Page 42 of Heart of the Desert

Instead, the passage of time was marked in other ways: The weariness of our horses, the growing weight of the Heart in my sash, and the subtle swell of Aderyn’s waist.

The collection of scars on my skin that continued to grow.

The desert changed around us too as we rode. While the ever-shifting landscapes alternated in familiar patterns between sandy dunes, baked earth, and rocky crags, subtler changes slowly became evident. Water was harder to come by, as was game.

On our fifth night in a row without fresh meat, we were lucky enough to find an oasis to rest at. Spotting palms, Keera’s eyes sparked, and she shimmied up the nearest tree with surprising speed to harvest handfuls of dates. She dropped to the ground next to me and held out her prize.

“You hate dates,” I pointed out. It was something she had admitted to me in one of the first dreams we had ever shared.

She shrugged and popped one in her mouth before chewing purposefully. “I hate dying of starvation even more. And the rest of you don’t hate them.”

It was true. We were all happy to have food as supplies became scarcer by the day. Often, we had to go days without fresh sources of water. Our lips grew chapped and burned, cracking until they bled from the persistent dryness.

Still, we marched on every day toward the rising sun, and none more doggedly than Keera. Even as I worried for all of us, I was reminded just how long Keera had managed alone in conditions like this, without even a horse or a proper sword. Where the rest of us started to falter, she continued to show us how to scratch a living out of coarse sand.

Of course, this wasn’t my first time facing the trials of crossing the desert. I had hoped I would be saner on my second journey—the first having been when I had freshly run from my family and had yet to learn Lord Alasdar’s harsh lessons about controlling my powers. Instead, my visions also served to punctuate the nebulous passage of time on our journey.

Kelvar visited me regularly but never spoke more than a few sentences before I drove him away, usually with my own blood. Occasionally, weakness drove me into Keera’s arms. The touch of my magic seemed to boil the well of magic in her gut nearly instantly though, and I often finished with guilt stuck in my throat and worry in her golden eyes. Still, Kelvar often mentioned her in his strange messages, and his name on her lips put me on edge, making me hurry to banish my visions in whatever way I could.

While the hunger and thirst and exhaustion had only grown over the past weeks, the monster attacks had abated. While we had fought the occasional sichat and bone spider, none had been so fierce or so great in number as when we first set out, and we had grown more experienced in exploiting their weaknesses.

It was as if the desert had tested us against her monsters and seen that they would not break us and now had turned to exposure and hunger as her next instruments of our destruction. I worried what she might bring us to next, when we outlasted the desperation and thirst.

I glanced at Keera, who rode Daiti next to me. I knew she worried too and that her concerns focused not only on what lay ahead, but what we had left behind. The longer we took to restore the Heart, the longer we left Kelvadan in Calix’s clutches.

I wished for words to comfort her—for the ability to tell her that the ocean was just over the next horizon, and so were the answers to healing the Heart—but I did not have any of those answers. Instead, I opened my mouth to tell her that she should pull her hood up, which was currently pooled around her shoulders, letting her cheeks darken to a sunburned blush that gave me feral thoughts of other things that made her flush.

Before I could speak, she frowned and whipped her head around as if looking for something.

“The others…” she started.

I tore my gaze from her and looked around too, only to find our surroundings vanished. So distracted had I been by staring at Keera, that I hadn’t noticed the cloud of fog we had ridden into. It was like the thick silvery blankets that sometimes formed near Kelvadan, when the cool air rolling down from the tops of the mountains met the heat of the desert, although we were nowhere near the mountains now. The effect was not unlike being in a sandstorm—completely cut off from your surroundings—only everything was painted in silvery mist instead of the rough gray of desert dirt.

I glanced over my shoulder, finding the others were indeed no longer visible behind us—just a sheet of impenetrable gray. I turned back to Keera to tell her that they couldn’t be far, but she was gone too.

My heart leapt into my throat, nearly choking me as I forced out a strangled shout. “Keera!”

There was no answer but the pounding of my rushing blood in my ears.

“Keera!” I called out again, loud enough to make Alza wicker and stamp in distress beneath me, but I barely heeded her. Instead, I pressed my knee into her flank, causing her to turn in circles so I could search through the fog all around me.

But Keera and the rest were gone, as if they had dissolved into so much mist.

Spurred on by my distress, Alza shot forward, picking a direction at random as I shouted for my companions—for Keera.

If they had been attacked by a monster, there should have been shouts and sounds of combat, but instead there came only silence. It hit me all at once.

There was no sound at all. Not the rustle of wind over the earth or the scratching of sand mice. Even the voices in my head were gone. The silence echoed in my skull like a gong. It wasn’t the peace I experienced under Keera’s touch, but the utter absence of the hum of life around me.

Even the subtle tangle of Alza’s consciousness in my own as I rode was gone. In fact, I wasn’t riding at all anymore. I didn’t remember dismounting, but now I stood alone in the vast blankness.

I spun around, searching for anything to ground me in the foreign landscape as the bitterness of dread coated my tongue. For a moment, I expected Kelvar to appear—for this to be the newest manifestation of my insanity—but something about it felt simultaneously heavier and less real.

“Viper.”

I spun to face the voice, thinking Kelvar had finally appeared, but I knew before locating the source of the sound that this was something much different. I met eyes as gray and colorless as the mist around me, and nausea rolled through me.

I opened my mouth to speak, but in the face of Lord Alasdar’s piercing gaze, I couldn’t find my voice.