#inshala

Blue & You (Original Mix) 1.3 by gAdBoA

natharaiebonrook said:

Librarian! Page 12.

On one fearful bush road out near Ongarue a hand-lettered sign was nailed to a tree: ‘Speed Limit, Fifteen Miles a Month.’

There aren’t really roads in Uldum. One good sandstorm would obliterate them, anyway. I’d picked up enough from the Guardians’ drills to know how to conduct a search and rescue, more or less, dividing the map into a grid, looking for the landmarks Inshala’s vision had shown. An oasis with blue lilies near a ruined temple was hardly specific enough to get any sort of help in Ramkahen.

More than once, I offered thanks to Aviana for raven form, which made the search from oasis to oasis much quicker. I didn’t need to worry about a mount, flying or otherwise; just myself.

And I was lucky; I picked the right direction to start with. North, I thought, and I would circle the region clockwise.

Even so, it took three days. Avoiding heat exhaustion and bandits. I spent far too long imagining I’d find a corpse, instead of a man in need of healing.

The oasis wasn’t any more isolated than the Blackwald, not really, but when I finally found him, it was as though I’d reached the edge of the world. That we were the only two people in existence.

When I think about that day, and the month that followed, that sense of it being just us is stronger than anything else, almost. As it turned out, we were never really alone; we were chaperoned better than any parent might have wished. But I didn’t know it at the time.