Eryth woke up with a pounding headache and a burning inability to breathe.

This was disconcerting to Eryth.

She immediately sat up, throwing clouds of powdery dust into the air around her, and began to violently cough, spewing said dust out of her lungs (this procedure involved much cursing). Once her insides had glorious air pumping through them in rhythmic fashion, Eryth looked around her.

She was surrounded by dust.

“Shit.” Eryth muttered.

Not a single wagon, track, or spec of debris in sight. Only the blazing light of the sun, scouring seemingly endless dunes.

“I am so fucked.”

Eryth forced herself to stand up, almost falling over from dizziness at the attempt. Her head was apparently angry with her, and was making its displeasure known in the language of migraines. The extra height from standing let her see her surroundings a bit better, pushing the perceived horizon out a kilometer or two.

She was rewarded with the sight of more dunes in every direction.

Sighing, Eryth took stock of herself. She was covered in dust for some reason. Or rather, had been covered in dust. Now she was just dusty. She couldn’t quite remember why though.

Her head ached something fierce, and she had a stinging pain at the back of her scalp that burned bright everytime she moved her neck and stretched the skin. Reaching up, she felt around the area and was greeted with a combination of scabbing, tender skin, and searing pain. There was probably a bruise in there somewhere too. Now wasn’t that a combination of ouch. She noted that her head felt oddly light, but took it as a symptom of her general dizziness.

Her throat was scratchy, probably thanks to the dust and coughing, and also probably because she was thirsty as fuck. Her body was covered in tiny scrapes. They were hard to spot thanks to the pasty covering of dust all over her, but when she brushed them they stung kinda like a carpet burn.

Alright, now to figure out what the hell happened.

Eryth looked down to keep the sun out of her eyes and tried to focus. It was weirdly difficult, her thoughts seemed to randomly cut off and then she’d have to stumble upon that same thought again, and even then it was like trying to swim through honey. She knocked on her head in irritation, hoping that jarring her brain would be grounding, but her headache made its disapproval of the technique known with enthusiasm. It felt like somebody had smacked her scalp with a baseball bat.

Then it clicked.

Arnett was going to shoot her, then she got smacked in the back of the brain and blacked out. The only issue is that it was unlikely Arnett would miss, and her head was devoid of gaping, self-cauterized holes that one might typically associate with getting their skull blasted with a bolt of super-charged plasma. So what had hit her?

Frowning, Eryth looked down at the small pit she had clambered out of, and saw a flash of dull gray at the bottom. It was right about where her head had been. Unsteadily crouching down, Eryth grabbed it and yanked it out with much more force than necessary. She had expected it to be stuck or something, but it simply popped out of the ground effortlessly. Naturally, this shot another cloud of dust in the air. Also naturally, Eryth immediately choked and had the pleasure of enduring yet another coughing fit.

After recovering, Eryth was rewarded with the most misshapen bit of steel she had seen that wasn’t created by Sam. It looked half-melted, and the molten side was scorched black, with a circular pit in the middle encrusted with sand and glass. She tried picking at it, but the sand was embedded in the metal.

She suddenly realized that this misshapen bit of steel actually had been created by Sam. Well, kinda. It was a collaborative piece. When she dove off the wagon she had felt a thump followed by heat, and Eryth was willing to bet Arnold’s traitorous neck that Sam had shielded her from the plasma blast with a piece of scrap metal.

Speaking of Arnold, Eryth wanted to have words with him. Very many words. The discussion would involve a metal pipe and a somebody to guard the door. And one of the participants might be short a few teeth when it was through.

That was a later problem though. Specifically the later when Arnold's face was in smacking range.

For now, the goal was not to die out in the Great Desert where her corpse would shrivel up like a dried fruit snack. There were probably vis corrupted animals that would consider an Eryth raisin to be a delicacy, and getting them hooked on something so limited in supply would be immoral.

Banishing the image from her mind, Eryth checked through her pockets, inventorying all the little knick knacks that would hopefully keep her alive. After sifting around in the sand just to make sure she wasn’t overlooking anything, Eryth tallied up her belongings.

