[IC] Fires

[tirgesfu]

FIRES

The fire was dying. Tah lowered himself flat on the ground and put his lips close to the wet underbrush. He sucked in a deep smell of the ashes and then puffed out a long strong breath. As he found the rhythm of breathing, in the dead heat and blowing out his own life air, his hands sprinkled in bits of bark and leaves he had gathered from under the rain soaked matiting. It was not time for a blaze. The wood he had under a wide spruce branch needed to dry and he did not have any meat to roast. But to let the flame die was to add time on his next heating. Keep it burning always was a simple enough lesson learned.

Even alone, out on his hunt, he knew he would need the light and the heat later. He would need the flames to warm his cold bloody hands and the light to guide his cuts. He was going to kill a great horn. He had no doubts of that. His star said so. He had spent the last circles of the bright light in the sky tracking the marks left by the animal that would feed and cover him. But this was not just a kill. This was the great horn. With that he could go back to his clan and chose his woman. Tah could make his way by the big fire. Yes, with the horn his strength will be increased. He will drink the blood and gain the powers.

Tah had been thinking of the animal and almost didn’t notice strands of his hair too close to the embers. They began to sizzle. Quick his hand yanked at his hair, sliced the thick knots with the tip of his spear and tossed them into the new small flame. The long auburn clump of hair sparked. It was just what was needed to make the coals flame. With the hair from one side gone to the fire, Tah pressed his hand to the ashes of the past heat. Fingers dipped in the dark remains he pressed them on the side of this face that now lacked a large bunch of hair.

Tah scooted back. He watched the flame. His brown eyes larger than most in his cave opened encouraging the burn. Tah’s wide face, high cheeks, pressed tight nose, and prominent jaw was now smudged across his cheek with ashes. Hair that had been longer than his thick shoulders now was cut close to that sharp jaw on one side.

As soon as the fire caught Tah began to place large logs around it and mounded the brush and dirt along side of the logs. Large hands built a hump around the fire wanting it to burn but just slowly. Simmer was a word he did not know or use. To him it was to cover the fire. It needed on end open or it would stop. But Tah knew he could leave this mound and come back to red hot coals that he could breath to fire again.

Tah picked up a spear, sharp black stone point he had worked on for seasons wedged and tied into the long hard wood. He was close to the great horn. Prints in the mud told him so. His covered feet in skins from his manhood kill, silently moved back from the mound. He wore no shirt over his broad chest. He would cover that with the skin he now sought. As an after thought he reached back toward the small opening of his covered fire and smeared his hand in the dirt and ash. He wiped quickly over his chest covering more of his scent with the power of a spent fire. His hand stopped at the edge of his deerskin pants that tied on his hips with a braided leather strap.

Tah stood tall and smelled. His nose high in the ar to catch the way of the wind. His star in the sky pointed the direction last dark spell. Tah was ready. He spun away from the covered fire and stepped through the old needled tree forest.

[Igraine]

Blue grey eyes dispassionately observed the elegant pair headed up the red-carpeted stairs, resplendent in shades of deep sapphire blue and topaz, ivory and charcoal, at their perfect ease in this marble and mahogany modern-day palace. Her gaze, her attentions never waiver, even when they merged with the myriad other lovely couples and all the other beautiful people making their way back from intermission, returning to the stately theatre for the second half of the ancient opera “Carmen.” It was a venerable ritual among the well-heeled, one that had carried over for centuries now, and Elke did not mind of course.

There was a great deal Elke did not mind, though whether she was born not minding these things, or had simply learned to pay them no mind over her twenty-six years of life, even she could not have said. It wasn’t that she had no preferences of her own – she did. She far preferred “La Bohème” in truth. She found the emotions far more genuine, and the music less tedious to follow though she likely could have never explained the difference, were she ever asked.

