Práta smiled gently. “You can save so many more, but you must keep your wits. If you do not, all your good intentions could bring you more pain than you can imagine. The battles have changed. You must stop pushing that truth away.”
Socair pushed her cheek into Práta’s palm. It was warm and soft and smelled familiar, like home. “I cannot leave her be, Práta. I know I cannot allow my whims to jeopardize so much, but I must see through what I have started. When we return to Abhainnbaile…”
“You will do as your heart commands you, I know.” Práta’s eyes were sad, almost pitying. “I only hope that you come to see more than what lies directly in front of you.”
v
Óraithe
A week had passed and the sun no longer seemed to give any warmth except for a few hours in the mid-morning. It was bright in her eyes then and she lacked for enough clothes to block it. With the nights growing frigid, she could not afford to rip any cloth away to cover her eyes.
Óraithe could feel that her face had become dry and blistered from the constant wind. The urge to touch her lips and cheeks was nigh unbearable, but she resisted. What little to drink she had managed to steal away had run dry the day before, and now a fifth day of restless walking lay ahead of her. The food still held, at least for now. It was hard to imagine what good it might do her, though, the things that she had taken being either dried or cured. Without water she would have only a few more passings of the sun before she fell to thirst. The idea had struck her to try her hand at bringing water up from the sand using the Gift, but the risk was too great, at least as she felt now. Later, she may lack the strength for it, she knew, but the balance in her mind leaned toward waiting so long as she could. At the very least, sweat seemed not to be a concern in the cool air.
It was not the water that concerned her, however. She had read stories in Cosain’s books of elves losing themselves to madness in the White Waste and she understood why now. There were so few hours of the day where she could even be sure the horizon existed that she found herself falling into the sand to assure herself it was still there. A haze came in with the sun and melted the white sand into the blue sky. When night fell, black met at the edge of the world and what little light the Eyes sent down in their late phases served to make it seem she was walking in a sea of stars. The second night it had been a thing of beauty, but the third and fourth, her lack of sleep made the sands seem to shift and her balance went if she did not focus. The focus had been more tiring than the walking. She was becoming used to the rhythm though and had learned to focus on the direction of the sun or her own shadow or a single star.
The sun had just passed over her head when she felt the urge to make water come over her. She squatted and pulled her braies down. Óraithe cupped her hands together and pissed into them, stopping the stream of liquid as best she could when they filled and drinking what she could. She gagged, coughing some out of her hands and onto the sand. Righting herself, she drank the rest and returned her hands to fill them again. When she was done, she wiped what wet remained on her hands across her face. It burned a moment but not so much as the wind itself. She had taken to the ritual the day before, cursing herself for having wasted precious drink for so long prior. It was hard to chide herself. She had known thirst but never been so far from a drink she could steal or trick into making her own. The desert offered up nothing, save sand and sky.
Her mind had begun playing tricks on the third day. The waves rising from the sand taking shapes strange and familiar both. First trees, then walls and buildings. At times, creatures seemed to swim across the distance. She was not fool enough to believe the pictures the desert showed her. She had read enough to know them for what they were. Lies told by sun on sand meant to fetch the lost from what remained of their path and drag them off into a hungry abyss. Óraithe knew well her enemies in this place. The sun and the dry and her mind and nothing else. Whenever she saw the shapes, she would look down at her shadow and count her steps, to a thousand and back down to nothing, before she allowed herself to look at the world again. Her mind fought her when she would count. It would scream at her to look away, to think of something other than numbers. She could not allow it. The numbers were her will over herself. An exercise for a mind which wished to grow weak and abandon her body to nature.
A day and a night passed, Óraithe again neither slept nor stopped her walk. She had slowed and her piss had become dense and dark and there was half as much. She forced it down as best she could, knowing that soon the liquid was like to do more harm than good. The light passed again and night bit at her. Tomorrow would be her seventh day. Nearly two weeks.
She closed her eyes for only a moment, she knew it could not have been long, but in that moment she heard a soft humming. Lyrical and patient and calm. She opened her eyes
