Uncharted

[Caira Ayryn]

...

After retrieving the treasure, her treasure, she glanced down at her painful fists and looked at the silver color of her blood, smearing everywhere and was sure she saw her bones. After tending to her wounds by summoning some gauze to bind her bloody fists, getting water and enjoying the eternal sustenance that was air, she took off on her hover board to the ruins to get some sleep after seeing that Merik’s camel tracks had vanished after a few feet. The chest that she wasn’t ready to open was propped up on the end of the hover board, in tow. And Caira’s sachet around her shoulder as she neared the shadowy ruins that gleamed in the moonlight. “If ONE snake touches me. I’ll blow up this whole place.” she muttered to herself, half out of fear. She had no real means to do that impossible, and by now, her words weighed with fatigue and her eyes had turned a pale silver, melting with the moonlight.

The sun’s hot gaze roused her from her slumber, and she looked around, she was still in the shade of the ruins, “How am I supposed to find my way out of the desert now?”

“Who says you want to escape?” a lizard skunked out of its hiding spot in the shadows.

“What?” Caira had never met an animal that could speak before, “Oh no, I’ve gone insane and hallucinated a friend!” she rationalized, “Oh well, it could be worse, I’d take this over an army of real scorpions any day.”

The lizard chuckled, “Oh I actually can talk, a wizard came here and cast a spell on me some ten years ago, I’ve survived well since.”

“Alright, I’ll play along,” Caira smirked to herself, her subconscious must have been a great comedian.

“Still, I wouldn’t joke about the scorpions though, horrific beasts, they are.” the lizard's tongue stuck out from its lips, almost like a dog's would, panting happily

Caira inclined her head to the strange beast, half tempted to poke it, but she could sense the vibrations it emitted, at least my subconscious is convincing. She took a swill of water from the canteen she had conjured and listened to the strange lizard.

“If you go the wrong direction, they’ll attack you, and then once you’re dead go straight for town, straight for the gate which you escape from.” the voice coaxed.

“How am I to know what direction is wrong?” Caira was slightly fearful. Alone in the desert and massacred by a fiend-like beings was not how she wanted to end her day.

“Even I don’t know my way around, and, in this form I’d die before I got across the desert.. I’ve been stuck here since the.. That is.. Unless you help me.” his voice now slithered with temptation, like a snake. Like Merik. That backstabbing, honorless scum!

Caira sighed, she didn’t even know its name, and now she was to help another being after what happened? Don’t make the same mistake twice. The words echoed in her head, same scenario too, only this one didn’t have the incentive of treasure, though perhaps the being could read her like an open book, as she valued life more than loads of wealth or honor. Even, perhaps, herself.

“I’ll consider it... Now tell me about these scorpions.”