Not that anyone would ever ask, of course. Elke was not made to be asked for her thoughts, and her opinions mattered precious little beyond the confines of her own head. And in truth, she did not mind that either – or had long since learned the art of seeming so. No one ever asked the guard dog his thoughts, after all. And though she looked the part of an opera goer in her pale green, floor length sheath gown, her expensive, real leather shoes and clutch bag? She knew her place.

Maintaining an appropriate fifteen pace distance at all times in public. Guard dog, born and bred and raised to oversee the sparkling woman with the burnished bronze hair, the sea green eyes and that resplendent sapphire dress. Her Moira. Elke’s charge, her sister-like, the closest thing she’d ever had to a friend in all her long life.

Not that she minded. It was in her DNA, it seemed. Genetics was all, and she had been born to be what she was, who she was. In her more nostalgic moments – or at least, as nostalgic as Elke ever got – she imagined the parents she never knew spent every last credit they had to give their unborn daughter a life they could only dream of inside the walls of the New Boston-Columbia District, far from the grinding poverty just past its impenetrable, fortress-like gates. Solid concrete and steel that was still one of the best building materials known to man, spanning some quarter mile into the sky above.

At least that was what Moira had told her about her parents, huddled together beneath blankets as the little girls they'd once been. And Elke liked to think her sister-like would not lie to her about such things.

Not that it mattered. Elke ne Sonnengirata was as bound to Moira Sonnengir the Truth-teller, as she would have been to Moira Sonnengir the Liar. But it gave Elke something very like pleasure to believe these good things of Moira, beautiful, brilliant, talented, shining Moira her sister-like, as kind as she was lovely, and already renowned as the brightest mind of their generation. And so that was what she chose to do.

Elke padded up the stairs after the pair lithely, nimbly, utterly unaware of her feline grace, or the poetry of precision in her every least movement from tucking the clutch purse beneath her arm to tucking a stray strand of silver-blonde hair back behind the ivory skin of one perfectly shaped ear. Muscle and sinew and bone moved in perfect synchronicity, an almost inhuman dance in every least movement that screamed – despite the clothes she wore, and the comely feminine shape of her body – that she was something entirely apart from this affluent crowd of ancient opera aficionados.

And they gave her path a wide berth as she followed after Moira. It was simply the wise thing to do, in the presence of a Genaltata birthed as a Guardian, bound to her charge to the day she died or became too old – often around the age of fifty or so – to carry out her duties. Then the Guardian would be replaced of course, by another Genaltata Guardian, to live out the lifetime of the charge and…

Well, Elke didn’t actually know what became of Genaltata Guardians after the age of 50 or so. Her kind were exceedingly rare and staggeringly expensive to birth, and so she’d only met a handful or so in her entire lifetime. And it wasn’t as if they simply “kept in touch” with one another; there was simply no community meant for the Guardians, beyond whatever notice their charge chose to allow them.

Elke did not dwell, of course, on this thought concerning her future. She found it… Discomfiting.

Not that she should have minded.

[tirgesfu]

It was getting chilly as the light began to slip over the mountain rise. The beast was close, tracks fresh, and the sounds of the snorts were almost heard over the distant squawk of birds. Tah knew he was close. Yet he hadn’t seen him. The fact that the great horn was near and yet invisible only increased Tah excited determination. It was worthy. The stars were right.

Tah stood silent in the dimming light. So still even his breath was measured and slow. Quiet like the tree, moving only with the wind, reaching with his branches to feel the air around him. Tah became the woods, for those minutes he was a tree, he was the tall standing oak watching the forest. Unmoving and observing the domain that was his, Tah felt the tree. As he did a flash of fur walked majestic and regal with its head high and its ears tall. One leg came up high and froze. In that pose the great horn waited. With antlers that spread wider than one of Tah’s arms the elk turned and looked in Tah’s direction.