All she had on her were the meager remnants of her medical supplies (she hadn’t been very careful about losing things during the wagon fight), her pistol, her clothes, and one avant-garde metal sculpture with a little splotch of Eryth’s own dried lifeblood decorating one side. She also swore she had had a pencil in one of her vest pockets but she couldn’t find it anywhere, so she decided to inventory it as a half pencil just to cover her bases.

Now, Eryth was grateful she had all those things, sure, but none of them addressed what was currently Eryth’s driving desire.

She was thirsty.

Her throat was dry, she had a massive headache, and she didn’t have her canteen.

Eryth sighed, then slapped her hands to her cheeks.

“Right, move while you still can.”

And so, Eryth got to walking.

She figured she could just head towards where Chaolus was and she’d hopefully get to the city gate before she either died or was corrupted into some inhuman horror. Of course, Eryth didn’t actually know exactly how long she had had vis building up in her blood, since she wasn’t sure what the current cycle was or even when she was in it (her poor comms watch apparently didn’t like being filled up entirely with miniscule dust particles), but she felt fine.

Well, she felt fine except for all the minor injuries and symptoms of dehydration, but that was hardly relevant.

This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

Eryth tried to use the sun to navigate, trying to keep it just to the left of center like the wagons had had it, but she couldn’t be sure she got the angle exactly right. She also didn’t know if the caravan had been planning on heading in a straight line the whole time, or if they only planned on keeping that course for a while before turning or something.

All in all, Eryth was feeling about as confident as one could expect given the circumstances.

Which is to say, Eryth had immediately given up hope and instead devoted her entire mind to wishing for water. The dunes didn’t oblige however, each crest only revealed another hill of sand, warm and dry under the brilliant, cloudless sky.

After some number of timeless hours of wandering around and getting sand in her shoes, Eryth spotted something when she crested a dune.

Waaaaaay off in the distance, there was a little dot.

Exciting!

After summiting another dune, specifically the one after the dune Eryth spotted the dot from, she looked out again.

Now the dot was slightly bigger.

Eryth’s tired and fuzzy mind started spinning up again. Here was something interesting. It had probably been a while since she started walking. Hard to tell without a way to keep time, and for some reason she felt like keeping time wasn’t actually all that important. It just kinda stopped mattering to her at some point and she stopped thinking about it.

That was probably fine.

With all the vigor and speed that a banged up survivor suffering from severe dehydration could manage, Eryth decisively shuffled her way over to the mystery spec. As she approached, the spot slowly resolved itself into multiple small spots and one big one. When she got closer still, she recognized it for what it was.

A wreck.

There was a small field of scattered debris, all the scoured dull gray of steel that had been exposed to the sandy winds for years. The big lump had probably been a truck, originally. Now it was a folded over tin can, with half-buried sheets of canvas stretched over parts of the frame. All around were fragments of metal, and where Eryth figured an engine used to be there was only a twisted and blackened cavity.

So not a case of running out of gas.

Well, it was probably out of gas now, but Eryth deduced that insight to be unhelpful.

She decided to approach cautiously. Something in the air made her heart rate elevate a bit, and she responded by preemptively drawing her gun and resting both hands on the grip while she stalked through the wreckage. Her mind was telling her that something was alive here, and Eryth simply accepted the information without question. Had she been in a better state, she might have pinned the impulse down and brought it in for questioning. In her half-delirious state though, meh. Anything goes. She just wanted something to drink. That whole self-reflection stuff was for people with a glass of water.

The truck was big. It had probably had treads before it had its recent unplanned body-work, but the tracks and even the wheels were all missing. Save for one sad looking wheel propped up on a crooked axle, half-buried in the sand a good couple meters away from the rest of the vehicle. Maybe the missing parts had all been buried already? Maybe there had been a dust storm… but then how did Eryth survive?

Wait. Hadn’t a dust storm been announced back before the whole Arnold/Arnett showdown? Yeah, she had been completely buried when she woke up. Being out in a dust storm would certainly explain all the scrapes she was covered in. But there was no way she could have lived through that without cover, right? She should be dead.

