Run, climb, hide. Run again, climb higher, hide better. And don’t forget to breathe. Breathe. Breathe. Breathe.

  She had been pushing herself too hard again. She was going to vomit at this rate, but she had no choice. It was either run or die.

  Callia had been running in a crazed stupor for days, pursued without relent and without remorse.

  She didn’t quite know how she’d kept running. But her body was set on survival, and she wasn’t going to complain, pouring every ounce of will and strength she could muster into maintaining her pace. It kept the voices at bay.

  Ever since that day in the hamlet, she had been hearing them. Gasping, wailing, screaming in the back of her mind. Over and over, they drowned out every other thought echoing against her skull and growing louder and louder.

  The screams of those she’d sacrificed.

  She crested the peak of a dune, throwing herself forward to slide down the other side. As she descended, making the most of the brief respite from running, she grabbed the waterskin tied to the tattered belt at her waist, giving it a rattle and a squeeze. Empty. Again.

  Scrambling up the next dune, she looked skyward. The sun hadn’t reached its zenith yet, so it should still be morning. It was rising over her left shoulder, so she should be able to see the river from the peak of this dune. But her confidence in her own sense of time and direction had been lost days ago; it had all become a blurry mess. The only consistent thing was the screams.

  She hadn’t wanted to! She’d had to! She had to save her lord. Burn the innocent to get the serpent’s attention. She saw it torturing him, she had no choice but to do something, and there had been no other option to hand.

  So, she’d closed the door on numerous lives to save just one. Blocked the door and burned it down.

  She dragged herself to the top, gasping and heaving as she looked out before her…yet all she saw was sand. Mountains appeared as tiny specks in the distance, but between her and them, naught but sand and rock, mile after mile of it.

  She frowned, twisting around to look behind her. Beyond the rolling dunes there was green; trees, bushes and ferns, huddled furtively around a broad and flowing river.

  The sun hadn’t been rising, it had been setting.

  Between her and her much desired source of water however, was her pursuers.

  There had been two horsemen following her for quite some time, repeatedly losing and finding her tracks again and again, just when she began to hope that she had finally escaped them. And though she had no doubt they were not far; her eye was drawn to the large war-camp squatting around the river’s edge.

  She’d thought her pursuers had been camping out alone in the desert overnight, but perhaps they’d been returning to their master daily, and their entire force had been chasing her en-masse? She truly must have been the only survivor then, and that thing was truly desperate to keep its presence hidden.

  This had suddenly got far more complicated, but she had no choice. Only a slow death awaited her if she turned towards the mountains.

  She set off again, sliding back down the dune she had just climbed. The screams were never far behind, pounding in her head with every step.

  Run, climb, hide. Run. Climb. Hide.

  ***

  The sun had absolutely been setting, because it was dark when they found her.

  She had been skirting around the edge of the camp, perhaps a few hundred meters away at most, sliding to the base of another dune when she heard their voices. Screeching yells in their strange language echoed down from above, followed by the thump of hooves.

  Her eyes snapped up, and down they came.

  With a lantern held aloft and finger pointed, the one who had found her continued to holler and screech as he thundered down the dune towards her. His compatriot wheeled around to follow, pulling what looked like a javelin from a loop on his horse’s saddle.

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  With her heart thundering in her chest, breath coming in gulps, and mind in a spinning descent she was left with no other options other than to run, she bolted right. She could hear the trampling hooves behind her, inching closer regardless of how hard she pushed herself. Javelins rammed into the sand around her feet, splashing her with sand as they narrowly missed.

  Her limbs screamed in protest as she pushed herself on. She slipped on sand and stumbled, tumbling down the next dune and scrambling back to her feet. Run. Run. Run.

  They were getting closer and closer. She had known there was no hope of outrunning galloping horses, but she refused to simply stand there and let them take her.

  She had seen the acts committed by those in chains, and the even greater cruelty of those who lacked them. She could not let them get their hands on her, turn her into one of them.

  Up ahead, she saw light. Lights. The camp! She’d run the wrong way! Before her, she could see the swinging light of a guard lantern, but it was too late to turn away now. She would go through it. Through them all. They would be asleep; the horses couldn’t gallop through that mess of tents and fires as fast as she could run.