As quick as a leaf turns in the wind, Tah raised his spear and threw. He let the thrust, of the throw, carry everything he had through him. Tah ran after the spear taking hold of his knife and running quickly toward the stunned great horn. Of course it turned and fled even with the gash of the spear cut through its chest. Tah had to race to keep up at all counting on the elk to bleed itself out. As it ran its blood pumped. As it pumped it took all the life force of the animal and dripped it onto the forest floor.

Tah just had to keep up. That was not an easy task. Four legs run better even when losing life’s force. But Tah was driven. The stars had told him. The fire waits. He would follow the dying tracks and take his meat and horns. It was as it should be.

[Igraine]

The opera had not, of course, been the end of the evening for Moira, and it seemed her latest suitor was along for the ride, whether he would or no just like all the rest. Aldean was amiable enough, perhaps even "charming," which was one of those archaic words Moira seemed so endlessly fond of, pulled from the innumerable ancient novels she devoured by the shelf-ful when she was not in her lab. This "charm" - whatever strange, nebulous quality this was that seemed to have Moira so rapt - was the reason Elke's sister-like indulged his every last whim. It was Aldean who had an absolute passion for the opera, some such thing about the tragically beautiful people to be found there, to a night spent in their shared bed with her Guardian, when he wondered aloud once, about the prowess of a genaltata.

Elke did not mind. She had performed that duty as she did all others that Moira had ever requested - thoroughly and well. But even if Aldean did not know this one thing of Moira, Elke most certainly did: while Moira greatly enjoyed a great many things in this world, and savored the company of even more people who moved contentedly about her orbit like satellites of flesh, she only had one great love - and that was her work.

A physicist of the first order, Moira was acknowledged globally as the brightest mind of her generation. It was her work that had become the basis of all inroads into Verihistoriography. Time travel, in essence, into the past in discrete parcels, or chronoquanta: moments mathematically determined to be infinitesimally insignificant in the development of the modern human timeline.

Of the tiny number of chronoquanta computed, only a precious, miniscule fraction of those provided proper vantage points from which to watch human history unfold. The masking, shielding and sanitation procedures alone for sending human researchers into these chronoquanta had taken the resources of entire small nations to develop and implement, but the information gleaned had solved some of the greatest mysteries of human history. In essence, priceless.

Roanoke, a colony of the nascent state of Virginia in the former United States, was decimated by a version of the bubonic plague, decimating the children and the elderly first and leaving the survivors to bury their own until they could not anymore. The mass grave was located some half mile from the original site. Fortunately, this particular strain died with the last of the Roanoke colonists, and only by the most insanely fortunate circumstances, did it not infect the native population.

The Rongorongo hieroglyphics of ancient Easter Island had been deciphered, the richness of this people's lore finally available for anthropological study.

And of course, the explosion in Tunguska, Siberia, was only ever a meteor after all.

This. This was Moira's true passion, her one love, the answers found to the mysteries of the world, as perfect and true as any mathematical equation. As the scion of the great Sonnengir family, the inevitable products and offshoots of her work had more than doubled the family's already indescribably vast coffers. And though this did not displease her, of course, it was still no better than a pleasant side effect of her first love.

And if this was what her sister-like held dearest, Elke could do no less. The Guardian would never know if her eidetic memory was a product of her altered genetics, or an honest gift from the roll of the genetic dice from her parents, like her hair and eyes. But all those elegant calculations, the intuitively impossible mathematics that painted the masterpiece of time travel, the filigree links that traveled back in history, to moments magnificent and abhorrent... There was a mystery there, a mystery Elke might have called profoundly spiritual if those words had the least meaning to her.

But Elke did not sully that mystery with her hands, or degrade it with her voice. She simply suspended it in her mind like a celestial body in the void of space, a treasure as profound and immutable in the confines of the Guardian's vast trove of thought and experience, as her undying devotion to her charge.

This night though... This night Aldean truly wanted to accompany Moira to her laboratory.

