The yawning tundra before Elody was magnificent in its unassuming splendor. The blues and greens of the mosses fought the ocean of orange, teal, and red lichens, making a natural watercolor painting of an ocean on fire. A stream snaked its way through the artwork, marked partly by the sparkling surface, but also as a green line as brambles clutched to the small banks.
On the opposing side was an odd sight- a patch of grasses and other plants that were separate from the bramble and lichens. The thought of herbs and grasses that might be of use to her crossed her mind, or if nothing else, some plant with fruiting bodies. If she was especially lucky, she thought some tubers might reside there, knowing nothing of the limitations of permafrost.
She sat atop the rise, thinking her plan through. As worn out as she was, if she wanted to survive, she had to be patient and persistent. If there was one trait she knew she had in spades, it was persistence. What was her ultimate goal, she asked herself?
“I need to kill Orivaughn,” She growled through gritted teeth
In spite of her current pain and surrounding beauty, the thought of the leader of Ade’s oligarchs made her tail twitch. She took a deep breath in, then out. She knew she needed to focus on immediate survival first. When she had a fire going and some food roasting, then she could curse him and make a plan to mete her revenge.
She assessed what she had on her person. She was wearing a peridot green dress, with a leather apron over it. She had been wearing her leggings, but those had been consumed to bandage some of her wounds. She pulled out the contents of her apron pocket and laid them out. She had two pieces of paper, one a folded list of items she was inventorying at her shop, and another was a crumpled receipt of purchase that one of her regulars had declined to take. She also had the keys to her shop, the brass glistening in the late evening light.
Hold on, she thought. It should be getting dark- yet she was noticing the sun getting higher in the sky. Why was it suddenly morning again? The thought only occurred to her as she turned the jagged metal in her hand, but the observation was a blindingly obvious one. While this boded poorly for any kind of sleep schedule she had, at least she had more daylight to work with. The sun felt paltry here compared to her homeland, the warmth a trickle compared to Ade’s flood of heat. She resumed taking stock.
The other two items in her pouch were a grease pencil and a labeled bag of medication.
Rudolf Kyne
Enhancement Experiment Batch 14
2mg Tablet
Quantity: 60
It contained a batch of medication that her assistant, Rudolf, had been making. He had been interested in making drugs that could enhance certain physiological characteristics, though he had yet to elaborate further than that. He had handed her the bag so that she could run an independent purity test, but she hadn’t gotten to that by the time she was abducted. Medication whose purpose is unclear would be dangerous to take, assuming it did anything at all, so she immediately discarded the small blue pills. However, the waxed paper baggy itself could be useful for gathering herbs and other useful small items, so she kept it.
The papers were useless on their own, though they would make for nice kindling once she attempted to start a fire. She didn’t have any use for the pencil, so she just held onto it for now. Perhaps making markings on her surroundings would be useful later.
Next, she assessed her surroundings for useful things. Obviously, the stream was a must go-to location. The water would be necessary for drinking and cleaning herself, but she’d also need a fire. While there were brambles near the water, they would be green and difficult to light. As much as she loathed her entrance, that patch of brambles had many dead sprigs that she could use to kindle a fire. Anything she built wouldn’t last long, but something was better than nothing. She would go and gather what she could, putting the twigs into her leather apron pouch, protecting her from their treacherous thorns, and then cross the stream at one of the relatively bramble- free crossings.
Elody took a deep breath as she got ready to descend the rise back down towards the bramble patch. Descending was much harder than ascending, but it was a grim reality of necessity. As she gritted through the pain, she silently thanked the uncaring universe that there were no large predators in this desolate land.
As the slope evened out again, she walked to the brambles. Her head was much clearer now, even though her entire left side throbbed with pain. She was clear-headed enough to realize that the area was actually quite noisy down here- the chirps and whines of insect life was abundant in this bramble patch. She didn’t like the idea of eating bugs, but if that was what she had to in order to survive, then so be it.
The tip of her tail was curved and made of a rough and leathery, and was able to curl into a tight loop. It was common practice for the Adstrani people to use it to hold small objects while their hands were occupied with more complicated tasks. She walked the perimeter of the brambles, not daring to set foot inside, plucking what dead branches she could see and reach. Her hands worked on breaking off safe portions of branches and twigs, and her tail reached up to grab the twigs and deposited them in her pouch. All this happened as naturally as walking for her.
After a little over an hour, her apron pouch was full to bursting. She decided it was time to go to the grass patch she had seen. She looked to the rise she had used to scout the area, and used it as a landmark as she slowly navigated towards the river. It was hardly necessary, as after she got around the bramble patch, there wasn’t any flora to impede her view of the thicket covered stream. She aimed for one of the less-thickly covered spots, and trotted over.
