After two hours of walking through the Valley of the Maw, the young woman could scarcely keep herself upright. Exhaustion crept into the very fiber of her bones, head spinning, breath shallow, face flushed with her two rust-colored eyes wide and desperate. The Elders had warned her of the dangers of her trial, and she was beginning to regret not taking them more seriously. [i]The Wild will snatch you up and devour you whole if you give it the slightest hint of a chance,[/i] one of their voices echoed in her memory. [i]Find shelter, food and water before the beasts find you, and you might yet live.[/i]

[i]Water.[/i] The word rolled on her dry tongue. It had been days since she had drank something cool and pure, the snow she melted did nothing to quench her thirst. Letting her yearning guide her aching legs, she pushed on, the mountains looming around her beginning to look more like the jaws of a giant with every step she took. 

Eventually, her eye snagged on the glimmer of a small lake in the distance as the sun crept over the mountaintops. The young woman bolted towards the source with little care for her surroundings—in fact, she scarcely noticed the uncanny tinkling of a bell as she sank to her knees by the water’s edge and drank deeply. Water had never tasted quite so good; it was pure life, it was ambrosia, it may as well have been the blood that pumped through her veins. She only stopped when she was completely sated, sitting upright and releasing a pent-up breath that relaxed her whole being and made her shoulders sink.

It was only afterwards that she saw what was, perhaps, the strangest thing she had ever laid eyes on.

The skeletal horse was standing only a few feet away, but it was not dead. In fact quite the contrary, the young woman could see that it was very much alive, somehow, and it seemed to be smiling at her with its sunken, lurid grin. Yet she found it almost beautiful in a sense. Slowly rising to her feet, she took a few hesitant steps towards the creature, her hand rising upwards, almost as if to touch, to check if it was actually real. 

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Before she could touch the skeletal horse, she was interrupted by the sound of water hitting water, woven with musical tinkling. 

The pyromancer whirled around and saw what was probably the second strangest thing she had ever laid eyes on, which was not a creature but presumably another human being standing in the water. Not only that, but his appearance made her blood run cold in a way that the horse never could, and her reaction was both immediate and extremely clumsy. She stumbled backwards, tripping over a rock and landing squarely on her hindquarters in a pile of muck. As if to remedy her own misstep, her hand clawed at her waist, pulling desperately at the jeweled dagger there, which she pointed at him to match the fire in her eyes. 

“Who are you?” she demanded, despite still being sat in the mud with a shaking grip.