Trials of Sand and Water

Dusk infiltrates the clear blue skies above like some celestial liquid long spilled and pooling. It’s only then that Lothiriel’s ankles are given a reprieve from the scathing sands as she scales one dune after the other. An hour passes, and the sun sinks into the sands until all attached to Lothiriel’s person ceases to feel like body armour composed of hot coals.

She stops at the peak of a dune when the first wave of cool air greets her in passing. She knows this comfort is false. When night becomes absolute she will freeze to death without shelter. She looks back over her shoulder and sees the ebbing bud of amber flickering from where she came.

The fires of her broken sky-ship still burned. The remnants of her vessel could have provided adequate shelter from the desert’s hospitality until another spotted her, but the beast she followed had led her well beyond the boundaries of known sky channels. The chances of her wreckage being discovered were unquestionable. She would not sit idle in her grave, not when the beast still needed killing.

The moons did not hold vigil in the sky that night, and while the stars shone aplenty it did not give Lothiriel much in the way of sight. During her plummet after the beast’s debilitating strike she marked its direction: northeast towards the dunes. Its scent had lingered long enough to follow thanks to a windless day, but now with each dune becoming more mountainous than the last she found herself losing the race against its fading trail.

She pulled from her belt one of several vials of multi-coloured liquids, this one a murky grey. Dragon’s sight. The toxicity of the potion burned her insides, inflicting heavy rigour on her veins. The shock of it passed. Her pupils became slits, the jade green around them replaced by a fiery red.

She saw an adult sand-worm four miles away burrowing into the earth as if she were right beside it. The night sky held many curiosities when under the influence of the potion, strange objects and lingering monoliths hung just beyond the boundaries of what sky farers could traverse, beyond the blue and within the black. Lothiriel took note of three monoliths circling each other before refocusing on the task at hand. Turning scent into a visible trail was difficult, even by the strength of the potion she just consumed. It took climbing another set of unbearably large dunes for her to catch the tail end of a sickly green vaporous line extending north.

“Gotcha.”

She had never seen anything like this beast before. Humanoid in shape, but heavily scaled with horrid wings of torn leather and a bloodied maw of razor sharp teeth too abundant for its own head. Four ghost white eyes looked upon her when she confronted it. Not as terrifying as the item it held, one that made all other details inconsequential. Her sister Leuriea’s bloodied shawl. When it fled it left nothing behind except freshly painted walls. No physical sign of her sister remained.

She knew safety in the skies was not absolute, but this? It was not her fault that, even several thousand feet above the ground, she could not keep her sister safe. At least that’s what she told herself when she saw the beast escape through the smashed hull of her ship. This was the comfort she fed herself to stave utter despair, granting time enough to pilot her ship and give chase. The pursuit lasted a day before the beast grew tired of its predator and decided to cut through the ship’s enchanted fuselage. The critical hit was more perplexing to Lothiriel than anything, even as the ship fell.

The beast’s trail had been quite thick and noxious when the effects of the potion finally wore off, which meant the beast could not have journeyed much farther. Even mindless harbingers of death needed rest, she supposed.

The dunes broke apart and gave way to large cavernous installations of sharp rock, red as blood, piercing the ground’s surface. There were multiple paths to take between ridges leading deeper into the caverns, but Lothiriel did not take this creature for one that could traverse tight spaces. She decided to circle the plantations of stone until she came across a more viable opening.

Banks of sand gave way to a hard, cracked surface in constant oppression from the sun. She came beneath the shelter of a large, pointed mass jutting outward, even beyond the edge of the sands some distance out. The scale of it and the shade it no doubt offered during the day allowed for a shrivelled pile of brushes to exist within a compact border of viability.

