After the long cold night, Sylas was once again the first to wake up, the sun slowly warming him up. His position was much less precarious than last time, allowing him to extricate himself from the pile much easier. He wanted to lay back down and let his muscles continue resting, but he couldn’t let himself. The temperature was wonderful at the moment and he had to take advantage of it. His muscles screamed at him as he moved, and he wasn’t sure he could go through the entire day carrying Lesin again. They had to take more breaks and he knew that getting started early would help them keep up pace.
He started by waking Ruusaan, and the look she gave him made her resentment clear despite her survival instinct overtaking it. With Ruusaan''s help, they then attempted to rouse Helianna. After a few tries, she finally stirred. With Ruusaan''s help, they then attempted to rouse Helianna. After a few tries, she finally stirred. Though still weak and requiring assistance from Ruusaan, Helianna was thankfully fully conscious this morning. Sylas couldn''t fathom how she''d avoided infection or worse, but he wasn''t about to question their luck.
Using the sun as a guide, they headed south, the occasional stonewood tree serving as the only relief for their thirst. As they sweat profusely from the intense heat, it felt like a constant battle for water, taking a step back for every two steps they made up. Fortunately, the stonefruits provided a minimal amount of sustenance as well, but it was far from enough and they found themselves in another precarious situation as hunger began to raise its voice alongside their thirst. They started to pay more attention, looking for tracks of any animals they could discover, although Ruusaan was certain they wouldn’t find any. Days passed as they traveled further south, Helianna slowly recovering. Lesin did not, resulting in Sylas taking on the duties of caring for him which were getting more intensive and uncomfortable the longer he stayed unconscious. He often babbled in his unconscious state as well, which was grating on Sylas’ psyche, almost making him feel as if he were losing his mind as well.
It was early in the morning one day when they stumbled over a dune, and the sight before them made Sylas and Helianna stop in shock. Unprepared, the weight of Lesin tipped Sylas over and he fell to his knees. Unable to remain upright thanks to his momentum on an unforgiving and soft slope, he fell forward. He braced himself, his hands leaving Lesin, who hit the sand and started rolling down the dune.
“Fuck!” Sylas exclaimed, scrambling to his feet, his eyes fixed on Lesin’s descending form. With the soft sand providing little resistance, their momentum quickly carried him down the dune. Sylas finally managed to halt their slide just a few feet from the bottom, panting. He slowly lifted his head, utter disbelief clear on his features. Behind him, Ruusaan strolled forward, a smirk playing on her lips, while Helianna''s expression mirrored Sylas''s stunned disbelief.
“Welcome to the forested desert,” Ruusaan announced, a smirk gracing her lips as she brushed past a stunned Sylas.
In front of them was the last thing Sylas ever expected to see. The dunes had largely flattened out, turning instead into small rolling hills, although he couldn’t actually see the sand. Covering everything for as far as he could see were plants thick enough that he couldn’t see the ground despite never even rising a foot over the sand. There were no raff or tall plants, purely this layer of yellowy green. The leaves were large, each one slightly larger than his hand and layered on top of each other. But aside from the large leaves covering everything and swaying in the breeze, there was nothing to see.There was a quiet rasping sound in the air as the plants brushed against each other, but very little animal life could be heard.
“But…. desert…” Sylas said eloquently.
“Ruusaan. What is this?” Helianna asked and Ruusaan’s smirk faltered for a moment. She still couldn’t get over Helianna’s clear heartlessness, but didn’t let herself act on it beyond minor jokes and pranks.
“Pretty sure I already told you, it’s the forested desert. Got some sand in your ears or something?”
Helianna gave a weak glare at Ruusaan, whose smirk grew a little in response.
“This stuff is called desert kuz. It needs almost no water, still manages to grow like weeds, and provides very little nutrition to anything, spending almost all its own nutrition on constantly growing.”
“So it’s useless?” Sylas asked.
“Not quite. The plant itself may not be helpful, but the animals that it hosts will help us with food.”
“What about water?” Helianna asked.
“That, they won’t help with. We’re going to need to keep finding stonewood trees.”
“So we need to skirt around the… forested desert?”
