Nothing about this situation was very well thought out. None of it.

It was maybe a day since I stormed away from that freaky chick with the kind-of cool lighting mark down her leg, and I was still resolutely making my way southward for some reason. Well, okay, I knew it was a day—actually it was about 21 hours, 46 minutes, and 32 seconds since that stupid side-show. What the hell kind of useless information was that? Whatever; I guess I had been heading south anyway before I was sidetracked by that monster-lizard-zilla...but, thinking back on it, even then I didn’t know where I was going. Now, battered and sore with a crisply scabbed burn on my chest and stomach, I was still heading to who-knew-where, and doing it proudly and a definite strut to my gait.

But now there wasn’t so much of a strut.

My head was drooping. My tongue was thick and clumsy and craving water. My legs felt like lead, my torso was throbbing, and my scabbed up burn was starting to ooze things and sting in a worrying way. Besides all that cute stuff, it was the very first time I actually felt tired. No, I mean tired, like every drop of shock and energy in my body had been wrung out and melted in the gritty sand underneath my frogs. Also, goddamn this sand was uncomfortable as hell, all itchy and scratchy and getting in awkward places. It only reinforced the message that I hadn’t had anything to drink since….oh jeez. Since before the monster. I had run into that battle with very little to eat and drink, with almost all my energy drained from running all those days before, and now as I trudged on through what was obviously turning into a desert, I was well and truly screwed 21 hours, 46 minutes, and 32 seconds after my first victory.

Fuck me.

The only thing keeping me moving was the light before me; this intense beacon in the darkness of the sky that kept hope alive in my breast, which was saying something, because fear was doing some pretty interesting things to me. Just like it was the first time I was actually exhausted, it seemed like the stupidity of my actions was starting to run up on me—and they were honest to god stupid, and I cringed just thinking about how close to death I could’ve come from that bastard of a creature. And how close to dying I actually was at that moment. It made my limbs shake even harder than they would’ve by themselves, and I was banking everything on this last hope of the bright light in front of me, hoping there was something there for this tired body, because otherwise I was screwed right out of my hide.

But other than all that yahoo nonsense, I wasn’t thinking much. My fear was this roiling thing and my exhaustion was horrible, but underneath all that there wasn’t much room for cognitive activity. My head was just this fuzzy balloon of absolute squat, and I was a literal zombie as I trekked across the desert—and the only think that shook me from my stupor was the notion that I had crossed a clearly marked border. It took a few seconds for me to realize what it meant—that there was something alive and breathing and marking their territory—and when the idea finally hit me, I stopped in my tracks. “Whoooops,” I said, my voice a sluggish thing, and I backed up quickly with lazily flailing limbs; I backed as far away from the border as I could before I actually lost balance and fell over like some depraved pony tweaking on strange shrooms. I was on my side, and some hidden panic somewhere between the fear and the tired told me I wasn’t getting back up any time soon; my legs didn’t feel like legs, but some sort of wiggly, jelly-like substance. “Dun matter,” I slurred, my eyes heavily lidded and still gazing at the light like it was my personal guardian angel, “Gotta sit down anyway….jus’ a mo’….Gotta….close my eyes a little…”

There was a silhouette in the light, the shadowy shape of a horse I had seen once before in my life, the light bouncing around his frame like some strange, ironic halo. I watched him approach me, even as my eyes were steadily falling, as well as my head; he was speaking, but his words went into my head instead of my ears, and some reasonable whisper in the back of my head said he wasn’t here, but that didn’t matter, because the God of Fucking Time was looking down on me, a smirk in those arrogant blue eyes I knew and hated and kind of liked at the same time, and he was saying—

--he said, “Look what the ingenious Roskuld got herself into now? What brilliance; it’s exactly the kind of way I would expect my daughter to screw herself over.”

And I looked up at him and pinned my ears and said, “Go soak your fat head, bastard,” except it was more of a slur and more of a whisper and less of a coherent statement, and I wasn’t looking at anyone because I had collapsed and I was down for the count.


[Ros has passed out outside of the Throat border! She's out cold for now so anyone's welcome to find her! Keep it to a minimum please-- only 2 or 3 others :3]