Book One – Chapter 1

Midnight kept stride at his side, her gait focussed yet fluid despite the violent heat and the distorted winds. There was an elegance to her that misled the inattentive. It was not delicacy. It was control. It was her strength and endurance that concealed the underlining strain, but Yves recognised the way her muscles coiled beneath her dark fur to resist the violence all around them.

It showed more plainly in him; the violence.

Where her stride carried the pride of a versatile predator well able to adapt to hostile grounds, his stumblings displayed all the suffering of a wizard denied the magic to make said grounds adapt to him. His feet were a mess of blood and blisters, and the main reason why he still continued putting one foot in front of the other was that each step briefly relieved the last. The pain drove him forward. It was like walking on burning coals, with the coals being ground so fine that he sank into the fire the instant he stopped walking.

The other reason was Midnight. As the one who struggled more and failing first, Yves set their pace. When he had to stop, so did she.

Midnight’s struggle was of another kind. Ordinarily, she read the world through its smallest disturbances; a new taste in the air, a change pressure, the heat of something living long before it revealed itself. Here, her senses were smothered by the dust-laden winds, and the deprivation disturbed her greatly. Even so, Yves trusted her instincts more than his own. When a dune shifted too cleanly, or when she caught territory markers that betrayed the presence of something that hunted, she adjusted their path. When her intuition found no purchase, Yves led with what remained of his compromised instruments and his artefacts.

Mapping, sensing, remembering and guessing; between them, they carved a passage through the endless wastes, for days, for weeks, until eventually the ground began to change.