1. Lina
Lina
O nly a desperate soul would dare venture into the desert of Morteres expecting anything beyond death. Yet, we stand on the edge of the black sands, eagerly watching their shifting tides as if they hold our last remaining hope.
“It’s our only chance,” the old woman whispers, her wrinkled fingers gripping mine tightly. Her voice loses its calm. “Look around you!” she hisses.
One short glance over my shoulder is enough to prove her point. White, half-rotten trees pepper the pathway. The air is thick with warmth, but the sun is hidden behind a gray haze. There are no signs of animals. Only unnatural silence.
I swallow, feeling her pain and rage and knowing she is very likely right. There is little left on this side of the continent.
A gentle brush of skin against my other hand alerts me to my most important companion. Astella’s eyes are soft as she shakes her head.
She will not cross the desert.
She’s not old enough to have given up all other hope.
The woman barely seems to notice Astella. She’s a girl with a tiny frame, a matted brown braid, and eyes so dark they reflect the sands beyond. Anyone could look at us and know we are not related, but she is my sister—blood be damned.
“We are not ready to make that journey,” I tell the old woman. My voice doesn’t carry weight, like my mother’s had. Its softness has often led others to believe I need their protection, or even their control.
But softness or not, I am a fighter, especially when it comes to protecting my loved ones. I will not yield, even to well-meaning pressures.
A grimace flashes across the woman’s face, but quickly morphs into despair, her lips trembling. “But we must.”
“Perhaps,” I say. “But not yet.”
I gently pull my hand from the woman’s. We’ve only just met, she and I. Lorraine and her family escaped the city of Ruthend as it fell to rebels last week and stumbled upon our hideout in an abandoned town yesterday morning.
Astella and I have been traveling together for nearly a year. A terrible year of hunger and grief and fear, where she was my only comfort.
She’s held me while I cried. Gently wrapped my wounds. Collected weeds I’d have never known were edible, let alone medicinal. She told me stories when I needed a distraction. She is my final anchor to this world.
“This is no life for a young girl, Lina.” Lorraine points to the shadowed lands looming before us, her eyes filled with a mix of sorrow and determination. “Beyond that is true freedom. Don’t let fear hold you back from trying to find a new life.”
She may be right—if we could survive the journey. But where she sees hope, I see desperation.
“There is also hope in the south.”
“For how long?” she whispers, not bothering to meet my eye any longer. She turns to peer out into the desert. It is misleadingly calm.
Only lumps of sand for as far as the eye can see, but some of those dunes are mountainous. By looks alone it seems an easy summit, but that first major dune is actually a several-hour trek that would use all of our energy.
Then, it gets worse.
I take a long deep breath and turn to watch Lorraine’s husband and son work to repair their wagon.
Lorraine and her family have spent their lives in a city.
They’ve been rich enough to afford a horse-drawn wagon, and that tells me more than enough about their life before they fled.
If the wagon is not repairable, they’ll have lost their best means of transportation.
Is that when they intend to flee into the desert?
Suffocation in the acidic black sands is not a particularly pleasant way to die, but I do admit it would still be better than being shackled to a pyre and tormented for the joy of a sadistic cult.
And the longer we stand here, the more likely that fate becomes.
“The desert will swallow us whole,” Astella’s small voice says. “And the wagon will ride. For now.”
Lorraine’s eyes narrow with an expression that makes me uncomfortable.
Astella knows things others don’t. She sees more than the rest of us.
She’s not exactly psychic, but anyone would be a fool to ignore her warnings. These new companions don’t know of Astella’s abilities, and I don’t intend to share.
Not everyone takes kindly to a strange child with magic beyond their understanding.
I pray that I will not have to protect her from these seemingly kind souls, but the knife in my belt feels extra heavy just now.
“You’re fools,” her husband mutters, breaking the silence. We turn to find he and his son wiping their hands of the grease, raising from the ground where he had tinkered with the wagon.
I watch carefully as he replaces his tool chest on the back of the cart, wringing my fingers together.
He huffs. “The axel is cracked. We were able to reenforce it, but… it may not hold.”
The man’s son glares at me as he climbs aboard the wagon. “We can continue on, but I don’t know for how long.”
“We ride until the cart breaks,” the old woman says with a sharp nod. She sniffs and grips her skirt to climb aboard.
I release a relieved breath.
I look to Astella one last time for confirmation. She looks over her shoulder to the forest of half-dead trees. There are three ravens watching us from the top of the lifeless limbs.
Her smile is sad, as usual. She grabs my hand, and we enter the carriage together.
For the last few weeks, Astella and I have been camped out in an old, abandoned village, surviving on the crumbs left behind and a small pile of dried meat. It wasn’t a good life, by any means, but if you have breath, you have hope.
And Astella and I have held dearly on to hope.
We restart our slow rumble down the dirt road. Troy and his son, Thomas, sit up front, steering the cart close to the desert, but it isn’t long until the path verges toward the tree line. Lorraine sighs, staring wistfully at the dark dunes.
“We missed the last boat,” she says absently.
I don’t understand what she means, at first. The pause stretches so long I begin to wonder if it was more to herself than to me, until she finally continues.
“In Ruthend. There were boats taking refugees to the southern cities. We waited, hoping things could still turn around. We thought there would be another. Another boat. Another chance to flee before things went bad. There wasn’t.”
