There was something heavy crushing her chest.
Her heart was beating hard and with every breath she took her lungs seemed to contract painfully each time.
Legs and arms burning, fingers bloody. Hot sand at her feet, making each step harder to take.
The desert was endless. The suns in the horizon, shining bright in the sky, willingly ignorant of the ache.
She had wondered many times before how it was possible for the suns to rise and set in the sky when everything else had collapsed.
How...? How could they still rise high up in the sky?
When her staff hit a rock hidden in the ground she fell. She tasted blood and ground.
Her cheek felt numb but she didn’t move. She laid there. Her staff had slipped from her bruised hand and she couldn’t find the strenght to get up.
Only a whisper. A prayer lost in the vastness of the desert, words eaten by the dunes and the sand and the wind.
She was a nameless girl in the middle of nowhere calling ghosts from a past she didn’t know.
She closed her eyes. And her mind was far away...once again she was walking with her feet under water. She was dreaming, always dreaming of that place.
In her dreams she was always whole.
In her dreams her pleas were always answered.
She had heard that voice before.
Was that her name...? Her real name...?
She turned, and she saw a shadow.
She ran after the shadow. She ran after him...A name...the shadow had a name.
“Come find me!” she screamed.
The darkness was eating the shadow.
Tears ran hot down her cheeks, her legs hurt until she couldn’t run anymore. She fell, knees deep in the water. Darkness setting around her.
“You must” the voice said “Rise”
She felt lost. More so than ever.
“I can’t....I can’t stand it” her voice was shaking.
Her mouth tasted blood again and she felt her bruised fingers grabbing the sand beneath them.
“Please, please let me stay” she begged.
The voice spoke one more time, words final but soft like a lover’s kiss.
“I’ll find you again, I promise”
She woke up to the night sky. Thousands of stars shinning above her.