As long hours dredged up the rising sun and heat basked the unending sand, Amina's mood did not improve. The air's warmth was pleasant for only a handful of minutes; it was kind as it burned the chill from her bones, but grew harsher and drier until it was a whip to the skin on the back of her neck, baking her from the outside in.

The heat was not usually her enemy. On any other day, she would've tipped her head back and welcomed the sun's kiss, yet there was a stinging malice to its touch today. It might as well have been a beast itself for how it gnawed at her. The horizon was still bathed in crimson, and already her head had begun to throb, skull thick and heavy as pain cut a line down to the bridge of her nose. She rubbed at it and dragged her nails across her scalp in frustration, wishing she could crawl from her body and curl up somewhere out of the heat's glare.

She trudged along several steps behind Rayanah and the beast, both grateful for and despising the widening distance. She kept her teeth gritted and pretended the lag in her step was on purpose. When Rayanah eventually doubled back to offer her the water flask, she snatched it without a word and drank several huge, greedy gulps, hearing the remnants splash weakly in the container's bottom when she finally dropped it from her lips. Part of her awaited consequences—a protest, at least—but Rayanah said nothing. She took the flash back, returned to the beast's side, and that remained their only interaction of the entire morning.

The water felt cool and welcoming as it went down, soothing her throat, but it didn't ease her headache for long. Time continued to creep onward like sludge. A scattered haze swept over the desert, forcing her to squint. Sweat made her skirt cling to her thighs. The thick, throttling urge to cry again rose in gradual waves, pressing on her throat the more she fought it until even breathing hurt.

She clenched her fists, and the raw fingers rubbed together, tingling with discomfort. Frustration simmered as a cobweb stuck beneath her skin. She tossed her head for the hundred time to throw her thick curls from her shoulders, glancing at the sun as she did so. After a morning that felt like a lifetime, it had only just begun to teeter towards the west, slipping from its brightest point in the sky, its unbearable glow cast in every direction without refuge. The silence ached. Her gaze settled on Rayanah's form several paces up ahead, her cloak rippling sapphire in the light, and a sigh wrenched from her lips. She stomped forward.

The steps should hardly have been an effort, but Amina might as well have been wading through an ocean of tree sap. She was panting by the time she eventually reached Rayanah's side, the lines of her vision faded and briefly split, though she blinked hard enough to make her stare fierce as she fixed it on the other mage. "So we keep following the beast until what? We keel over?"

Rayanah flinched and nearly tripped over her cloak's hem. She seemed to have broken from her own distant world; shards of the haze still clouded her vision, dragging on a pause before she spoke that scratched at Amina's impatience. "I doubt you'll like where I think she's leading us."

With a huff, Amina shoved a hand against her hip. "Well, I'm stuck here, aren't I? Thanks to you." She turned her scowl on the warm, dizzy horizon. "You might as well enlighten me as to what your surely wonderful plan is."

Taking in a small, shaky breath, Rayanah curled her cloak across her front, tucking her chin into it. She still didn't appear wholly present; her gaze stayed on the horizon. "I think we're headed to a nest of beastfolk."

Amina's heart stuttered. "We're what?"

A smattering of fierce, jittering whys reared to her mind's forefront, but Rayanah spoke again before she could find a way to haul the incredulous word to her tongue. "A week or so ago, I saved the life of a beastfolk boy. Corvin. He's a friend, and I fear he's in trouble with his own kind for the very same reason I had to flee Tehazihbith. Our species are not meant to interweave." Her head dipped, though her voice was surprisingly strong. "But he's opened my eyes to the world. If he needs it, I have to be there to protect him."

Tongue trapped between her teeth, Amina dragged her gaze to the side, arms folded tight to her chest. Complaints built up in her chest, all made of bitingly cold metal and hard to swallow, but she was tired of arguing, and she had nothing to say in the face of such a strangely impassioned speech. Rayanah was ill in the head. Nothing else explained why one would pair a Feralite with a thing like friendship. She grimaced, mouth tasting of bile.

