Ice to fire. That was what was touching her lips, deliciously cold ice to the the arid desert of her throat and she was greedy, too greedy as she her head inched toward what had to be the source of that cool relief - and paid dearly. The pain that shot through every nerve in her body sang with an agony she had never known, her eyes wide open now and unseeing as she gasped, a thin sheen of sweat forming on her skin. Elke knew she lay on her side on hard, cold ground of some sort, uneven beneath her. The fingers of one hand dared to move, the tips touching the surface she lay on, feeling, and then grasping… Soil?

It could be nothing else, soft and giving and wedged now beneath her fingernails. Her eyes half-lidded now, still unable to focus completely, to get her bearings, Elke could still make out the wavering outline of light in front of her where she lay, an orange light that radiated warmth on the skin of her fingers, delicious warmth though she began shivering uncontrollably from head to toe. 

She knew she wasn’t dead. That one thing she was sure of because, if nothing else, the pain alone promised death hadn’t claimed her.

Yet.

Elke felt a thousand blades shredding her gut, all her agony radiating from that point, up and down her spine, and somehow she felt sure she deserved every last measure of that pain, memories she knew would flood back to her in their course only just banging furiously at the doors of her addled consciousness. 

Small, incremental pieces of this place wormed their way past the pain, through the fog that still enshrouded her thoughts. She lay on soil, dirt of some sort. There was a warm, soft glow, red-orange and inviting before her though her eyes could not make it out fully, and - 

And she was not alone. Elke tried one more time to crane her neck upward, to see the half-lit semi-darkness hovering above her, the play of shadows and flickering orange light still refusing to coalesce in her eyes into anything recognizable, though surely… Surely this was the source of the sweet, refreshing ice? With an aching slowness, the fingers that had grasped the soil crawled toward where she thought… She hoped she’d find a boot, her fingers splayed over what must be a foot.

Elke peered upward toward the cooler shadows above, blinking and grimacing as if she could force her eyes to focus by sheer power of her will alone. “Whe…” Elke coughed, choking on the word as she began to retch, her body racked with spasms until a gobbet of something coppery-tasting and dark finally fell from her lips and dribbled into the dirt.

She caught her breath slowly again, and tried once more to speak, her voice barely above a whisper. 

“Where… Where am I?”