I meet Astella’s eyes for a long moment. A silent moment where we share our sorrow for this woman’s loss. For the whole city.
Before the cart broke, they’d told us about the riots in Ruthend. Burning of supply ships and fights in the streets. Things have been tense for years, while hunger grew. I had always thought it was the towns on the edge of the desert that struggled the most. Towns like mine.
Now, it seems, even the cities are falling apart.
We let the silence stretch on for miles as we bump over the uneven dirt road.
“Where will you go?” she eventually asks us. “What is your plan?”
When we saw the horse and carriage rolling toward our village yesterday, I’d thought I was seeing a mirage. It was a blessing to find Lorraine. And finding us must have felt like a curse to them.
They were kind enough to offer us a ride farther south, but we hadn’t elaborated on our specific plans.
I pause a moment to consider before answering her question.
“Braissid,” I answer, naming the most southern city on our continent. “We have family there.”
It’s a lie. I have no family left at all.
Astella has extended family hidden in the mountains between here and Braissid. That is our actual destination.
“Do you two think you’ll be able to cross the mountains alone?”
Is it any worse than the desert? I think. But she does have a point.
The trek to the free cities south of the Gorian Mountains is far and difficult, even in the best of times. With limited food, the predators of the wilds, and no experienced guides for hire, it’s nearly impossible.
Astella believes it is our only chance of survival. I haven’t quite worked out if it is her sight that gives her this insistence or delusional hope like Lorraine and Troy’s delusions about the desert.
“We intend to try.”
Lorraine doesn’t press us further about our plans or the hypocrisy of refusing the desert in favor of the equally treacherous mountains.
A crow caws in the distance, barely loud enough to be heard over the rumble of the wheels.
Astella sucks in a small breath. Her hand flies to mine and squeezes tightly.
My heart races, even though I don’t know the source of her fear.
Only a moment later, several ravens take flight all at once. There were more than I’d seen.
“Seven,” Astella whispers. “Wait…”
I frown. It’s not often she second guesses herself. Her gaze shifts down between her feet for a long moment.
“They’re too close. We need to stop.”
I pull in a long breath, looking behind us for evidence of what she’s seen, even knowing I won’t find any. She knows what she shouldn’t. And I know to trust her.
“Stop!” Astella says, voice full and deep. She does not assert herself very often. That’s how I know this is serious.
Lorraine, Troy, and Thomas all turn to stare at her. I shift uncomfortably.
“Please, just stop the cart,” I say calmly, pulling the attention back to myself.
Troy obeys after another beat of resistance. The horse whinnies and huffs as we roll to a stop.
“Why?” Lorraine asks. She looks around, her wrinkled eyes alarmed at first, but her expression quickly turns dubious. “What is it?”
I don’t need to know why. I believe Astella.
“They’re going to hear,” she whispers, her eyes locked onto a spot on the ground by the wagon, her face slack like she’s somewhere else entirely. “I don’t know how I missed it.”
My stomach sinks.
Lorraine clenches her jaw and places her hand on her son’s forearm. He watches her closely. After another beat, she turns back to us. “Why?” she asks firmly. “Why did you tell us to stop?”
I swallow.
“They’re not going to listen, but they’re coming,” Astella whispers.
“Who?” Troy asks.
The fear in Astella’s eyes tells me more than I need to know. “The Drak’yn.”
Fear trickles down into my veins like ice. My vison blurs, mind spinning but quiet at the same time. Lost, because if I were to have clarity now, it would mean full panic.
The death cult’s name is sharp on my tongue and sends terror down my spine. So, I’ve come to simply call the horrible death cult, driven by a mindless religion of hate, what they make us feel: Dread.
They are not the cause of our country’s demise. They didn’t cause the droughts or the famine or the rising magic of the Morteres, but they’ve certainly taken advantage of our destruction.
They are a cult, worshiping both death and the terrifying lizard creatures they ride.
They round up survivors of our crumbling society and then use them in their extreme rituals.
I shiver at the horrid stories I’ve heard of their feasting on human flesh or feeding people to the massive lizard beasts they ride.
Lorraine and Troy release a breath as one.
“There is a reason we didn’t go to the Drak’yn den when we fled…” Lorraine says calmly, but her expression is one of puzzlement. “But we’d hardly run from them.”
“You should,” Astella says, this time finding her voice. “They’ve mutilated the land, magic, and people alike. You won’t survive if they take you.”
Lorraine grimaces, clearly offended by her words.
Not everyone in our world believes in the darkest tales about the cult. Some consider them saviors. Others, just a strange religion that should be ignored.
There’s a long pause, as our differing opinions linger in the air.
“We need to stop riding for just a little while,” I say firmer. “We can begin again once they’re gone.”
Lorraine glares at Astella, again with a look that provokes my protective instincts. It’s the look of hate.
“We only have an hour or two of daylight. We’ve lost enough time as it is.” She eyes Troy.
“Enough,” he grumbles. “Enough listening to a strange child.”
Lorriane nods sharply. Her lip curls as she says, “We will not bow to witchcraft.”
Troy whips the reigns and encourages the horse to continue our bumpy ride.
Astella mumbles under her breath as the carriage rattles, “You will not bow to witchcraft, but you will bow to death.”