She fell back, looking up at the night sky, and a soft whisper came to her lips.
"Sorry, Momma... I'm sorry, Pappa. I...I didn't keep my vow."
Shortly after that, the shivering began as the rapidly dropping temperature and the loss of blood conspired to rob her of the heat she held.
How long she lay there, the cold working its way deeper and deeper into her body, Elan didn't know, but eventually she drifted off and greeted the overwhelming darkness with all the joy of a starving man greeting freshly prepared food.
Sleep, if it could be called that, was fitful and filled with dreams and nightmares. She was chased by demons as they paraded the dead bodies of her parents before them, unable to turn on them because of the gut-clenching fear that rode through her, barely able to run as the land itself bucked under her feet and caused her to constantly stumble and fall.
Dawn found her unmoving against the ground, clotted and drying blood covering her wrists and ankles, eyes half open as they stared up at the lightening sky. She didn't know when she had awoken, or if she had, but the rising sun brought her briefly from the mists that fogged her mind, and back to the harsh reality.
In an hour, the sun had returned the warmth she had lost. Its rays were like a gift from the gods themselves. Shortly after that, however, the gift began to take more than it gave. She sweated under the bathing heat, her naked flesh glistening from the perspiration as the rays began to beat down on her, robbing her of more moisture as the rising sun cooked the wasteland for another day.
By midday, every inch of her exposed skin, her entire front, was red and burnt and the sweating had stopped as her body began to find that it had no more water to give for something as trivial as cooling. Fever dreams set in shortly after, and awake or asleep, Elan could no longer escape her own personal demons.
*****
She ran.
Elanthielle couldn't see where she was going, nor could she see what was chasing her, but she ran. The feeling of some unnamed evil breathing down the back of her neck wouldn't go away, raising the hairs of that soft skin and sending shivers along her spine. She looked over her shoulder but saw nothing but sand and dirt behind her, but she knew...somehow knew...that if she stopped running, the terror would catch up with her.
So she kept running, even though the ground was uneven and moved underfoot, making her stumble and fall. She skidded along the coarse dirt, ignoring the fact that she felt no pain from the impact, and climbed back to her feet in a desperate struggle as the terror built up behind her again.
It was closer.
She could feel it.
Elan couldn't shake it; she couldn't stop running either. The mere thought of it catching her was enough to send her heart racing and tie her stomach in knots.
Then she hit something in her path and went down again, her hair haloing out around her head as she struck the solid ground, and her eyes snapped open with the shock of it as her back arched in an attempt to get up.
She screamed then, not from the fear, but from the searing pain that lanced along her body from the burns she had covering her exposed flesh and from the blades that still dug deep into her wrists and ankles.
Her cry went out, echoing over the barren land, but there was no one to hear it and she just fell back to the ground and sobbed from the pain she could feel frying her skin. There was little relief in it, but the sobs were the only action she could take that didn't add to her pain, so she just lay there as the sun continued its descent to the horizon.
Her skin was on fire as reality reasserted itself, her fear dying down to a dull throb in the back of her mind, but the pain and loss coming back to the forefront.
Finally, though, all of it dulled out.
She didn't know why, just that perhaps her body had experienced more pain than it could take. Maybe the dulling was some sort of safety release, protecting her sanity. Or, perhaps, it was the loss of her sanity that dulled the fires.
Elan didn't know, nor did she care at that point.
The world wavered around her then, and she closed her eyes again, shielding them against the hot, baking sun.
When she opened them again, the searing flames of the sun were gone and she was standing alone on a windswept dune, a cool breeze wafting around her as she paused in surprise.
"Am I...dead?" she asked softly, the sound of her voice surprising her as she blinked and swallowed.
She knew that she couldn't be standing there, that somehow she wasn't really there. She was lying on the sun-baked dirt, with long daggers driven through her limbs to pin her securely into place. She wasn't standing on a peaceful dune, watching the lights in the sky as they wavered and shifted colors in a brilliant display of beauty.
Still, she didn't think she was dead either.
She wasn't sure what being dead was, but she didn't think that this was what it felt like.
"I'm asleep," she said a moment later, then knew it to be true almost as quickly as the words slipped from her mouth.
At least it didn't hurt anymore.
Her lips and throat still felt sun-baked though, and her mind...
She couldn't focus suddenly, the world shifting around her as the dune vanished and she stumbled, coming to her knees.
She opened her eyes to the most wonderful sight she had ever seen: a calm, cool lake of clear water right at her knees. She fell forward then, splashing into the water, and dipped her face down into its surface, drawing as much of it up into her mouth and throat as she could. Her blonde hair landed in it around her face, slowly sinking into its surface, but she ignored it as she kept drinking.
She drank and drank, pulling more of the cool, clear liquid into herself than she ever had in the past, but it never seemed to be enough. After each cooling draught, her lips chapped at her more than before, her throat rasping worse and worse.
Finally she gave up, falling back to sit in the water that seemed so inviting, but remained so torturously out of sight. There she just sobbed again, unable or unwilling to move as she stared down at the water below her.
"Well," a new voice spoke dryly, startling her.
Elan jumped, coming to her feet almost instantly, and spun around. "W...who are you?"
The figure was shrouded somehow, like she was looking through tears or something. Elan wiped at her eyes, trying to get them to focus, but nothing worked.
"Me?" The figure shrugged. "I'm just a traveler like yourself. Though I must say, I don't believe I've ever seen anyone waste their time in the Dreaming trying to drink the water."
Elan slumped, not feeling threatened, so her brief surge of adrenaline quickly died out. "I'm just so thirsty."
"That won't quench your thirst, child," the voice said softly. "It's not really there."
She looked down, passing her foot through the water with a satisfying swish. "It feels real."
The figure chuckled. "Everything here feels real, child. That's part of the power of the Dreaming."
The second time he said the word, it sank in, and she looked up with wide eyes. "D...Dreaming? This...this is..?"
"What?" The figure seemed puzzled, and he stepped closer. "Don't you even know where you are? What...?"
He paused then, taking a step back in surprise as blood began to run down her arms, dripping into the water below, and her face turned a blackened, burned color.
"Oh...oh my," he whispered. "Maker, child...what happened to you?"
"M...monsters," she whispered softly. "They killed me, I think."
Then she thought of her body, staked out on the ground to die, and a sudden tightening in her gut snapped out and yanked her off her feet and back to that dying frame.
Cold air hissed down her throat when she opened her eyes, staring up into the black of the night sky, and then she began to cry again.
*****
The night chill was on her by the time she stopped the wracking sobs that had overtaken her body, but it was offset by the burning heat that seemed to be pouring from her scorched flesh. There was no comfortable middle, Elan soon discovered. The heat where she had been burned by the sun's rays was scorching, and the cold from the ground on her back was chilling.