It was around those brushes that Lothiriel discovered the remains of an abandoned campsite. Few camels laundered the site around a crudely assembled box tent, under which lay a bloodied chest and two swords, one with a broken blade. The unfinished remains of a cooked desert rat roasting on a spit hung above the dying flames of a fire. Lothiriel considered a scuffle amongst mercenaries or wayfarers carrying precious cargo, yet cargo still remained, as well as several camels that could’ve been used to carry what was left. Her foot hit something as she stepped over one of three bedrolls. Not stone, not metal. She picked it up and held at the wrist the dismembered hand of a man. She tossed it aside, casually. The noise caused a disturbance among the brush.

Lothiriel crouched and drew her dagger. Whatever approached was moving slowly. She heard the feint rasps of wheezing breath. Not an animal.

“Who’s there?” she asked.

A torn hand came through the golden reeds, grasping earth and pulling itself forward. The face of a man dragged through the darkest of hells pulled forward, eyes mad and ceaseless.

“Help me,” he begged.

Lothiriel went to him, pulling the rest of his body from the reeds. He was not missing a hand, yet the entirety of his robes held a wet crimson sheen from whatever wounds he sustained. He had been bleeding out for quite some time and would surely die.

“What did this to you?” she asked.

“A winged devil,” he coughed, blood outlining the gaps of his teeth.

“Where is it, now?”

He raised a withered hand towards the center of the rock’s mammoth base. “There. It took the man and woman I traveled with. It was eating them. Eating them alive.”

Lothiriel pushed the beast’s methods from her mind. She could not imagine.

“You rest,” she said, placing bundled bedroll beneath his head. “When I come back we’ll see about getting you help.”

He coughed again. “I’m no idiot, girl. I’ll be dead. You will too if you’re going after that thing.”

“Mm.”

The man coughed again. His eyes fell upon the bloodied chest resting beneath the tent.

“Vials of poisons in the chest. Give me one. I’ll not suffer these wounds like a flayed lamb.”

“Why do you carry these?” Lothiriel asked, opening the chest.

“Poisons are versatile. Good money. Give me the deathwhisp.”

Deathwisp was tastless, odourless, clear as water, and immediate.

“Are these vials of ribbicore?”

“Indeed.”

Ribbicore was a selective poison used by city folk to eradicate vermin. Little did most know that when applied to a blade it primed the edges to become sharper than any other weapon. She placed a vial in her pouch before offering the deathwhisp to the merchant.

“Burn the chest,” he said, uncorking the vial. “My hands were shifty but true. Others who find that chest might have other intentions. Or don’t. I don’t give a fuck.”

He drank. Death came for him before he could swallow the last of the vial.

Lothiriel made for the base of the stone, taking no time to burn anything or deviate any threads of sinister intent that may come from the discovery of the merchant’s wares. The wheels of fate bind everyone to uncertainty. Who’s to say the contents of the chest won’t someday prevent atrocities?

There was not much light to be found along the enclosures of the stoney mass, least of all along the slanted recession leading underground. Lothiriel didn’t hesitate, unsheathing her recently oiled ebony longsword and marching into the darkness.

The crunch of grinding rock beneath her boots disappeared as her soles began parting soft patches of dead grass. She heard nothing as she continued forward, treading as lightly as any would when hunting a new species of monster. This creature could see just as well in the dark as it does during the day. She lit one of her two handcrafted torches. The cavern she found herself in was so large that the light of her fire could outline neither the walls beyond nor the ceiling. The creature could swoop down at any second from any crevasse without so much as a sound and finish her in seconds. No such thing came to pass.

She came across the bodies of the two mercenaries, both unceremoniously devoured and mangled, barely retaining their human shape. Their bodies lay before a narrow passage. Her previous estimation of what the beast was willing to bypass quickly diminished. In she went.

The passage was claustrophobic, offering very little space to breathe, let alone move. It continued for an eternity, until with each step the crackle of her fire meshed with another sound that grew louder. Something fleeting and rapturous. She heard water.

