CW: This chapter contains depictions of blood and injuries.

In the Lorr Desert

Valla POV

Valla kept laughing to herself for longer than it was funny, exhaustion drawing her nerves tight. She had been showing off. If she were honest with herself, she was barely managing to keep the pace she had. Her body was battered, her aura was aching, and her mind was frayed. But she was also driven by a sense of urgency. They did not have the time to sit and recover as they needed to. The storm had hit the monkey’s companions too, whoever they were, and there might be some still alive.

It was odd that she and Doren had not sensed anyone near them before the storm, odd enough to make Valla very wary as she searched for signs of travelers. Only skilled mages could accomplish that kind of cloaking, and only people with nefarious or furtive purposes would bother to do so. Of course, Valla and Doren had been taking turns keeping themselves cloaked, but for that matter their purposes were certainly furtive and quite possibly also nefarious. She sensed no one as she kept searching for a while, staying within the two League radius Doren had asked for. Most likely the other travelers had been somewhere ahead of them along the Paving when the storm hit, but that did not mean they still were after the storm had done its damage. The little monkey had probably been blown part of the way towards them from his group.  

Thick red-brown mud sucked at her boots as she moved. The sun was returning, and the harsh heat of the desert afternoon was rapidly setting in, deep cracks in the drying dirt forming as the water evaporated. It would soon be dangerously hot, and already was outside the Paving limits. Dust was gathering outside the Paving runes, swirling in alternatingly dry and damp gusts of wind from the now-distant storm. Soon it would be too hot to safely travel as she was, or for anyone injured to survive without help. Time was running out. Valla searched as systematically as she could, but there was no clear pattern to follow which would save her time in searching. She could not sense anyone – if anyone was around, either they were dead or close to it, or they might be fine and hiding somewhere. She could be walking right into a trap.

Or the monkey just fell from the sky, Valla thought to herself wryly.

Finally, after almost an hour of searching, Valla saw a wagon wheel shattered against a boulder – proof that there was something to find. It was a medium-sized, unembellished wheel, like one you would see on an average caravan wagon. More confident now that they were looking for a small caravan that had been well-protected because they were carrying high-value goods, and not because they were actually imperial agents or assassins or some other sinister thing, Valla kept looking. It took another quarter hour before she saw the main body of a wagon, blown into the unprotected desert off the Paving. In her Sight, there was a faint flickering of some sort of life inside the torn canvas cover. Sprinting over, she heard a moan of pain.

“Hello?  Can you hear me?”  There was no response. Valla leaned into the wagon cover, and saw a person, bloody and with their arm at an odd angle, their legs pinned under a wooden beam. The person was about Valla’s size, with this black hair and pale skin. They seemed to be fading in and out of consciousness, groaning occasionally but unable to answer. Valla Looked at their injuries, cataloguing them. Some lacerations, a crushed arm, and a fractured leg. The most concerning were the internal injuries. It seemed as though the entire wagon had been thrown with them in it, and they had been injured in the crash back to earth. Moving them was risky, so she would need to treat them inside the wagon itself. Quickly, Valla sent a flash of red light into the sky above her location, alerting Doren of her location. She needed to help this person immediately, but there might be more, and even if there weren’t Doren would almost certainly need to help her with the healing. She ignored the persistent voice of caution which warned that this could still all be some elaborate trick. It was a remote possibility, and with someone dying in front of her, the point was moot.

“It’s alright, it’s alright. Steady now, steady.” Speaking softly and soothingly, Valla leaned over and put a hand on their shoulder, sending stabilizing aether through them to staunch the bleeding – internal and external – and start closing and healing the more superficial lacerations. Bones would need to be set and larger cuts sewn before more healing could take place, and any serious internal damage would take time and focus to avoid doing greater harm. Keeping one hand on their shoulder, Valla sent aether into her arm, weaving a simple influence to strengthen and steady it as she lifted the debris off the injured person. Once they were clear, Valla started a more detailed examination and healing, simultaneously warding off the intense heat. She was so intent she did not register Doren’s presence until he was a few paces away.

“You need to look for others,” she said without looking up. He left without a word, and she kept on with the healing.

