Барб Хенди - First and Last Sorcerer

Chap wrinkled a jowl and waited.

Brot’an crouched in the opening. “Is she well?”

Ghassan shook his head. “I do not know.”

Magiere croaked something and tried to sit up. Before Leesil could, Chap pinned her shoulder with a paw. Then Leesil held her head and carefully gave her a sip of water from a small cup made of carved horn.

“The orb,” she whispered. “Where ... where is it?”

“It’s here,” Leesil said. “Don’t worry.”

He said nothing more and made her drink again. The instant he withdrew the cup, Magiere began to sob, shudder, and thrash weakly.

“I saw her burn!” she whimpered. “I didn’t know ... but she was there! I tried to stop it ... but I ... didn’t ...”

Alarmed, Leesil grabbed Magiere’s face and tried to hold her still as he looked to Chap.

They had both seen her enraged, wild, out of control. Chap had never seen her like this.

“Hush, that’s enough,” Leesil murmured to her. “Everything is all right.”

Chap did not believe so.

Leesil again grabbed the small cup and put it to Magiere’s mouth. She drained it and then lay in incoherent fits, whispering words too garbled to understand. Even the flickers of rising memories that Chap caught in Magiere’s mind were scattered and broken and told him nothing of use. After a little while, Ghassan brought dried figs and brittle flatbread. She ate as if starving. Though this was another good sign, Chap watched her with growing rather than diminishing concern.

Brot’an remained in the tent’s opening as Leesil and Ghassan continued to care for Magiere. When it grew dark outside, Ghassan set the cold-lamp crystal inside a real lamp to amplify it. Partway into the night, Magiere rolled her head and looked up at Chap. She seemed calm and more aware.

“You found the orb,” Brot’an said.

Magiere’s eyes shifted toward him, but she only stared.

Chap wanted to take Brot’an’s face off for bringing that up again.

“Was there a guardian?” he asked.

Chap snarled, bearing his teeth, and did not stop until Leesil nudged him. Magiere rolled her head away, and Leesil twisted where he sat to face the shadow-gripper.

“Get out!”

“Different,” Magiere whispered. “Different ... from anything ... before.”

Chap swung back around as Leesil looked at her. “Not now. It can wait.”

Magiere shook her head. “You have to know. I have to tell you.”

That was unlike the Magiere that Chap knew. She never needed—wanted—to talk about anything. He did not try to reach for what rose in her mind for fear it might shake her even more. Magiere kept her eyes only on Leesil as she began to speak ...

The first night’s trek wasn’t difficult. The sky was clear, and the stars and full moon offered some light. Magiere had heard that deserts were hot during the day and cold at night. That wasn’t exactly what she found. She’d grown up in the dank, wet cold of Droevinka on the eastern continent. The temperature dropped but still felt warm to her.

Even after the sea voyage to this land, and her time here, the arid air of the Suman region was still so ... foreign.

All through that first night, she gripped the tracking device, feeling its pull. It led her farther and farther northeast.

From Ghassan’s best guess, she had perhaps three days’ travel to reach the crater that had once been a salt lake. When she’d complained about being weighed down with two full waterskins, he’d told her, “You will not have that weight when coming back.”

Before she knew it, dawn arrived.

As the sun crested, it was not yet unbearably hot, so she continued for as long as possible, and the first hint of something glittering in the cracked ground caught her eye.

Magiere stopped and looked down at countless crystalline shards around her boots. Each one reflected the rising sun like tiny precious gems. She’d hoped she wouldn’t see them so soon, for they marked the fringe of the worst to come.

The light from above and below began to burn her eyes as she went on. Tears started to run down from her seared eyes, wasting precious water. Still, she followed the pull of Wynn’s device. By midmorning, the heat on her pale skin grew unbearable, and then the pain in her eyes worsened as the world brightened, became white.

Suffering broke her will, and she felt the burning in her stomach rise into her dry throat as her teeth began to elongate. Her dhampir half came to the defense of her body, and clear thought grew more difficult with every step. Even the device strapped to her left hand began to make her palm sting.

She had to stop and wait out the sun before she lost all control.

Magiere dropped, pulled off her cloak, and used the walking staff to hook the cloak’s hood so that the back of it faced the sun. She weighted its hem with whatever chips she could scrape off the ground with the Chein’âs dagger, and then curled up in the tiny shelter, holding the staff upright by locking its base in her folded knees.

The water she sipped from one skin was nearly hot enough to make tea. The figs inside her small pack had almost baked together, and the flatbread crumbled apart in dried bits.

She and Leesil had often longed for privacy in their travels. But now she was so alone without him. No Leesil complaining about, well, everything; no Chap digging through the packs looking for any leftover jerked beef.

Nothing but silence ... And the heat grew.

She stopped thinking of anything as the sun rose overhead and the cloak shelter couldn’t shadow her boots anymore.

Again, the burning began rising from her gut into her throat, and that was the last thing she remembered.

Awareness came back slowly. When she cracked open her eyes, the cloak tent had fallen to cover her body, and she pushed the fabric off her head to find the sky darkened by night.

Everything rushed back to Magiere.

She cursed and grew frantic wondering how much time she’d lost lying there. Her eyes and teeth felt normal, and her head was beginning to clear. She lifted a waterskin. Though still warm—hot—the water gave her some relief, but when she stopped gulping, the first skin felt so much lighter.

She was going through water too quickly. The first skin had to last until she found the orb. Even then, the second would have to be stretched out on the return, when she’d be in even more need as she would be dragging something heavy.

She picked up the cloak and, this time, kept it thrown over her shoulder. Then she took up the staff.

Magiere closed her left hand on the device and prepared to regain her direction toward the orb. She did not need to reactivate it, as it had never lost contact with her skin. While Ghassan had taught her how to activate it, and she’d tried speaking the Sumanese phrase, it hadn’t worked. On impulse, she tried again in Numanese and failed, and then again in Belaskian, her own native tongue, or one of them.

“By your bond, as anchor to the anchors of creation, show me the way!”

The device came to life, but that wasn’t enough for Magiere. She worried that if she succumbed to her dhampir half, saying those words—let alone remembering them—might not be possible. And she knew she would succumb, eventually, just to survive. That was why she’d asked for the device to be tied to her hand.

Now she simply lifted her arm, swinging it until the device stopped twisting, and she moved on. The night was not as quiet as the last, with the crunch of her footfalls numbing her ears and mind.

At dawn, the heat began building at the first spark of light on the horizon. By midday, her dhampir half had risen so fully that it took her a long time to erect the cloak tent.

As she curled up in that tiny shelter, breathing became so difficult that even her inner nature couldn’t keep her from passing out again.