>>5969950Hurtling toward the ground in a barely controlled glide, the beast's taloned feet skim the top of a tall dune and cause it to violently lose control, sending you flipping together end over end in the air. You cry out in that horrid second of spinning, the beast’s cry matching your own - shrill and childlike - and then <span class="mu-i">your</span> strength fails and your tired limbs are pulled free from the grooves of the beast’s armor. Separated, you fall fast and hard to the dunes below - the last thing you see before striking the sand is a searing flash of white.
When you finally awaken, your arm pulses with a dull hot ache, inviting the red at the edge of your mind to come crawling back - the curse thrives on pain. Kicking at the hot sand, you find your sandals were torn off in the tumbling crash. It burns, but you have endured hot sand many times before, and soon you have pulled yourself from being half buried. To be devoured by the desert is a terrible fate, and it will not be yours today - you are the curse’s to claim.
Pulling yourself tight into a ball, and tugging your hood up to protect you, you begin to inspect your aching arm, touching it gingerly. Horrid pain shoots through you as you press a finger to it, trying to feel the extent of the break - and it surely is broken. A whimper escapes your lips, unable to bear it. Parched, achingly tired, and running across dunes or crawling through vents for hours, you cannot bear to any more - this is too much. Red eyes watch you from the sands, the ancestors mocking your suffering, and crimson crawls further inward.
Soon the slavers will find you, those skimmers surely must have seen your fall, and you will be captured. Perhaps you will be a wraith by then, and claim one of them as well, claiming a maddened vengeance in your mind-death. Bile rises in your throat at the thought, but that only draws the horror closer, tighter, tighter than the duct ever could have been. It constricts everything, smothering your thoughts with fear, and hate, and <span class="mu-r">red</span>.
