South, Past the Camp

If you're going to get re-captured by the slavers, you'd rather it were from trying to outsmart them rather than playing right into their hands. Steeling yourself for the trial to come, you resolve to head south, past the camp and deeper into the Plains. With a quick check back at Katerina to make sure she hasn't moved, you clamber up one of the hills surrounding the glade and make your way south.

Conditioning Weakened

Deciding to take a generous arc around the slaver camp, you go a mile or so out of the way to make sure you can keep at least two hill croppings between you and them wherever possible. You'd rather not risk being spotted by the camp denizens simply cresting a single hill. Your prudence appears to pay off after you circle your way around the camp to its rear with no sign of any pursuit. Up until this point you've been trying to hold where south is in your mind, with the heavy cloud cover of the Arcane Storm you can't use the sun to navigate, and now you're going to have to trust your gut that your orientation has remained true. So, with your back to the camp and what you assume to be south ahead of you, you take your first steps into the unknown.

The first of many.

Hours pass. How many? You cannot say. The unnatural light of the storm gives no clue as to the passage of time. The monotonous trudge of footfall on soft earth is punctuated only by intense flashes of the primary-coloured lightning heralding the teeth-rattling boom of distant thunder. Sometimes it's the other way round. Magic is weird.

Not to say the trek is boring. You wish it was, but each flash of heavenly illumination spikes an intense fear of discovery deep within your core. Intense enough to mask the growing maw of hunger emminating from your gut. You wish you could seek cover from the skyward searchlight, but with nothing but grass as far as your eyes can see, you'll have to settle with reflexive cringing instead.

But that fear drives you on. Bolsters hidden wells of reserve that the camp trainers tried to drive out of you. Your determination pushes you through the growing hunger and thirst. Pushes you through the blossoming pain in your bare feet as blisters bloom. A consequence of the magic that undid your tan also removing the decade of calluses developed from an active life on deck, you'd assume. But you cannot stop. To stop would mean capture, **** and a lifetime of bondage. And so you trudge onwards. Ever onwards.

Conditioning Weakened

Eventually, your grit is rewarded. As the temperature begins to drop from an apparently setting sun you spot a road. Well, road might be a strong word. The unending sea of grass ahead of you is parted by a scar of compacted dirt that intersects your tradjectory and continues as far as you can see in both directions. A road, such as it is, means civilisation. Civilisation means shelter, food, safety and rest. The thought of such luxuries makes all the aches, pains and discomforts your exodus flair into a screaming cacophony. It takes all your willpower to not simply fall to the ground in the weakness of your relief.

You make it to the path. The change in texture is a welcome novelty to your burning feet as you angle yourself anew. Soon though, the novelty wears off and you find yourself missing the soft carpet of plantlife. But you can't risk leaving the path. With the sun now set, the lightning is the only illumination that can penetrate the clouds. And it's becoming more and more intermittent. Leaving the road provides a very real risk that your direction changes just enough and for just long enough that you might loose this lifeline to people. The non slaving kind, you hope.

And so more hours pass. Or maybe minutes. Maybe days? Probably not days. Exhaustion is begining to kick in hard now. Your limbs are leaden and hunger is sapping the meagre dregs of your adrenaline, the whisps of its former influence becoming more and more ethereal with each plodding step. The thunder and lightning has all but stopped now, the heavy pant of your strained breath the only barrier between yourself and the deafening silence of the inky eternity that surrounds you. The dirt road is your only succour, a lifeline that tells you where to place each trudging foot.

You begin to introspect. You can't work out what you did to deserve this. You weren't even a pirate for that long! It was a regretable stint in the middle of what was otherwise a very respectable maritime career: a burly deckhand for merchant vessals, smugglers and other honest entrepreneurs. The last thing you can remember from before your abduction is a drunken stagger from an unremarkable dockside tavern. You and others of your crew were making your merry way back to the ship, roaring a off-key shanty as you all webbed your arms around each others' shoulders in a tight net. A many limbed chimera listlessly shambling in the vague direction of the docks. And then you were waking up slung over the shoulder of a marching ogre with a headache thumping in tune to his march. Was the group attacked? Did you get arrested? Were you just dumped in an alley to sober up? You have no idea. And probably never will, if I'm honest.

It was with you lost in that uncomfortable thought that the cloud cover finally broke, the storm at last spent. Like a soldier briefly in the arms of an uncaring whore: an initial fire of fury and verve that quickly spatters out to be dissapointingly forgotten by both parties. Well, I won't be forgetting the storm any time soon. But that thought is quickly dispelled by the moon. Or, rather, what the moon illuminates.

A town.

A town! Or maybe a village? You're too tired to tell. Too drained to care. It's only a mile or so away. Relief sweeps through you, quashing all the fear and dread of recapture. You're safe! You made it! YOU'RE EXHAUSTED! That last one hit you like a brick wall. A brick wall of bodily pain. You have no reserves left. Your drive is spent and your stomach screams for attention. You don't know if you can make it any further.