Chapter Text
It felt like she was suddenly lying in a pit of fire. The princess moaned, tossed and turned, but the peace she had felt slipped away like sand across the dunes. Darkness itself latched hard around her throat, stealing her voice. Her eyes burned, unable to look away from the figure in the distance, blurred against the dusty horizon. It staggered, talking longer to right itself after each unsteady fall, but it never stopped drawing nearer, as though all that mattered to it was reaching where she stood rooted to the ground.
Finally, she could make it out clearly—tall, lanky, dressed in clothing so dirty and patched there was no telling what their original color might have been. But there was a stain there that shouldn’t have been, a stain she sorely wished would fade as the figure slowly closed the last of the endless gap between them. It reached for her, groaned, then fell again, now barely able to hold itself upright. Her heart in her throat, she willed herself to move, every drop of blood aching as she sprinted across the blazing sand, falling to her knees beside the prone figure’s head.
“Tack,” the whispered word was shards of glass. “Tack, please!”
She braced herself, rolled him slowly on his back, the bandaged hand that had held his thin stomach now falling limply to his side. It seemed to take all his strength just to shift his gaze, the light in his eyes little more than a flicker. She took his head in her lap, his long fingers blood-soaked ice when she braided them with hers.
“I-I’m here, Tack,” she managed, the words tearing her throat. She bent over him, touching her forehead to his, gasping when she realized no warmth was there. “You can’t…no…”
Sadness and fear came to a boil, spilling down her cheeks. She pressed a hand to his chest, only to feel that steady rhythm had faded, his eyes gone dark. The small tacks always held between his lips dropped to the sand, dissolving into black smoke that devoured all, cutting off her vision as it stole the last of her gasping breath.