Elke frowned as they drove through the streets, Moira and Aldean whispering and giggling in the real leather seats of the luxury aero, the Guardian ensconced beside the ever-silent driver as they hummed silently through the rain-drizzled byways of the District. The Guardian had never been sick a day in her life, her immune system a bulwark as formidable as the fortress walls reaching to the skies about the District. And so this strange, bitter gall rising up in the back of Elke's throat, this tense twist to her stomach was an entirely new and disconcerting sensation as she did her level best not to hear a single, bliss-filled word of the lovers behind her.

When the driver stopped before the enormous neo-art deco skyscraper that contained Moira's laboratory, Elke all but leapt from the aero to the sidewalk. With a growl she didn't even realize she'd made, the Guardian opened an umbrella before opening the backdoor as Moira and Aldean exited. She thought nothing of the fact neither acknowledged her presence mattered not at all, nor did such a notion that they should so much as enter her head.

By the time they entered the grand marble- and onyx-lined lobby, Elke was soaked utterly, the pale green sheath dress plastered to her body from chest to waist; her silvery-blonde, carefully-coiffed hair hanging in ragged, wet tendrils to her cheeks and neck. Still, the state of her appearance mattered no more nor less than whether the dry, pristine, laughing couple walking ahead acknowledged her when they left the aero. It simply... Well, it simply was.

And so as she walked, folding the umbrella away quickly, Moira removed the leather heels she wore as in swift, fluid motions that involved no clumsy jumping or maneuvering. Padding barefoot across the stone floor, her skin began to prickle with the sudden cold combined with the rain. Yet there was no other reaction that indicated the Guardian felt even the least touch of discomfort.

Not even with that strange, utterly foreign twisting in her gut.

The elevator ride to Moira's laboratory - a complex that actually encompassed several floors including what might have traditionally been called the "penthouse suite" - was entirely silent but for the deep, excited breathing of the thoroughly involved couple, studiously ignored by the Guardian who knew, for all intents and purposes, she was as relevant to this moment for her charge as the mahogany panels and the elevator instrument panel before her.

When the doors opened, Elke stepped out as always, moving aside for Moira to proceed first, accompanied by Aldean this night. The pattern was as steady and known that Elke sometimes liked to imagine that one day, their footsteps might yet be worn into the elegant marble tiles of the floors.

So when Aldean held up his hand to her outside Moira's main laboratory, where all her prototype works were sealed off from scrutiny by all but Elke and precious few others in this world, the Guardian damn near walked right over him. Not with malice, no, nor inattention, but simply because... Because such a thing was frankly unthinkable, without precedent in all her life. Those grey-blue eyes widened in genuine surprise for, perhaps, the very first time as her mouth fell open, her gaze darting between Moira, to Aldean, and then back to Moira again.

She quickly squelched her fist impulse, ingrained almost enough to be instinctive, to break his wrist in a single fluid movement, throw him to the floor and crush his windpipe with the heel of her bare foot- though the mere thought, strangely enough, relieved that growing, bitter ache in her belly.

Only the swift shake of Moira's lovely head stopped her instinctual reaction. Her eyes searched her charge's face, without even enough guile to mask her surprise or growing dismay.

"No Elke," Moira said softly, not unkindly, as she lay her warm, soft hand against the Guardian's rain-cooled shoulder. The contrast in temperatures sent an involuntary shudder through Elke's body that she noticed not at all. "Stay out here for a few moments. Aldean and I would be alone, yes?"

Though the "yes" at the end of her words might have sounded no less than any small bit of casual conversation, Elke knew well what it truly was. It was a command. A command from her charge to do exactly as she was bid, and she could no more refuse that single word, than she could somehow stop her own beating heart.

