At last, she saw something in the dark and marvelled at the distance she had come. She rubbed her eyes to be certain, for she saw the glow of not one cluster of campfires but two, each a considerable distance from the other.

How long did I rant on?

A blast of cold wind blew across her back. Her thin dress flapped against her legs. Shivering, she wrapped her arms across her chest and studied one campfire then the other. Each beckoned to her with a dim orange glow, promising food, warmth, and companionship. One had to be the camp near Elishevera , and the other...

What had the old man said, something about nomads?

No matter how hard she tried to find some outline or silhouette of Elishevera , the bone flower blended into the sand becoming a vast stretch of dark grey, indistinguishable from the rest of the desert. Without daylight, determining which of these campfires belonged to the devotees was impossible.

Her stomach growled. As if in response, a haunting howl floated through the air. The hairs on her arms stood on end. She noted the sensitivity as she rubbed the prickle in her flesh. Somewhere out in the desert, some form of beast wandered about.

She began chewing a thumbnail as she considered which direction to go. If she waited until daylight to determine a destination, weakness might prevent her from standing altogether. Sleep would partially restore her, but she worried she might wake in the belly of a desert predator.

Swaying slightly, she realized she needed to make a choice soon. If she didn’t start walking again soon, her trembling knees would relinquish their last bit of strength.

“It felt like... there,” she said, pointing to the smudge of orange glow to her left. Her tongue rolled over fine grit stuck to her teeth, which she was certain was sand.

“But that one,” she pointed to a similar smudge of orange to her right, the collective glow of another cluster of campfires, “there’s a big shadow near it  as well . Perhaps it’s Elishevera . Or it could be a big rock.”

To the left, her intuition urged. “To the left it is,” she decided grateful to be moving again.

A sharp pain tore through her left heel every time she bore down on it. Her knees throbbed and her lower back ached. The sooner she arrived back at the camp near Elishevera , the sooner she could start begging for food and water, be nourished , then curl up to sleep and restore her flesh.

Ah, yes, to dream.

Recalling this phenomenon was peculiar to being in humanoid form, she looked forward to dreaming. The experience often evolved into a sensation of her conscious mind rising above streams of dream bubbles, where she floated in a dark, seemingly  empty place, which reminded her of the Void. Often, she had awoken to a mix of visions reflecting Elish, the dreams, and what she saw happening in her realm.

Once, she experienced a dream in which she suffered a fever. During the fever, she began another dream in which she slept and woke to discover her legs had turned into legumes. She found the imagery odd and irrelevant. Yet the dream within a dream, although curious, felt comforting.

Smiling at the memory, she felt her inner energy begin to  weaken. She dreaded the possibility of collapsing in the desert only to be gnawed upon by a creature. If the An Energy didn’t respond properly, she had to assume that her ability to heal might also be defective. The possibility propelled her toward the dark silhouette which rose behind the glow of campfires.

Hobbling closer to her destination, she strained to peer into the shadows, searching for a curl of petal or any identifiable detail belonging to Elishevera . A puff of air blew across her back. She stopped. The hairs on her neck bristled again. Had her reserve of energy been fully restored , she could simply  shift her molecules to pass through any medium—air, water, ground—and outrun the desert creature. At least, that didn’t rely on the An Energy. Neither did healing herself. Still, these abilities might affected too.

Stiffly, she peered over her shoulder into the dark, sensing some thing had silently crept by. A coyote or jackal, perhaps. She strained to see into a pocket of nearby shadows, but they remained impenetrable and still.

Hobbling , her pace slowed with every step. She focused on the looming camp, where the dark silhouette against the sky grew taller and taller, appearing nothing at all like Elishevera .