Desert

The blood is slick and red on her hooves. When she takes a step, it gleams in the mid-morning sun as though the gods have dipped her feet in liquid rubies.

When she blinks, it is gone.

Yet its stench—heavy and coppery—lingers in her nostrils, fanning the fire in her heart as she presses onwards, into the Desert.

Evren had arrived the evening prior, spat onto the shores of Salem by a fierce squall that had nearly swallowed her whole. Little of the swim—as well as the hours leading up to and following it—are clear in her memory. When she had woken at the first light of dawn with the firm, cool pressure of sandstone at her back, it had taken several attempts—as well as a savage coughing fit—for her to find her feet. Then she had stared with heavy eyelids at her surroundings, her mind searching for something that would remind her where she was and why she was here.

Koray, she had thought, and just as quickly dismissed. Her brother, after all, was long dead.

Even still, a creeping feeling had followed her as she set out into the cool gloom of daybreak, as though he watched her from the shadows of some crevice. Evren had never believed in ghosts, but she would not have put it past her brother to find some way to haunt their childhood home. She had wondered, fleetingly, what he would have thought, seeing her now: a thin and shabby old mare, beaten down and weathered into an angular carapace by the passage of time, her rule over the Desert little but a distant memory.

No matter. She was alive, and he was not. That was victory enough for her.

Now, several hours later, the muted grey-violet of the sky has brightened to cerulean. Already Evren's coat has darkened with sweat, though she has kept her pace to a leisurely walk, and the distant red mountains of the Badlands shimmer and dance like a hallucination. The sandy earth beneath her hooves, which had been damp from the storm when she had arrived yesterday, is already dry and hard-packed, with deep cracks zig-zagging in every direction. Furthermore, when Evren lifts her head to test the air for any trace of water, there is not even a breath of wind, which is of little comfort to her achingly parched throat.

She presses on, copper eyes scouring every rock, tree, and shrub for a familiar feature. It's largely a futile task, of course: the Desert is ever-changing, the wind and sand reshaping the landscape in a constant dance, one which they have had nearly twenty years to practice, while Evren has had nearly twenty years to forget.

She is trembling and blowing hard when she reaches the crest of a hill, shouldering past the scratchy foliage of cacti and low shrubs. Squinting in the glare of the late-morning sun, she pauses to catch her breath, and then she sees him: a pale silhouette in the distance, standing and watching her with a sardonic smile.

Then the earth tilts, and Evren hears the crash of her own body as it collapses into the shrubbery and tumbles downhill.

When the dust settles, she is lying unmoving among the cacti.