"Yes," was all Elke did - or even could - reply in perfect, unreflecting acknowledgement, Moira and Aldean entering the laboratory as the Guardian took up a position outside the solid metal doors. Still and unmoving as a sodden piece of statuary, with a strangely bitter gall rising at the back of her throat, Elke didn't know that her own hands had begun to wrap around her bare, cold arms, gently rubbing up and down over the prickles of flesh. No, not for some need to fight off the cold that barely touched her consciousness, but the sudden desire to feel the warmth all over again, of her sister-like's touch.

[tirgesfu]

With speed, agility, and luck Tah managed to run through the old growth forest following the trail of blood. The dying sun still provided light enough to see. Tah sent out pleas to the stars to have the great horn fall before the dark of night ate up the sight of him. Once the night chased all light he would have to fight the howling beasts that he knew would smell his fresh kill.

Tah hurried. Around a stand of white pine he saw the great one fall on his hind legs. It rose quickly only to fall forward over its wobbling front legs. Tah dashed to the creature with his dagger drawn and he jumped upon the beast’s back. The elk stood again and snorted tossing its head back with force. He pranced around making a long high pitched scream throwing its head back and forth, side to side.

Tah hung on. When most of the violent movement was done he pulled his hand off from his hold and stabbed. Right into the soft side of the great horn. He pulled back and did it again. And again. And again. It was a release of all Tah had been running through and waiting for. All the nights he read his stars, and all the day he followed the tracks. All of it ran through his body and his arm as he stabbed and stabbed.

He didn't stop until the elk fell. Even then he almost kept hold until the beast turned as if to fall right on Tah’s leg. Tah jumped. He rolled to the ground beside the great horn. He panted right with the last breaths of his kill. Turning his head he watched the rise and fall of the last shallow air. He rolled toward the elk. Taking his hand without the dagger clinging tight he pressed his palm flat against the bloody fur. He let the warmth of the blood drip through his fingers and down his arm.

Slowly he pushed himself onto his knees. The darkness was coming and Tah was not sure he would be able to get the kill back to his fire. How far had he run? He quickly began to cut through first the neck and then the shoulders. He dashed around as the light faded and found two stick long enough to pull and then others to weave through to provide a travois,. drager. Keeping ,most of the body in tack Tah rolled lifted, pushed the corpus onto the makeshift carrier.

As darkness surrounded him he had the kill enough in place to begin the walk back to his fire. Carefully he retraced, once or twice changing his direction pulling the dead meat back to the mound he hoped still held light. In the distance he heard the cries of wolves.

[Igraine]

CRACK

To any normal human being standing in that hallway, barefooted and in a sodden evening gown, unaccountably hugging her arms for comfort, the sound through several inches of concrete and wood and steel would have been all but inaudible. But Elke was not normal. She was born and bred to be anything but normal, and the small but unfamiliar explosion from behind those closed double doors had the Guardian whirled about in a split second, palm slamming into the passlock.

Nothing happened. The doors remained shut.

CRACK... CRACK CRACK

"Moira! MOIRA! Open this door, NOW!" The Guardian slammed a fist into the wood, splintering the surface of the solid oak and slicing open her knuckles at the same time - not that she noticed in the least. Elke had never, not ever once in her life given anything like an order to her charge, but the strange sound combined with the unnatural separation from her sister-like sent a sudden, silent surge of adrenaline through her body instantly.

Silence from within.

Crimson drops dribbled down her ivory fingers, splattered on the marble floors in perfect little concentric circles as the Guardian waited just one moment longer before the thought clicked in her head. That same battered fist crashed into the palmreader of the passlock, shattering the clear glass as her fingers tore through the circuitry. A blinding flash, a *pop* and the smell of cooking flesh, but the Guardian tore a fistful of wiring from within, burns seared and only just starting to blister up her forearm as she reached back into the blackened hole of the pass lock.

Her face impassive, Elke reached into the hole she'd made up to her shoulder now, schematics clicking through her mind's eye as her fingers found the wires she needed, yanking them from their moorings as the doors slid open. The Guardian jerked her arm free, bleeding from a dozen long scratches from the sharp edges of torn metal, blood mottling the burns to her marred fingers.