“Yeah.”
“Do you know how to hunt in the forested desert?”
“In theory.” Helianna turned to Ruusaan, a hand on her hip. She winced a little as she started to move her other arm, but stopped due to the pain, her shoulder far from healed.
“Alright, Ruusaan. This is just too weird. How do you know all of this? It’s almost like you expected to get stranded. Knowing how to survive when stranded on a raft makes sense, but like this? This is just too strange. And another thing, the ships that accept female crew are almost nonexistent. And the first day, you seemed so obsessed with the others on your crew that you put yourself at greater risk. And yet by now, you seem completely fine and unworried. What is going on with you and who are you, really?”
Ruusaan sighed heavily before she responded. “Well, you seem to be doing better. Our crew wasn’t exactly, well, normal.”
“How so?”
“Our captain was more than just a captain to us, and he wanted to protect us. He taught us how to defend ourselves and survive anywhere. A whole lot of our earnings went into buying books that gave information on different places we could be stranded and survive. He wanted us prepared for anything.”
“Explains why it sounds like you’re giving us quotes from a textbook or something. If he was so concerned about your safety, why didn’t you all change professions? With a cohesive team, I’m sure there’s many jobs that you could do.”
“He found us on the ocean. He saved us from other crews who weren’t so nice. He helped all of us and it was the ship that allowed that. We weren’t going to change that.”
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“But you worked for The Academy?”
“Sometimes. We worked for them when they needed us, but that wasn’t all the time.”
“Right…” Helianna said, cynicism clear in her voice. “What did you know about this mission?”
“Officially, we didn’t know much and were simply helping them hunt down a criminal. But this team was really bad at realizing how little privacy exists on a ship. So I know they were helping the ithrax hunt down a high-level recruiter for a terrorist organization.”
“A terrorist organization? That’s what they called it?”
“Yeah. Why? What do you claim it is?”
“Doesn’t matter,” Helianna responded after a few moments. “Was all your crew… rescued from other crews?”
Ruusaan’s voice became defensive. “We were effective. The way we joined doesn’t change that.”
“I said nothing about your effectiveness. Why did you work for The Academy?”
“Why not?!” Ruusaan burst out. “Who wouldn’t dream of working for The Academy. And they gave us our ship, even! Top of the line!”
“And yet it exploded.”
“That was… that was…”
“They hired you guys separately didn’t they? They provide you with the ship on the condition that you work for them when they ask.”
Ruusaan didn’t respond.
“They were using you as guinea pigs. They needed people to use their experimental ship and probably took advantage of your trust so that it would be on your people if something went wrong. And something did, so it exploded.”
“You have no idea what you’re talking about! Our crew is top of the line! They didn’t take advantage of us, they wanted us and our captain demanded a brand new ship in recompense. They wanted our skill and regular crews can’t do what we do. We are a family and we can hunt like no other.”
“Hunt?” Sylas interjected. Ruusaan took several deep breaths to calm herself before she spoke, but anger still bled into her voice.
“Is this damn interrogation necessary? We’re barely fucking surviving as is, do we need to deal with other shit as well?”
Helianna’s concerns were far from assuaged and Ruusaan’s irritation with Helianna was faring no better, but they both tabled it. Despite having been able to find stonewood trees consistently enough to be able to function, they were still dehydrated, exhausted, and burnt. Sylas made the effort to pick up Lesin, starting to feel like his efforts were in vain for the poor man, but still carried him as they moved on. They skirted around the forested desert for the rest of the day, going back out into the dunes for stonefruit as the sun began to set. They only found a single tree with two fruits, which Helianna and Ruusaan took.
As they were laying down for the night, it was Ruusaan who suddenly shot to her feet, noticing something in the distance. Sylas and Helianna were a bit slower to get up, but they both could recognize what she had seen. In the distance, a bit of light was emanating from behind a dune. But this wasn’t from the west, where the sun had set. This was south, and they all recognized what the source of the light must be.
“More survivors,” Helianna said warily.
“Yeah, let’s go!” Ruusaan responded excitedly. She started to run forward, but Helianna called out.
“Wait!”
