>>6118510>>6118510Alright, long way around it is. Luckily, walking an extra few kilometers at night in unknown territory and the rustling of every little bit of grass around hiding potential assailants is otherwise known as "Monday", and to do so after having spent all day engaged in an intense hostage situation, escape and critical Lungrot exposure episode is known as "Monday, but Overtime". It's probably good to go for a walk after Edward hit you with enough Lungrot to kill thirty people twice over, right? Clear the lungs. Give the muscles a good work out. You've already ranged so far today, what's a few more hours of trekking in a vaguely possible direction chasing fleeting shadows and hopes and thoughts and trying to remember how it feels to feel awake and not this tired, worn to the bone, gassed out, eight times over hammered horror that your body insists it is now. Climb another cliff. Up another dune. The landscape boils away into a kaleidscope of rainbow colours and your wonderful Scraghound sprouts a thousand legs and eats one of the moons and you blink and snap awake again. Micro-sleep. That'll happen once you're past a sufficient level of bone-deep fatigue.
Walking an extra few kilometers in the dark in new kit chasing unknown leads has not, alas, for the moment, measurable helped Zivka recover from the enormous amount of gas they were exposed to earlier. When the doctors ordered "bedrest, and nothing but" and said "you were thirty more breaths of that stuff away from dying" and "please don't do anything strenous, you were locked inside a warm building during the midday heat for hours with little water", what they REALLY meant was: sure, march off into the night, a spot of bracing stubbornness is good for the soul.
your blisters on your blisters have grown blister blisters. your feet are the machine that turns kilometers into pain.
( But the hound is bounding along, joyously delighted to be out roving, and the free fleet bird lands on bush and passing shrubbery and little rock and radiates a kind of contentment that almost lifts the spirit )
The stars above are myriad and you wish you could sleep. That's what humans do at night, you know. Sleep. They don't go marching off chasing down kidnappers who could be any-Icon-where. Especially not after they spent all day being variously gassed, attacked, locked in a room, threatened with guns, beat over the head, shot at or mildly dehydrated.
But perphaps the soft twinging in your ligaments is simply pain leaving the body. There sure is a lot of it.
And then Zivka rounds a little dip in the landscape, keeping low, and there's a campfire up ahead, a tent, a small score of people bustling about. And the clanking of armor and the grinding of preparations for ... combat?