Grey-blue eyes took in the whole of the laboratory in an instant. Two stainless steel topped tables, some twenty feet long and strewn with all her sister-like's small experiments, her tinkerings and hover screens, split the room. Against the far wall, were three glass lined pods, prototypes of the chronquanta vehicles she'd built herself, lovingly detailed. The glass door to one was propped open somehow, the small fusion engine within humming softly. Moira had hinted that this one was special, this little experiment of hers that she refused to share even with her sister-like, until she was finished entirely. The excitement in those sea green eyes was unsettling, startling, manic even - just as it had been when she was near to completing those first equations that showed the world the existence of the chronoquanta in that mathematical language she intuitively as the spoken word.

Elke's ivory brow quirked curiously, though there was no other expression of emotion to be found on her face. She could see nothing else out of place, but for the fact Aldean alone stood against the far wall by that open door, eyes wide and arms to his sides, and Moira was nowhere to be seen.

"Where is she?" Elke leapt up easily on the first table, the shortest distance between her and the well-dressed man before her a straight line.

"Elke... " Aldean's dark brown eyes widened in horror as the Guardian moved inexorably toward him. "No... Stay back... "

"Moira." Not a question. A statement now. The Guardian refused to allow a single thought cross her mind other than the retrieval of her charge.

"Stay BACK!" Aldean's arm raised swiftly, an ugly, ungainly black object in his hand and suddenly there was a flash, and another CRACK filled the room, far louder without the inches of concrete, steel and wood between them. Elke was slammed backward as she made to leap to the second table, a fire blooming in her gut as she was hurtled into the cabinetry behind her. Eyes wide with genuine surprise, the Guardian's uninjured hand went to her abdomen where she lay sprawled on the ground, coming away crimson-covered where the bullet from the antique weapon had ripped a hole through her skin.

"You don't understand, Elke! How could you!?" he screamed, he wailed, arm still outstretched though shaking with the weight of the strain and the terror. "You're as much an abomination as these machines she built! Stolen! All the mysteries of the world... All of them, to the last! And she would have ripped the last veil away, the last piece of mystery left to men - "

The next two seconds of Aldean's life were anticlimatic to say the least, though they were over blessedly quick. Elke was up off her back and over the last table in little more than a blur to the man's eyes. She slapped his gun arm away as easily as she might a child's, took his head in her two bare hands and snapped his neck, twisting his shocked, horrified face to his shoulders before she let his body drop to the ground.

A sudden wave of nausea such as she'd never known in her life, nearly sent Elke to her knees. In her mind, the Guardian knew she was bleeding out. Shot, burned, bleeding, only sheer will power kept her on her feet. She'd heard of these... These... Religious zealots, these madmen on the outlier lands who railed against Moira's work, but this was... It was for the insane. The irrational. There should have been none who might come close enough, get near her charge...

Moira.

Elke swayed on her feet, blinking away the spots that threatened to overwhelm her vision, one hand pressed against the hole in her belly as her gaze traveled with a painstaking slowness from the body of the dead man, toward the open door -

The sight splayed before her, dropped the Guardian to her knees. Moira, her Moira, her charge, her sister-like... Though she didn't know it, never heard it, the Guardian moaned softly, deep in her throat like a wounded animal as she crawled to the dead woman on the floor, her body still propping open the door to that last of her creations...

And it would be, the very last. Those sea green eyes were half-lidded and empty, her mouth open slightly. She was only a shell now, an incomplete shell of the woman she'd been. Small, torn pieces of that brilliant, incomparable brain, blood and bone dangled from the hole in the back of Moira's skull, spattered along the floor, the walls, two gaping holes in her chest, turning that sapphire blue gown a mottled, brackish purple where her life's blood had seeped and stained the cloth.