“What now?” Ruusaan asked exasperatedly.
“We don’t know who they are. They could be people from our crew, who could be antagonist towards you just as likely as they are to be antagonistic towards us. We need to be cautious.”
“Unless everyone on board was running, it’s just you that could have an issue with me. Why would everyone else be antagonistic?”
“Because you guys chased down our ship and then sank it,” Helianna stated bluntly.
“We didn’t do that.”
“It looks like it from their perspective.”
“Alright. Alright. We’ll check it out first.”
Still impatient, Ruusaan fidgeted as Sylas picked up Lesin, not wanting to leave him behind. It took all her effort not to run ahead of them, eager to hopefully find some of her crew. It took a surprisingly long amount of time to reach, none of them having realized how far away the backlit dune was in the dark. When they reached it, they slowed down, doing their best not to disturb the sand too much. While the movement of the sand didn’t make much sound, Helianna and Sylas wanted to be extra careful. As a result, Sylas resigned himself to leaving Lesin at the base of the dune. He could certainly carry Lesin up the dune, but they had already learned that it was very difficult to climb up dunes with the added weight and he didn’t want to make noise from the exertion by accident.
The three of them slowly snuck up the dune and poked their heads over. They had heard arguing as they got close, but now it was clear what the issue was. They were arguing over the fire, which was much smaller than the three of them expected. Apparently, finding fuel was a problem, the stonewood trees burning quickly and the kuz even moreso. The two main arguers were ithrax, the fire and spatial mage that they fought earlier. The group was larger however, and she could vaguely hear a couple others try to make suggestions, but were promptly growled at by the mages.
“I take it this is a problem for you two?” Ruusaan whispered, a complex swirl of emotions twisting through her words. Both of them nodded in response. She opened her mouth to ask another question, but Helianna beat her to it.
“Sylas, you still can’t use your magic, can you?”
“Nope, still fucking useless here,” he responded bitterly.
“Fighting’s not an option here then.”
“Why not?” Sylas questioned. “And why can’t you use your weird magic?”
“This is the perfect environment for the spatial mage. I could deal with the fire mage, but the spatial mage could easily get around me and he’d then have a significant advantage over you. Besides, I’m injured. Between my back still healing and my shoulder, which I can barely still use, I’m far from peak fighting condition.”
“I… you… damnit.”
“And in terms of my magic, I have no idea what to do with it.”
“We know it can move on its own. Maybe we can at least scout with it. Get a better idea of their capabilities?” Helianna paused, thinking over the suggestion.
“We still don’t have anything that we can put it into.”
Sylas looked around. “Maybe one of those birds?”
He gestured towards a bird that wasn’t far from them. They had started to notice the birds once they got close to the forested desert, but they only ever showed up at night. Where they went in the day, none of them knew, not even Ruusaan and all attempts to catch one so far had resulted in failure.
“What makes you think I’ll be able to put it in a living thing? Besides, how would we even catch one?
Sylas opened his mouth to respond, but was interrupted by Ruusaan.
“Who says we have to fight?” Both of them looked at her.
“While I do support The Academy, I won’t give you guys up. You two can sneak around and keep going south. I’ll stick with them.”
“You want to go back to your crew.” Helianna said, which Ruusaan nodded in response to.
“I’m not sure that’s a-” Helianna started, but was interrupted by a sound behind them. All three whipped around as they heard it. Lesin’s quiet ramblings were becoming loud. This had happened a few times in the past couple days, and had sometimes turned into yelling, the realization of which immediately brought Sylas and Helianna into a scramble. They ran down the dune as fast as they could, trying to get to Lesin. Sylas got there first, immediately trying to quiet the man.
He wouldn’t quiet down however, so he put a hand over Lesin’s mouth, trying to muffle the sound. It barely worked, and Lesin suddenly bit him, making him recoil. He cursed quietly right as Helianna arrived. He didn’t have time to react as Helianna reached down and snapped Lesin’s neck, instantly silencing both Sylas and the now dying man.
“What the fuck, Helianna?” Sylas whispered in shock. But before she could respond, they heard yelling behind them. They were too slow.