  Her mouth gulped in every ounce of air it could manage, her legs pumped with all the strength they could muster, and her heart pounded with desperation in her chest. Bile rose in her throat, her lungs burned with a cold fire, and her head began to pound. It wasn’t going to be enough.

  It wasn’t enough.

  The breath was stolen from her lungs, escaping as a scream as a javelin ran straight through the meat of her thigh. She scrambled, stumbled, and finally collapsed into the sand.

  Her breath came in shuddering gasps now, hands digging at the sand as her head swam and strange sounds filled the air. The thump of hooves and the riders’ alien language blended together into a messy amalgamation but there were other sounds there too. They swirled together and meant nothing to her, a heavy thump, a twang, shouting words in multiple languages criss-crossing and overlapping and then a pattering sound like rain all around her.

  She was rolled over, and could only fuzzily make out the figures looming over her. She screamed as one of them pulled the javelin from her thigh.

  The adrenaline was fading and nothing was making sense. They had her surrounded. Why hadn’t they already finished the job? She'd seen too much, eluded them too long.

  Instead, she was hefted up into the air by at least four pairs of hands. Hadn’t there only been two chasing her? Where had these come from?

  Her head lolled from side to side, as she tried to make sense of her surroundings, but she couldn’t form coherent thoughts, everything was slipping through the fingers of her mind.

  Yet, just at the moment everything descended into darkness, and consciousness was slipping away, there was light. Golden light. Perfect light.

  It chased away the darkness and filled her with a single perfect breath that brought feeling back in a wave of euphoria.

  Every muscle in her body tensed, desperate to hold onto that breath as clarity washed over her once more. Every sense returned to her one by one.

  Sight came first. She staring upside down at an amaranth-scaled hand inches from her face. The light was dancing from its fingertips into her eyes, her mouth, her nose.

  Sound flooded back next, chattering voices in the gloriously reassuring language of her own people, the flowing words and precise pronunciation music to her ears. Questions were rained down upon her by those carrying her, but one voice stood out above them, a calm, firm and matronly voice. “Breathe, my child. Breathe.”

  Feeling returned next. With that came pain and fatigue in equal measure, stealing the air from her lungs in a shuddering gasp. The aching pain in her limbs flared once more, though it was duller than she remembered it being moments before.

  Breaths came shallow and sharp then, until she could steady herself into a natural rhythm, and she allowed her body to fall limp in the arms of her saviours again.

  The hand slid back, revealing the tall and curvaceous woman who had worked such miracles upon her. She had scales of amaranth, eyes of green, and wore elegant priestly robes, carrying herself with an air of calm. Had she not been in such pain Callia would have sworn she had died and was being carried off to the afterlife by an angel.

  “Breathe,” the priestess repeated. “You are safe now. You have nothing to fear.”

  Callia nodded dumbly as they began to bear her back towards their camp.

  Nary a word was shared as they carried her into a tent, and all was silent as they laid her down upon a bed. They left as swiftly and silently as they had appeared in the desert, leaving only her and the priestess who now sat neatly beside her.

  “What is your name, my child?” the priestess asked, unspooling a length of bandage and applying a curious salve to the white cloth.

  “I’m…Callia,” she stammered, bracing herself on her elbows as she watched the priestess tear open her trouser leg. “Who are you?”

  The priestess nodded slowly. “My name is Aretuza, Miss Callia.” As she spoke, she began wrapping the salve-soaked bandages around her pierced thigh. The stabbing pain eased, simmering to a dull throb. “You wear the uniform of a soldier, yet you are out here alone, pursued by strange men. Do you have a tale to share?”

  Callia swallowed, staring at this woman for a long moment as she chose her words carefully. “I am sworn to House Zerkash. I serve…I served under an officer by the name of Rexis, as a scout. Veltari.”

  She swallowed back the next thought that came. That they were all dead.

  The priestess nodded pulling the bandage tight and forcing a sudden yelp from Callia as her wound was squeezed. “I know the man. Yet you have been separated, would you care to tell me how that happened?”

  Callia eyed the priestess carefully, frowning as she thought back on the events of recent weeks. That new clarity was still burning through her mind, keeping her awake and her senses sharp. “Well, it all really began when we arrived in the small village of Sturva…”