It was a hard, bitter day. The wounded person flickered on the verge of death, and when Doren returned he only muttered “One other person,” and shook his head, sparing Valla any details. It took both of them to safely move their patient to a small fire within the Paving stones as night set in and the temperature plunged past freezing. The two of them were both still weakened from the storm but fought to keep watch and stabilize their patient. Despite their best efforts, they died in the hours just before dawn.

Valla sat back on her heels from here she had been leaning over and avoided Doren’s gaze. Exhausted, angry tears formed in her eyes, and she blinked them away. Doren sighed heavily and bowed his head before he started speaking the oaths to dead used by the Order of the Promise. It did not strike Valla as odd or out of place, despite Doren’s excommunication and her own hatred for the Order itself.  It was a call to rest for a fallen companion, an acknowledgement of their suffering and release from the world of the living. As she listened, she was startled by a small hand on her arm. The monkey had approached her as she sat there, looking remarkably unscathed and watching her with sad, curious eyes.

The burial as brief and silent, both Doren and Valla moving steadily through their aches and pains to finish the rites in the bone-deep cold of the night. Doren used his aether to Influence a boulder to be lighter, moving the large red stone to form a headstone, and then strengthened a small knife to cut through softened stone like butter, carving the date, a brief description of the storm and the caravan, and a wish for peace deep into the face of the stone. Once he was done, he released his Influence , and the stone returned to its original state, now marked. They had placed the burial site just outside the Paving, visible from the path. As she watched Doren work, Valla hoped that someone might look for signs of the caravan and find the stone as a sign of what had happened, as something to save them from the misery of not knowing.

They set down to rest after that, eating and taking turns sleeping as the day came, waiting for nightfall to start moving again. Watching Doren sleeping fitfully on her shift, Valla considered her decisions up to this point. She had rationalized her actions based on her current situation: she knew she had been wounded and likely imprisoned by an unknown enemy, she knew she was not healing and would die of her remaining injury within a few years. Her time in the Witch’s valley had been peaceful, but she could not accept inaction any longer, and had made a rash decision to leave.

But there were other things that had driven her to make that choice. The creeping, slow return of vague memories from before she met the Witch. Facts coming back to her, like the safe at Lombard, or that she had visited the capital multiple times. Memories of faces of courtiers and their smirks, a sense that she had been seen as someone or something lesser. A burning sensation of shackles at her hands and feet and neck. As time had gone on, she had recovered her opinions on certain topics first – her staunch belief that the expansion of the Empire was bad had hit her like a heavy stone when she had first heard people talking of it one evening in the tavern. The same had happened with the role of the order, the current ruler of Weiran, even topics like growing tariffs and changing seasonal patterns – she had not been developing new opinions as she learned, although of course that happened too, but sometimes she would suddenly remember a pre-existing opinion at the first mention of the topic. It was disorienting, but she had gotten used to it, and hoped at first that it was a sign her memories would soon come rushing back. But it was as though she had been the topic wiped from her memories, and only the barest fragments of her knowledge of herself had ever returned. She had wanted to leave because she had hoped she would encounter enough to remind her who she was, that maybe on seeing the city of Carram she would be struck, suddenly and completely, with her memories of her life.

Some of that had happened today. She had seen the blood and damage of the storm and the survivor and been hit with a rush of disjointed memories. Flashes of a battle in a desert, bloodstained sand in an amphitheater, a cruel laugh in a voice that she knew bone-deep was the person who had kept her in a cage. A memory of the cage itself, light flashing on clean, polished iron bars, and an injured person being carried carelessly past. They had hit all at once, and now she was left with the aftershocks, sifting through them, horrified and desperate to glean as much as she could from them.

She still couldn’t remember her name from before the Witch’s valley, or the face of her enemy, or if she had family or friends or a purpose before all this. With the little she had gained she felt the absence of the other memories anew, and she mourned them as she mourned the wounded person they had failed to save. The sun was relentless overhead, and the expanses around them were completely empty of any life in her Sight except for her, Doren, and the monkey, and she sat and struggled to process the sadness and rage.