Coming to the stream, she saw why this spot had less vegetation- it was where a wealth of river stones had been deposited. They varied in size from smaller than a marble to larger than Elody's head. This created a shallow gravelly area she could cross in relative peace. Putting her bare feet in the water felt like stepping into ice, and she quickly dashed across. Daggers of pain lanced into her skin as she could swear she could feel her feet freezing. She cursed again, and realized she had to make a fire, and soon. The herbs could wait.
Elody found an area clear enough of the grasses and larger vegetation that creating a wildfire was of negligible concern. Her feet were going numb by this point, and Elody was getting scared. She dumped all the kindling she had gathered, plus a few tufts of grass her tail had yanked out. She took the largest branch she had found, wriggled it into the earth so a small divot faced up, and dropped in a few pinches of grit. Next, she took a straight twig and her keys, using the jagged metal to remove the thorns as best she could. She needed to use the stick and divot to create friction, heating up the grit so she could deposit it onto the paper and start up a fire. She had never done this herself before, only having read about it in some adventure novels she had read. She prayed the technique would work at all.
The process of spinning the stick was agonizing. On more occasions than she could count, she lost grip as she attempted to spin the stick between her palms, only to have the stick slip out from the shallow hole it was meant to rest in. For over an hour, she attempted until she broke down in tears. Her feet were numb, her left side was still screaming at her in agony, insects were swarming her, she was getting hungry and she couldn’t even light a fire. She felt useless. She felt like a child again. She felt like nothing she could do would help anything. It was too much for her and she broke down, sobbing. The pain of her situation vented from her eyes, tears streaming down as she screamed into her hands. For the next twenty minutes, she bawled.
It was another five minutes of dry eyes as she stared at the twigs in front of her. After half an hour of breaking down, she was beginning to regain control over herself. Her drive to survive kicked back in, and she tried again.
This time, she used her tail to stabilize the stick, placing the loop of the tip at the top of the stick as she spun her hands down. She could get the stick spinning pretty fast, and while this hurt the tip of her tail, she was already in too much pain to care. She moved her hands down, then quickly re-positioned them at the top and repeated. She did this, over and over, her hands and tail tip going raw and her palms protested until she saw the grit glowing with latent heat.
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She dropped the stick, quickly grabbed a piece of paper, and deposited the glowing grit on it. It stayed for a moment as the paper browned and blackened, but did not catch flame. She blew on it, gently, and the paper caught in a tiny flame as the ember fell through. Elated, Elody moved the paper into the clump of dry grasses as the flames quickly enveloped the kindling. Finally, she felt something was going right.
Elody moved a bunch of the twigs around the flames, and the dry wood caught quickly. Without thinking, she threw the rest of the twigs and branches onto the flames as everything caught. She didn’t notice the grease pencil that had been thrown into the pile until great billowing clouds of smoke emerged from the small fire. She spluttered and coughed and squeezed her eyes shut against the irritating smoke. Even so, she grinned as she had a source of warmth for now. She put her feet near the fire, then the rest of her. She got as close as she could without fear of burning herself, feeling the comforting warmth against the tundra chill.
As a pillar of smoke rose above her, Elody relished finally getting to fall asleep.
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Waking up from being cold is a distinctly unpleasant experience for any creature not made with the essence of ice within them. Waking up without ones bedsheets or clothes is bad, but waking up in a tundra in torn and threadbare clothing with wind howling into your ear at night is worse than most sleepless nights.
Elody woke with a start, shivering and teeth chattering. She could still see embers smoldering in the small heap that was once the fire. The embers glowed dully under the night sky, just bright enough to be noticed in the darkness. Elody moved close to the embers, grateful they still radiated heat. The smoke was no longer an issue, nor the swarms of insects that had beset her the previous day. She huddled around the tiny island of warmth, noting that she had sensation back in her feet, though they were in terrible amounts of pain. She had a lot of that lately.
She looked up at the sky, drinking in the appearance of the night sky. It had some similarities to what she knew, but only a few. She recognized some constellations that were normally only visible in the dry season, but there was an entire stretch of sky that seemed unfamiliar to her. She was by no means an astronomer; most of whom served the Goddess of Stars. There were also more stars than she was used to. Patches of glowing cloth formed from the myriad points, a scarf that made a ring in the night sky. Taking it all in, Elody couldn’t keep herself from brimming with anger.
Despite the beauty of the sky, the clarity only served as a reminder to Elody that she was very, very far from home. The damning cold, the pain of her body, the simple pleasure of the campfire warmth, all of it was another punch to the gut. She had lost everything in an afternoon. With nothing to do in the darkness and nothing to distract her, Elody lost herself to her anger.
“They were right. I always doubted them a little, and they were right,” Elody muttered to herself. Her shop in Ade had been host to a regular meeting of politically inclined individuals, namely those who opposed the Medeah Consulate, the oligarchs that ruled Ade and more.
