I was going to drown in sweat.

As if the insanely long walk hadn’t been enough, the summer sun in this region was piercing and relentless as a rain of burning arrows. Erebos and I had the short end of the stick, our dark coats soaking in the light and reaching a point of heat that I was sure would ignite dry grass if I was to drop down and roll in it if it wasn’t for all the perspiration running down my body. My fellow prince speaks my sentiments aloud and I look at him with the exasperated face of a tired and rotten little boy who is beginning to regret tagging along on this adventure, though my heart is still set on finding whatever we might find in the desert land I’d only ever heard of in tales. I try and blink the expression off my face and manage to subdue it into a frown that collects the grit of the red sand in its folds. "It’s stupidly hot," I reply, dark ears falling back on my head as I look over at my sister, "how the hell did you not turn into a puddle before you made it to the meadow?"

The place where we had found her, the Thistle Meadow, was well behind us and the last stretches of not-on-fire air along with it, and the further away we came the harder it was to believe that she had drug her weak, tiny little body all that way. The evidence of the sand in her coat had been enough to subdue my worries that she’d been lying and good enough reason for me to tag along on this adventure even without having been shown the path by momma; Aithniel would know, and if nothing else, we would find the sea and follow the shore to wherever the Dragon’s Throat was. All in all, it had seemed pretty foolproof and entirely delightful while nice and cool back home in the mountain valley.

Now, it was just stupid.

Blessedly, the land transforms not long after I began wondering if we would ever make it there, an obvious border present in the form of a land bridge reaching out through the sea towards a greater mass. There wasn’t much on the island like mass but for a really, really big tree or maybe just a bizarre rock formation (momma had said something about a shrine in the World’s Edge made of stone) and what looked like some barriers out across the distance, but just like Erebos, I am not too eager to leap into someone else’s territory, and so I stop alongside him and excitedly take in the view between glances at my companions.

"I don’t know," I say, narrowing my eyes to look further in after Erebos asks what the tall thing is out in the distance, "maybe it’s where the Sun God lives, like the Mirror back home." I frown momentarily before breaking into a deep bout of laughter. "What an ugly house!"