A crystalline lake lay within the cavern, it’s sapphire hue giving the grass and plants surrounding it an otherworldly cadence. A waterfall flowed from the corner of the cavern’s ceiling, just below a circular opening that allowed the sun to kiss the a portion of the lake and the grassy ridge before it. Morning broke not long ago within the oasis. Butterflies basked in the sun along the edge of the water.

Lothiriel saw nothing, heard nothing.

Her thirst was severe, but knew taking a moment to drink would mean letting her guard down.

Quickly, she thought.

She didn’t even unclasp her empty waterskin, opting to cup her hand for a quick drink, instead.

The creature’s hand broke the surface of the water in that instant, latching itself around her wrist and dragging her in.

Sky and water?

She struggled as best she could, yet remained complacent when plumes of her own blood obscured her sight of the beast. She hadn’t felt the beasts claws puncture her side, but it wasn’t enough to kill or maim her. Her hand found the hilt of her dagger. Her thrust was nothing more than a guess, yet still it punctured one of the creature’s four eyes. Its shriek was ear piercing even beneath the surface of water.

It hurled her up and out of the lake. The air was stolen from her body as she landed on her back. She wasted no time, bringing herself to her feet and brandishing her sword. She stood, dripping blood and water, waiting for the beast to surface.

Its silhouette shimmered like a crystal apparition in the water as it approached. She readied her sword above her head as she stood at the lake’s edge. She swung before it came up, redirecting her swing when the face that broke the water was not that of a beast, but her own sister, missing an eye.

The blade produced sparks as it struck stone.

“Hello, sister,” she said after a silence, before sinking into the lake.

Lothiriel tossed her sword and dove.

Her sister’s body offered no resistance when her hands found it.

Lothiriel coughed water and blood when she pulled her sister from the lake.

Leuriea did not cough at all.

She placed her hands on her sister’s chest and began to push in sequence. It was only when she put her mouth to Leuriea’s that water escaped her lungs, rasping for oxygen.

Lothiriel sat back to take her sister in, horror subsided by grief encapsulated by joy.

“What…the…fuck,” was all she managed to say.

“Can I explain after we fix the eye you stabbed?”

“You explain now. I nearly killed you.”

“It’s really great that you didn’t,” she said, smirking.

It faded when she caught her sister’s eyes glistening.

“I'm sorry, Lothiriel.”

They embraced each other.

After patching her sister’s eye and herself with wet bandages and powdered elf leaves they began their journey back.

“Are you going to turn again?” Lothiriel asked, guiding her sister through the narrow passage by hand.

“Well…I only turned when I touched that enchanted cuirass we’re transporting.”

“Oh my fucking gods.”

“I’m sorry! I just wanted to know what was so enchanting about it. It’s definitely cursed, though.”

“What was your first clue?”

“…did I hurt anyone? Besides you, I mean.”

Just as she asked they came into the cavernous opening, where still there lay the two bodies of the mangled mercenaries.

“I’m not gonna lie to you, Leuriea. You did that to those two, and mortally wounded another at a campsite just outside. They were poison peddlers, though.”

“That doesn’t make it right.”

“No, it doesn’t. But it wasn’t you.”

The heat of the desert washed over them as they came upon the clearing beneath the jutting stone. The air was dry and much welcomed to be breathed at all.

“Where’s our ship?” Leuriea asked.

“You destroyed it.”

“Of course I did,” she slumped. “Shit.”

“We can buy another one.”

“And the armour? The buyers are gonna be quite pissed off if we show up empty handed.”

“So we don’t show up. We weren’t paid and I’m not putting us at risk like that, again. The armour can rust in the desert for all I care.”

“I think it’s gonna put us in trouble,” Leuriea said.

“We’re already in trouble.”

“But we’ve got each other!”

“Ugh.”

“Love me.”

“Just please stop touching enchanted shit when I tell you not to,” Lothiriel said.

“No promises.”

She shoved her sister and they smiled.

They gathered what little supplies remained at the camp, hoisted everything atop two of the camels as well as the chest of poison, and made way into the unforgiving bosom of the blistering sandy thralls, together.