“They warned me. They told me that Orivaughn would excise anyone in a moment if it benefitted him. They told me! And I did… what? Nodded, tried to be polite? I… I…” Elody began to cry for a few minutes as words failed to help her. Tears cannot last forever, however, and her monologue to herself resumed.
“What did I even DO?!” Elody screamed. “What in the name of the myriad heavens does that even get Orivaughn? I’m just… some pharmacist! I make medicine and keep people alive! I keep my head low, and for what!”
Elody’s crying came without tears now, her face burning with rage despite the chill. Her words came now as a hoarse shriek, comprehensibility ceding ground to raw emotion. She stood up, neck craning upwards at the stellar tapestry above.
“Hear me, stars! Hear me, gods! I swear to you both that I will kill Orivaughn Medeah! I do not care what it takes, or what it costs, but I swear to you, stars, I will kill Orivaugn and tear down the Consulate around him! I will survive this barren hell, and I will see my vengeance met! And NOTHING! Will stand against that end!”
Elody staggered, the forceful screaming leaving her light-headed. She collapsed into a sitting position, and began to sob once more.
“I can’t die out here,” she sobbed into her hands. “I can’t. I can’t, I can’t, I can’t.”
Sitting next to the embers and exhausted from her exertion, Elody passed out again.
★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Elody woke up again as the sun peeked over the mountains, harsh sunlight shining directly into her eyes. She was cold, but the embers kept her warm enough that she stayed asleep until then. She was still in pain and cold, and now sore and hungry to boot. She was also parched, having shouted so much the prior night.
She looked to the ashen remains of the campfire. There wasn’t any light coming from it, but the barest heat still emerged, meaning some embers remained. She went and gathered some dry grasses from the nearby patch, and found some smaller twigs that seemed viable from the nearby bramble and tossed them on. The grasses caught, and she had some flames again. She warmed herself, then moved to the next task.
She needed water and food, but luckily, there was the stream. The running water was crystal clear, but she did see a little plant life in the water, as some algaes danced in the gentle current. She cupped her hands and took a few sips. She wanted to bathe, but she knew from how bad her feet got yesterday that that was inadvisable at the moment. She spotted a few fish in the water, but they were tiny and few in number. She would revisit that as an option if the grassy area had nothing to offer.
The grasses had no hidden tubers nor plants with fleshy stalks, everything being fibrous and resistant to the cold. There were, however, a few plants close to where the brambles and the grasses met that bore fruit. They were clusters of bright red berries hidden under leaves. The bright coloration enticed Elody, but she paced herself. She plucked one of the berries, and crushed it. She smeared the juice onto her lower lip, taking care not to ingest any. She waited several minutes, and was greeted by a stinging sensation.
Elody tutted, and gathered some of the berries anyways. She would try to cook them, but that would happen after she got some of those small fish. Her stomach growled, but Elody knew she would be alright for now. It had not yet been a day, and while obtaining some food was important, she knew the real hunger had yet to begin.
Elody walked to the stream, and found a patch of earth near where she saw the fish. It was bare and flat, promising a good perch to stand upon as she balanced over the water with her tail. In reality, the moment she moved to do so, her foot sank into the silty mud. The familiar dread of the cold ran across her foot and up her shin. The mud went surprisingly deep, reaching over halfway up to her knee, and she was stuck fast.
Shouting was far from an ideal solution. She hadn’t seen any predators yet, but that didn’t rule out their existence. On the other hand, she was stuck, and would die of hypothermia very fast if she couldn’t attract help somehow. Unable to think of a better plan, she yelled for help.
It was several minutes of prolonged shouting, voice growing hoarse with the effort. She didn’t dare slake her thirst with the ice-cold water when she was already losing body heat fast. She kept shouting for as long as she could manage. In the end, it wasn’t her voice that gave out, but her energy that had been sapped by the frigid water.
Suddenly, a rustling could be heard in the bramble. Something large was moving in the thicket. She gathered the energy to attempt to utter a few words, but only a faint rasp came out. The rustling grew closer, and the thicket parted.
What stood there was an enormous monster, like someone had taken an elk and gave it a bipedal form, giving it enormous rear haunches, and replacing its front feet with knuckle-dragging hands. It stood over two meters tall while hunching, and it turned to look at Elody. Its face was a short, wide snout, its fur such a dark brown she almost thought it black. The eyes were large and had rectangular slits for pupils, yet forwards facing in the manner of a predator. It had large, curving antlers that looked like hands, reaching out to grasp the sky above it. It made a deep, guttural sound as it spotted Elody.
Elody was stricken with fear, but all her energy was spent. She couldn't move besides shivering. She again tried to speak, but she opened her mouth to emit only a rasp.
The creature made another growl, then reached out for the helpless woman.