Somewhere overhead a falcon cried out and Alize flickered her eyes open. She lay on her stomach, her bare skin pressed against a sandy ground. Shunted scrubs crowded around her. Their stiff limbs whistled and rattled with the wind.
Every part of her body ached.
An aggressive stillness prowled the landscape. To Alize’s eyes, all the colors seemed painfully oversaturated. The sunlight gnawed at her vision and her skin prickled.
The few solidary trees around her, exhausted somehow, rumbled a weak warning.
Alize paid them no heed. She tried to piece together her experiences. Celillie was dead, she was sure, but at whose hand? And she had dim memories of entering towns, of fiery attacks by powerful Conjurers, of warm hands and kind smiles.
Beneath Alize, all the vegetation was charred to a crisp, as if she lay strewn on an extinguished fire. She coughed on the ashes and shut her eyes against all her confusion. Her skin felt raw and she could not remember how she had arrived in this place. Had she been kidnapped by Sargons? The thought should have sparked her outrage, but Alize felt only oppressive weariness.
Somewhere nearby sounded the distinct crunch of footsteps. The encroaching person crooned softly, the notes rising and falling without any melody.
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When the song stopped, Alize opened one eye.
A faceless figure in billowy white fabric stood before her. The shroud masked all her features, save for her eyes. Her pupils crowded with cataracts and cast forth their gaze duly and without recognition.
The trees rattled with terror.
“Come child,” the stranger spoke. The scant skin visible at the edges of the small fabric window wrinkled, but Alize did not have the impression the stranger was smiling.
She helped Alize from the ground and gently wrapped her with gauzy white cloth until Alize’s figure cast a similar shapeless shadow.
Alize hesitated. The trees had become grotesque in their fear, but she was too exhausted to untangle the meaning.
“The trees, they are upset.” Alize pressed her fingers to her temples.
The woman blinked and reached out to Alize. “Are you certain?”
The stranger gently held her fist to Alize’s heart. Alize frowned as the trees’ frantic voices utterly died from her ears. “Listen again.”
Her ears rang, but there was nothing beyond that. “It’s quiet now,” she said in muted wonder.
“Then we must go.”
“Go where?”
The woman directed Alize to face the hillside. All the way down yellowed plants bent under the weight of the gale and the impending winter. Far below, a line of faceless white-robed riders stood profiled against the sweeping steppes.
“Home,” the woman answered.
Two horses waited with empty saddles and the stranger guided Alize to them despite the prickly plants that grasped at her ankles. Once Alize sat mounted, the Deku caravan turned its back against the corpse-strewn ruins of the Eastern Temple and began trodding towards eroded mountains that obscured the ominous granite spires of the Silver City.