Peeking outside, the sun was still high in the sky. He made a fist and sneaked an arm outside the tent, then held it straight out. Four fist widths from the horizon to the sun.
“Looks like four hours of daylight left,” he said. “See if you can get some more sleep. I’ll get food going.”
Maiya responded by flopping back onto the sand.
Vir crawled out of the tent, leaving its shaded protection. The sun blared down on his skin, but thanks to the makeup on his face and arms, he managed alright.
In this scorching heat, the last thing he wanted was to build a fire. But food had to be cooked, and he didn’t want to dip into their nonperishables just yet. Vir resigned himself to his fate and unstrapped a small bundle of firewood they’d secured on Bumpy.
To hide the flames, he dug a small ditch in the sand. Even during the day, the light of a fire was visible from afar. Thankfully, it was a lot easier digging into sand than dirt. Unfortunately, because of the heat, Vir found himself heaving from exertion anyway.
The one area that had improved the least was his stamina. Vir was forced to sit down to recover his energy, and as he analyzed his black prana with Prana Vision, he suspected why.
He’d noticed before that his black prana was a tiny trickle compared to the prana inside Riyan or Maiya. The connection should have been obvious: the continuous leaking. The more effort he spent and the faster his blood pumped, the more it leaked. Both into the air, and through his feet into the ground.
He didn’t really understand what effects prana depletion had, but Riyan had mentioned it was the energy of life, so he doubted it was a good sign.
It’s almost like I’m being sucked dry, he thought. But why?
No matter how much he racked his brain, he couldn’t explain why only his prana leaked out. Was his body generating more prana all the time, only for it to be sapped away? The same leakage never once happened with Riyan or Maiya. And if prana really did support life, he wondered how the people in the Voidlands survived at all. Do they also feel weak all the time? he wondered as he got the fire going. Since the man himself wasn’t around to say no, they’d borrowed one of Riyan’s luxury items—a magnifying glass.
Vir lifted the heavy lens and held it above the tinder pieces he’d arranged at the bottom of the new fire pit, creating a tiny spot of incredibly bright light on the wood.
He’d never used anything like this before, though Rudvik had told him stories about how they operated. All he really had to do was hold the lens long enough to heat the wood. Something about how it concentrated the sun’s light to fry whatever you pointed it at.
It sounded like magic to Vir when he’d first heard about it, but as it so often turned out, reality disappointed. His arms grew cramped from hefting the heavy object when a small sizzle finally showed that the lens was working.
Now it was a race against time: would Vir’s arms give out first? Or would the smoking tinder catch fire?
Challenge Accepted.
Perspiration flowed down his face like a river, but Vir endured. And after a short but fierce battle of mind against muscle, his persistence prevailed. The tinder lit—he had a fire, and meal prep was officially in progress.
Vir let the flames grow and then burn themselves out. Once they’d become embers, he placed some fresh vegetables directly on the bed of coals.
Led by her nose, Maiya crawled out of the tent, but immediately ducked back in as if she’d suffered an attack.
“How in Yuma’s name can you even cook out there? It’s so dang hot!”
Vir laughed. “Just stay inside. I’m almost done.”
As the veggies roasted and mushrooms sizzled, Vir thought back to the pirate encounter earlier. He should’ve kept a better watch on the coastline for ships. Maybe he’d have seen them in time to avoid them entirely. If Riyan ever heard about this, he was sure the man would give them a long lecture about situational awareness.
But the bigger issue was his chakram’s crippling flaw. He’d hesitated to use the disks because each one he threw would be lost forever. If he did eventually buy nicer steel chakrams, would he be able to just throw them away like that?
If only they returned to me… Alas, they were merely disks of steel, not Artifacts from the Age of Gods. They might float through the air better than a thrown knife, but they possessed no mystical powers whatsoever. Even if they did, Vir guessed they would require magic to use.
He shook his head. Thinking that way was dangerous and foolish. What was a piece of steel worth compared to his life, or the lives of his loved ones? Weapons were replaceable. Maiya was not.
Maybe I can get that guy to teach me archery instead… Vir loved his chakrams. Everyone had bows, but nobody used chakrams. At least, not that he’d heard of. They were rare, exotic weapons from the Age of Gods. He liked that about them.
Vir brought Maiya a bowl of the salted vegetable stir-fry, which they both gobbled up with relish.
“I hadn’t realized I was so hungry,” Maiya said between mouthfuls. Vir hardly heard her—he was too busy shoveling food into his mouth.
Once they’d wrapped up, Maiya dabbed away her marred makeup and reapplied it, then did the same for Vir.
“What do you think?” she asked once they had finished.
“It’s good… But maybe not as good as when you’d first applied it?” Vir said.
“Well, obviously. I’m not going to get the same results with a travel kit and a small mirror. But it should be good enough. I hope,” she said with a frown. “Anyway, what do you want to do now? Stay on a night schedule? Or should we push forward to Saran?”
Vir knew without a doubt which option Maiya preferred. “Saran. I think we’re somewhat close to the Saran-Daha highway, and we’re close enough now that we shouldn’t encounter too many bandits. Not like blazing our own path did us much good, anyway.”
Maiya’s eyes lit up at his words. “Oh, I can’t wait to sleep in a proper bed tonight! Maybe they’ll even have a bath!”
“I wouldn’t get your hopes up,” Vir said. “We can’t really splurge on accommodations, or we won’t have enough for all the supplies Riyan wants us to bring back.”
“Just a little’s okay, right? It’s just one night! Right?”
Vir laughed. “We’ll see. No promises though!”
They worked quickly to break up camp. Vir shoveled sand back over the fire, erasing any trace that it was there, while Maiya disassembled the tent and swept the sand to erase their tracks.
She’d found an innovative solution to her sunburn problem—she’d darkened her skin a bit with makeup this time around, and applied the same makeup to her forearms and hands, which had the benefit of matching her facial skin tone and protecting her from the sun at the same time.
“Y’know, we make a good team,” Maiya remarked as they mounted Bumpy. “We packed that stuff up in record time!”
It was true. They’d taken only half an hour to get things ready for travel.
“We can probably do it even faster next time,” Vir said, scanning the horizon.
He led Bumpy in a vague, easterly direction, using the sun’s position and his own mental map to guide him, while Maiya used some charcoal to scribble down additions to their papyrus map as they rode.
“There it is!” Vir said, spotting a snaking pathway through the desert in the distance. “Guess I was right. We weren’t far from the highway, after all.”
The cobblestone path that led from Saran to the Hiranyan capital of Daha was a delight to travel upon. Even though the stones were as hard as the rocks that had given them sore bottoms last night, the road was perfectly smooth and flat, making for a much smoother ride and a faster pace.