She was neither hungry nor thirsty, but she was extremely cold. She knew the chill was from the fever, because she had been coated in sweat. Salidda suspected that whatever fever she may have had broken while she was unconscious.

As she walked unsteadily toward the stand of trees to gather more firewood, Salidda felt as weak as a newborn, struggling for every step. Her eyes drooped, no more than half open, and her legs trembled as she walked. Salidda knew that if she did not rebuild the fire, she would catch worse than a slight chill. She dragged, step by slow determined step, a sizable pile of lumber to her small fire.

She relit the fire and stoked it up to a nice, warm blaze before she laid down near it and tried to relax. Her chest ached and throbbed but the pain, so intense when she had first cauterized it, felt less intense. Perhaps it was because her beleaguered mind could no longer process the pain. The warm popping of the flames comforted Salidda as nothing else had since she first awakened in the tent of her people.

As she stared into the fire, Salidda could see, replayed in her mind, the hunting cat leaping toward her and her father. She analyzed the moment, trying to find the truth of her part in it. She knew that she had caused the hunting cat to stop in mid-flight. She understood that she had saved her father’s life. She didn’t understand how she had saved them, what she had done to the cat. What defied explanation, in her mind, was why her own father had shot her down. Did he so fear what she was capable of that he was willing to shoot her over it? Of his three daughters his father had always been the closest to Salidda, but she was not his favorite. Her father did not have a favorite daughter, all three of them were naught but a burden upon him, but Salidda had always suspected that he loved them, despite their womanhood.

Salidda cast the memory of that encounter aside, she did not understand how she had done it, but that was the least of her concerns. She had blown up a building, with her father inside it, and somehow traveled a great distance, unconsciously. She didn’t even know how long she had been gone. It did not take understanding the events of the last hours -days?- to understand that she would never be welcomed into an encampment of the Tribe of the Blue Arrow. She was to have been sacrificed, for that was what the tribes did to devils and witches.

Again, Salidda tried to pull herself away from thought and toward sleep. She was exhausted, her body ached more with every passing moment and she understood that her best hope of healing was to get plenty of rest. Salidda was pretty sure that tossing and turning next to a campfire, deep in thought, was not considered a restful activity.

The morning sun was bright and warming by the time she finally managed to sleep. If she could make it, she promised herself with her last waking thought, if she could make it one more day, she would be strong enough to fight against the despair that she felt. Despair because she feared she would not survive the injury and even if she did, she would not survive alone in this wilderness. She was, after all, not much more than a child.

32 Harvest, 385 - Midlands, Charan

Her face was warm. This sensation finally brought her up out of sleep and into full consciousness. The sun, already lowering toward dusk, was shining full in her face, heating her cheeks. She rubbed at the stubborn sleep that stained her eyes and rose to her feet. Already she felt slightly more steady, perhaps the rest had done her more good than she had suspected that it would. Her stomach growled loudly and Salidda knew she had to forage for some sort of food before she settled down again on the low plateau of the promontory.

The first order of business, Salidda told herself, was to walk back to the river for a drink. She would use the opportunity to clean herself up and check her wound, clean it and rebind it. As she walked toward a gentle slope that lead toward the river’s bubbling source. Salidda picked up a long, thing branch to use as a walking stick. By the time she reached the wide river she was coated in a thin layer of sweat. The wound, though it was no longer bleeding, still sapped at her strength.

In among the reeds by the river bank, sheltered in the shadow of a weeping willow, Salidda knelt in the mud and leaned forward to drink the icy water of the river. The bracing cold seemed to seep into her muscles, cooling the sun warmed flesh. She slipped into the water once she had sated her thirst. She brought up handfuls of water to clean the wound on her chest as she settled down into the water. The crusted rim of burnt flesh softened under the icy water and the dried blood washed away cleanly.

The wound itself was wide and raw, it widened as it swept up and away from the midline of her chest. The flesh contained within that raw maw was a deep, angry reddish-black. Despite the cooling water, she could feel her heartbeat throbbing through the wound, eah beat bringing with it a sharp pulse of pain. Salidda tore the last of her undershirt into strips and bound the wound. As she rose to her feet, she shoved aside all conscious thought of her injury, for if she dwelled upon the wound her father had given her, she would find herself incapable of surviving. Her tribe had allowed her to flee rather than deal with the alien nature of the magic they thought her capable of. In spite of that fact, she promised herself, she would survive. There were many things she would have to secure in the next few days, she would need a more permanent shelter, a supply of food, and some sort of weapon she could use to defend herself.

She spent the rest of the afternoon foraging among the reeds and the small stand of trees, searching for edible roots, plants and fruits. She found a small store of yahn roots, a favorite of hers; the reeds were twailgs, the core of which was not only edible but extremely tasty; a pile of hartnuts and acorns from among the trees, not her favorite food, but certainly edible; and as a particular treat she found a large, dried gourd from teh previous fall. She used her small steel shiv to hollow out the gourd and filled it with clear, cool water from the spring.

By the time she had gathered her food and water near the campfire, she was exhausted. The energy it had taken to find even such meager supplies had sapped what little strength she had that wasn’t already devoted to healing her wound. She watched the sun finish its journey across the sky as she ate.

She had survived her first day alone in the wilds south of the great valley. There was something immensely satisfying about that. She still needed some sort of shelter, but the sky in all directions was completely cloudless for now. The wind was gentle and the weather seemed to have no threat. She felt, at that moment, that the need for shelter was not so pressing that it couldn’t wait until the next day. When she finished her dinner, she stashed the remainder of the food she had collected, wrapped in hastily torn off selections of her dress, under a pile of stones. She could only hope that the stones, coupled with her fire, would keep the scavengers away from her food stores. Salidda stoked the fire into a raging roar before she settled back into the sun-scented grasses and tried to go back to sleep. She had survived one day. As long as she lived alone on this promontory, she would take her survival one day at a time.