Elke pulled her sister-like to her arms, pressing her to her chest as if she could somehow share whatever heartbeat she had left to her with Moira, cradling that burnished bronze head of hair obscenely stained with crimson and brain. The Guardian lay her strangely hot, wet cheek against Moira's forehead. Still warm. Moira was still warm, but the Guardian knew she wouldn't be so for long, and that eerie moaning continued on and on, a strange counterpoint to the whine of the fusion engine that some part of Elke's mind told her would soon reach critical mass - but she just didn't care. Not anymore. There was nothing left in her world, in this life, that meant a single thing to her anymore.

There was no purpose left to her. No reason for anything, not even her own survival, and tears she had never shed in her life - not even once - slid down her cheeks to a dead woman's face as she let the whole world slide away, heard the ominous *click* and did nothing at all but hold the empty shell of her sister-like closely. She waited with the door propped open, and the fire she knew would come when this machine shorted, and vaporized everything in this laboratory.

Elke never screamed, never flinched, an eternally silent sentinel as she felt that first pulse of fire wash over her, her entire being unknitting, blessed freedom at last, freedom from the unbearable agony of being without her sister-like, her purpose, her entire reason to be from beginning to end.

The Guardian smiled, and then knew nothing more.

**********

Pain. Nothing but pure, pristine, unrelenting pain singing along every last nerve in her body, an exquisite symphony of agony that strangled a gurgled scream from her throat, whether she would or no. Elke blinked slowly, her eyes opening unseeing, uncomprehending, as the grey light coalesced above her head in forms... Thin shapes, dark...

There was a weight on her chest - she could feel it but not understand what it might be... Sticky... Something felt sticky against her hand, thick, heavy and... And hard - and she couldn't catch her breath, only short sips of cold, strange-tasting air.

And somewhere very, very close, Elke heard a song of sorts ring out from living throats, a wail, a call, utterly without words yet still eerily beautiful to her hearing, sodden and dull as it was, as if she were submerged in water.

[tirgesfu]

He was unsure of his direction. With the howls behind him and beside him Tah dragged the dead meat through the dark trees. He put his head high and looked to the stars trying to find his direction. They answered. In the flash of light that streaked across the sky Tah saw a star fall. He quickly took hold of his drag behind and tramped with new determination and direction right toward the spark that fell between the trees ahead of him.

His stars guided him. But what he found when he reached the direction the skies gave made him stop in his tracks. It wasn’t just a simple light shining him to his fire. No. No it was much more. The star actually fell and it lay there. He stared. It was a body unlike any Tah had ever seen and it was on the ground not far from his covered fire.

Tah pulled his dagger out. He took one step but then shook his head. It was his star why would he wish to cut it? He put his dagger back into the bone cover. Slowly he stepped toward the fallen star. The trip must have injured it because it was easy to see the wound. The breaths were short and labored. He very slowly very casually one a fraction of an inch at a time put his hand out to touch the stars face.

It had a face. A pure, radiant, unblemished smooth face with eyes closed. Tah let the very tips of his fingers touch the cheek to make sure it was real. He felt the skin and jumped back. The star was cold. Not death cold but chilled.

Tah rocked on his heels and looked at her. It was a her. A she star. He pulled his drag behind close to the fire. He uncovered the coals and fed them the wood and dried branches he had collect to fuel the brightness and heat back. He then ran back to the fallen star. Carefully and yet so easily he picked her up and carried her to the now roaring fire. With great care he put her down near the heat and the flames.

Even the wolves seemed to know to stay clear of the fire and the star. With retreating howls they ran over the hills away from the dead elk they had thought would be an easy meal. They echoed as they left.

Tah was never a healer and did not know or try to repair something so magnificent as a star. Instead he poured sooth water, special water gathered at the old wells, from his medical skin and held it above her lips. He let just drips fall down onto those strange tinted lips. And he watched. With intense eyes he studied her face. He was sure he was looking at the face of a star.

[Igraine]

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?”