Every bone in my body ached, bones I didn’t know I had were screaming at me to stop running, for the love of Stikle, stop running. My feet kept moving though, however much they protested. The only things keeping me going were the screams of the dying and clashes of metal I heard from behind me and Dota’s sweaty hand in mine. I could hear her heavy breath in my ear as we ran.
My instinct was to drop to my knees in the sand and cry like an infant, cry for the loss of my home, my village, my possessions, for the loss of my sixteenth birthday celebration; my Serani (when I would come of age), the possible loss of Ander, the only family I had left in the world and to cry for the sheer unfairness of it all.
But I didn’t, my deeper instinct, the instinct that made humans so like animals and yet so different, told otherwise, told me to keep going. And so I did. Dota and I kept going and going, until Arasia, the Beloved One, the moon rose in the sky, her and her star-children lighting the sky. Dota and I collapsed into the cleavage of two dunes, exhausted. Quietly, not even looking at one another we examined ourselves in the light of the stars and the moon. My knees were scraped from when I had tripped and fell. I had a long, thin cut on my shoulder that I couldn’t remember getting and my feet were bloody and sore from running across the sand, which had been dotted with sharp pieces of shells and small rocks.
I looked up at Dota at the same time she did to me and our eyes met. She had a small bruise on her forhead and there was a gash on her arm from where the soldier cut her. We immediately fell into one another’s arms and began to sob uncontrollably. I imagined what Ander would say, were he here. He would laugh and say “Oh kinsi, little one, my lovely scrap-girl. Don’t be such a woman.” Oh, Ander. The thought of my brother, his sword glinting with the light of the fire as he screamed for me to run and take Dota made my stomach turn. I pushed down the bile, I couldn’t be sick, I needed to be strong.
The scariest thing to me was no longer the shock and destruction of the raid, but the utter sadness of seeing Dota cry. She looked like a baby, face all scrunched up and red. It terrified me more than any enemy horde.
All through my life Dota had been my steady hand, my rock. Even when my father died, several years after my mother; who had died in childbirth with a younger sibling the gods did not destine to live when I was a young child, when I was thirteen and Ander fifteen, Dota’s family took us in, Dota held me at night when I cried, taught what my mother should have and a what a woman should know, been my sister, my mother, my friend. She even became my real sister when she married my brother. Ander often joked the only reason she married him was to be related to me.
I knew few things of the world, growing up in my small fishing village in the West Corts, but one of the few things that I did know, as well as I knew which fish was best for which illness and when to start my garden was that ‘Dota can’t be hurt.’ (It was childish knowledge, one I should have, by the age of sixteen dispelled, but I was in most aspects still a child then.) But now as I held that quivering, afraid Dota in my arms, one of my simplest, most basic truths was ripped away and for the loss of this, I also cried.
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