She chewed on her tongue to try and banish the sensation. As her eyes trailed the unending hot sand in search of something to focus on, so did her mind, and an interesting thought snagged on. Her head perked up.

A nest of beastfolk. Wasn't this an opportunity?

Her heart thrummed still, yet her nerves dampened, boiled to a fluttering ash. Half a smile crooked her lips. She turned again to Rayanah, piecing together another question, when a dark shape beyond the other mage's shoulder caught her eye and the words withered into nothing.

"Move," she breathed, the word cresting into a shout as tension grew in her lungs.

Rayanah whirled on her, brow creased and lips parted in question. Her eyes' violet jewels glinted as dim as she was. With a noise of frustration, Amina snatched a fistful of her cloak and yanked, towing her to the ground. The impact lanced through Amina's shoulder with the whisper of a coming bruise. She hissed and flipped onto her back just in time to see a curved, armoured tail stab the spot they'd both been standing in a mere second ago.

It withdrew with a scraping rattle, coiled high above a slender, skeletal body with detached eyes that blinked off-kilter, and Amina went numb. She should not have frozen. Several overlapping voices in the back of her mind screamed that she do something, but ice encased them, glazing her skin in a gripping chill. The tail's end bulged, deeply crimson. Its end was razored and dark as death. She couldn't tell whether she was sitting or standing, whether Tehazihbith lay at her back or not, whether reality had twisted to play a cruel trick on her and dragged back another moment she'd stood before a beast and spent a microsecond awaiting the end of her short life.

Spindled claws rendered the sand uneven. She dug her heels in to lever herself out of this cold ditch, but before she could rise, movement swept the corner of her eye; Rayanah surged to her feet with an arcing sweep of her cloak. She swung an arm and the air grew hazy. With a hoard of clicking sounds, the beast reared back, eye stalks coiling low and aligning to train a narrow stare on the magic shield.

Relief settled as little more than a faint impression, quick to dissipate as a handful of heavy seconds filled with the beast's frustrated clacks ticked by. They weren't noisy enough to bury the rapid in-and-out heave of Rayanah's breathing. She shook like a leaf in a breeze, her cloak's ripples combing the tension in her stance, yet she stayed still.

The beast's claws scraped at the barrier's base, itching at Amina's ears. It was misty and indistinct, not solid enough to betray damage, but she felt its weakening edges like a silky-smooth web traced over her skin. She shoved to her feet and ducked to Rayanah's side, searching the side of her fellow mage's face. "What now?" She hoped the bite in her voice served to hide the anxiety thumping through her.

Rayanah's jaw remained locked shut. Her dark gaze darted to Amina and away again, so jittery it made her look wild. Her outstretched arm shifted, firmly keeping Amina within its protection—flimsy and crumbling as that was.

Amina barely resisted the urge to shove at it. Frustration built in her core, curling her fists. "You're the trained mage." A mocking drawl dripped into the words, satisfying enough to mask her fear. "Remember? You have to fight it."

Listlessly, Rayanah's other hand drifted to her pocket, though the pads of her fingers barely skimmed its edge. Her head was already shaking. "No." Her brow drew in. "I don't."

Her arm fell. With the peeling sensation of a folding veil, the barrier went with it. Amina could've sworn the noise the beast made in response was a cackle, strung by knocking bones and tittering all the way down her spine.

Its claws levered it forward, and it lunged.

Amina ducked on her own this time, heart rattling her ribs and veins hot with lightning, though Rayanah joined her anyway. Insane as she was, the idiot wasn't so stupid as to throw away her life in two seconds flat—though if Amina did nothing, neither of them would last the minute. She couldn't freeze this time. The baffled anger warming her skin helped to thaw the ice. Tangling her legs with Rayanah's, she dragged the other mage flat to the sand and then flipped, forearm keeping the mage's chest pinned while she once again snatched the pouch full of dust from its hidden pocket. Her lip curled in an instinctive snarl when she met Rayanah's frantic gaze. "Then I'll fight," she snapped.

