Page 13 of The Demon God's Desire
6
BRIDGET
The sun beats down relentlessly on my shoulders, glinting off of the sand around me and reminding me that the desert never takes long to heat up. The evening chill that had lingered in the air at the market this morning has completely dissipated, the dry air now brimming with unforgiving heat.
I have half a mind to reach for one of the waterskins I packed, but I stay my hand. Despite all the practice I have navigating the desert, I know how finite resources are out here- it’s best to conserve them wherever possible.
The dry wood and white canvas of Camp Mythos glints beneath the sun’s rays, looking more fragile from a distance than it ever feels when I’m there. I’m suddenly reminded of how tenuous our existence is in this unforgiving landscape.
Especially now that more dark elves are rumored to be on the continent.
Images from my dream flash unbidden in my mind, and I force myself to shake off the chill of dread that races up my spine, returning my focus to the dunes. I’ve done this a million times before, I tell myself. Today is no different than any other day.
My feet carry me along my usual path with half a thought, working in progressively wider circles around the camp. Small patches of vegetation reach out of the desert like the clawed fingers of a corpse, dusty and dry, and I check each outcropping for anything of use.
Before long, any lingering dread I was feeling has faded with the familiarity of my task. Too many people look out at these dunes and see a wasteland, but anyone who’s spent long enough out here knows that the desert is as rich in resources as any other ecosystem.
There’s an order here that I find comforting. I visit the places I know always have something to take back to Camp Mythos: a small outcropping of zabilla, their dusty green leaves spiked and firm with life-saving, soothing pulp, a patch of grassy warroya, their tiny white flowers bobbing gently in the sandy breeze.
As I move further and further from Camp Mythos, the desert seems to sing, beckoning me deeper within her embrace. After I lost my mother, there was a time that I hated the desert. I thought that it was cruel and without mercy, and I blamed it for having robbed me of the only family I had left, but with every year that has passed since, things have changed.
The desert has become my surrogate mother in some ways, providing for me, sharing its coy secrets if I am only brave enough to search for them. I stop to take a break beneath the shade of a squat copse of meqixste trees, swigging from my waterskin and savoring the coolness of the water as it slides down my dry throat.
The desert is a reminder that appearances can be deceiving. Quiet, persistent strength might be enough to kill a man, but it’s also enough to rear an entire community of people. It’s a strength I carry with me everywhere, in the hopes I can emulate even a fraction of its danger and beauty.
I dust myself off, climbing to my feet and looking out over the dunes when a glimmer in the distance makes me freeze. I squint, not trusting my eyes. The desert plays tricks after a while, and I know from years of experience that there’s nothing out there, yet…
“There it is again,” I murmur.
The sun is reflecting off of something in the distance, maybe fifty yards away. Panic thrums through me as Allan’s words float back through my mind. Could the dark elves have found us? Why would any battalion stray this far from civilization?
There are more direct ways to the southern coast from Tlouz, and no known threat to them exists out here, but even with all of my logic, I know what I’m looking at. There’s something, or someone, here. A mere mile from our community.
I leverage the shade of the meqixste trees to my advantage, squatting low in the sand as I peer out from behind a slight trunk. The glimmer blinks in and out of existence as though something is moving, but I can’t see the source clearly from this angle.
Staying low, I move out of the trees, crawling through a thicket of weeds to the peak of a dune where I can get a better vantage point. The source of the glimmering light slowly comes into view between the stalks of the desert grass, and my heart leaps into my throat.
“What is that?”
Stretched out across the sand is a dark elf male- no, a dark elf soldier- clad in a metal breastplate that glimmers in the sunlight. I cast my eyes around, looking for any sign of the rest of his battalion.
A deep gouge in the sand trails behind him, a single set of scattered footprints breaking up the scar he’s made in the dunes. He’s all but dragged himself here, staggering at certain intervals before collapsing into the sand.
My heart hammers wildly in my chest as I stare down at him from a distance. Blinding white hair fans out around him, some of the strands gathered into strange-looking beads. His gray skin is even paler than the typical pallor of the dark elves, ruddying with burns beneath the heat, his lips cracked and dry with dehydration.
I wait for his eyes to open, for the trap I’m sure I’ve wandered into to spring around me, but nothing happens.
He can’t truly be alone… can he?
It’s entirely possible he got lost in the dunes, that he was separated from his battalion, and is in real danger of being claimed as another victim of the desert. Even despite my reticence to approach him, my healer’s heart can’t help but ache to try and render the elf some aid.
He’s going to die out here if I don’t do anything- just like my mother and I would’ve died if we hadn’t been found.
“Should I help you?” I ask the unconscious man.
Despite myself, memories of those days in the desert flood my mind. My mother and I blew through our supplies too quickly, not knowing or understanding the kind of mortal peril we were in. By the third day, we had nothing, and any attempts to try and retrace our steps or find some kind of refuge only brought us to more and more remote areas of the desert.
By the time the beginning members of Camp Mythos found us, we were half-dead already. My skin itches at the memory, remembering the blistering sunburn that covered my body, the pustules that popped as I tried to drag my mother’s unconscious form through the sand, the sound of her shallow wheezing and the scrape of her burned, scaling skin against the sand echoing off of the dunes.