“Get the fuck back you fucking beasts! I’ll fucking kill all of you!”

A hoarse and desperate scream dragged Eryth out of the little brain spiral she had been distracted by. A sensation like an invisible wall slamming into her knocked her off her feet and into the air, where it slowly degraded into a violently strong wind that pushed her into the slope of a nearby dune. The dust she knocked up was blown away from her by the rushing air, where it created a small plume that blossomed towards the sky.

Luckly, Eryth had maintained a death-grip on her pistol, so when she landed with a thud she immediately leveled the gun even as she tried to regain the breath that had been knocked out of her.

There, half-hidden behind a flap of canvas, was a man.

And boy howdy was he in a sorry state.

He was sitting back against what must have been the only stable piece of the twisted wreck, with his matrix arm still raised from the apparent air attack he had just unleashed. He was properly panting, and was covered in sweat and blood from what must have been dozens of wounds all over his body. Eryth couldn’t make out whether he had a cut on his left eye or if the eye was completely destroyed. From where she was lying half-shoved into a dune it just looked like a ragged red spot.

Eryth almost shot him reflexively, but caught herself before she could pull the trigger. He might have water, and even if he didn’t maybe he knew where water was. Worth an ask at least.

Plus, she could always shoot him later. After the water.

Eryth shook her head. Apparently her blood was more saturated than she had realized. Eryth had thought the sadistic doctor lady had said that the body went first, not the mind, but apparently Eryth was jumping the gun a little. Maybe she could find the doctor around here somewhere. She probably had water. If giving water to a dehydrated person counts as a medical treatment, does that make water a medicine?

Oop, wait. The bloody guy was shouting at her. She had forgotten he was there for a moment. She should ask him about water.

“-and whatever foul corrupted monstrosity ya think ya are if ya come one more step close I’l-”

“Hey!” Eryth interrupted whatever the bloody guy was blabbering about and greeted him with as much friendliness as she could scrounge up. “Do you have any water?”

The man stared at her for a moment, then replied with a mix of disbelief and fear. “Oh on the winds, since when can vis-beasts talk?”

“That’s kinda rude.” Eryth frowned. “I can personally assure you I’m not a vis-beast.”

Eryth thought for a moment.

“Yet. I’m not a vis beast yet. I am pretty thirsty though. So…..”

The man just stared at her.

When the bloody guy didn’t pick up on her subtle conversational prompting she continued.

“.... so I’m interested in procuring some water. You have any?”

The man’s face was a tableaux of confusion and consternation. And when he finally deigned to reply to Eryth’s simple question it was with a blatant change of topic. Eryth was beyond disappointed. The nerve of some people.

“If yer not corrupted, then what’s wrong with yer head?” The man gestured with his left arm, his right still raised with intent to cast.

“Uh, what do you mean?” This conversation wasn’t panning out as Eryth had hoped at all. She had been both ignored and insulted. And she was still thirsty too.

The man tilted his head fractionally to the left indicating for Eryth to look at something. She narrowed her eyes. She just knew that the moment she did, he would hide the water, wherever it was. But Eryth still hoped for a peaceful resolution, her being an upstanding individual, so she obliged him.

There were a couple scratched up shards of highly reflective metal, probably the remnants of the truck’s solar oven. Sam had mentioned that a lot of people took advantage of the “big flame ball in the sky” (her words) to cook since looking for firewood in the dunes was closer to a divine quest than a simple chore. And in the mirror she saw the most fucked-up looking gobloid creature she had ever seen. Not a hard contest, since goblins didn’t exist, but the diminutive and bald thing with pasty skin and tattered clothing could only be described as such.

She jumped back, fulfilling the stereotype of being scared by her own reflection even as she realized the horrible truth.

Eryth patted the top of her head where her hair usually was, and found only the slightest bit of fuzz, covered in little black spots that smelled of sulfur. So that was why her head felt lighter, she belatedly realized. Arnett’s shot had lit her hair on fire.

However, cutting through her fuzzy thoughts and surprise, came the most horrible realization of all.

A truth so terrible, she could only stare up at the sky in despair.

She had, once again, called herself short.