She rolled again and kicked upwards, flying to her feet before her body was ready for it, her run crumpled to a few stumbling steps before she had to whirl and breathe and right herself, though even that momentary pause was deadly. The beast's tail whipped past her head, air whistling in her ear. Cursing breathlessly, she wrenched a fistful of dust from the pouch and fixed her feet, watching the tail withdraw and tense for another strike.

The beast's stalked eyes coiled in the same rigid curve, hungrily fixated on her chest. Like it were trapped in a swelling glass sphere, the air in her lungs sank inward, hard and frozen. The rest of her seized. Jaw set so hard she swore she felt something crack, she squeezed her eyes shut and primed her ears. Her fingers tingled. The dust's song skated up her arm and wrapped her throat, holding her stiff, and she drank up the thin confidence it seeped into her pores. She had no reason to be afraid.

Heat spilled from her fingertips and ripped life into the dry desert air. The flames burnished her closed eyelids and crackled as static in her bones, so bright her heavy feet seemed to lift, though darkness writhed beneath it; the bitter reek hit her like a wall of sandbrick. When she peeled her eyes open, all that remained was charcoal scattered in black swathes amid the sand.

Relief sagged her shoulders, and exhaustion crashed down with it. She wobbled on legs that felt wispy beneath her.

Rayanah's gasp was all that kept her knees from buckling. The sound was sharp enough to bring the rest of the world flooding back in, snapping the mist that pooled in her ears. Rayanah still sat on the ground a few paces away, one knee pulled to her chest and cloak forming a vast puddle around her that dwarfed her slim, trembling figure. Something haunted shadowed her gaze as she stared at the beast's corpse. She wrenched a hand through her ruffled hair, lips pinched, complexion noticeably grey.

Something pinched in Amina's chest—something akin to regret or pity? Either way, it was weak enough to be ignored. Nose wrinkled to display disgust, she kicked at a scattered pile of soot, flicking Rayanah a half-hearted glare. "What?" She made little effort to hide her exasperation. "That's twice I've saved your life and you look like you're going to vomit again."

Rayanah's head dropped, eyes on her clasped hands. Her lips moved, but if she said anything meaningful, it was much too quiet for Amina to catch.

She rolled her eyes and switched to picking out the leftover specs of dust stuck between her fingers. "But you can keep being delusional. That's fine. Maybe I'll let you die next time."

A long silence settled between them, cut as deep and gaping as a chasm. It itched, but the moment Amina readied to break it, Rayanah shifted to her knees and rose, cloak sweeping the sand around her as she shuffled in a circle. Her brow was creased, its jewels half-hidden by her choppy hair. "Meag," she breathed.

Amina pushed a sigh out through her nose. "I don't want to hear—"

"No." That startling switch again; authority flicked so easily into the single word that Amina's jaw clamped shut of its own accord. Rayanah's stance unfolded, straightened, shades of panic flitting through her wild gaze. "Meag was right beside us. Where is she?"

"I don't..." Amina's protest withered on her tongue, sucking the moisture from her mouth. She stumbled closer to her fellow mage. Her vision paled, and she subtly trailed her hand to its opposite arm, digging her nails in beneath her sleeve to keep her senses sharp. Against her will, her heart had sped up again, though she tried to shrug away the sudden chill. "She ran away or something? Sh... It's a beast. It doesn't care about us. That's what I've been trying—"

Rayanah flung out an arm. A sharp glance came with it, stern and silencing. Fear lurked behind it, and for once, Amina felt no indignation at the sight of it. Fear seized her in its entirety, dripping beneath her skin and tapping at the back of her neck, a breath at her back that smelled of everything rancid and terrifying.

She wished she'd caught those quick, light footsteps behind her sooner. It took her far too long to move. By the time the thought occurred, she could do little more than flinch at the feathery locks dusting her shoulder and the cool, steely touch of claws against her throat.

Lips threaded silky words directly into her ear. "Hello again, little lost pup."

The golden shades of the desert continued to pulse with their unceasing sun, yet its warmth had never felt so far away. Strips of shade were everywhere. From the dip in the dune before them, the Feralites crawled.

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