There are rumors, of living sand.
No one has ever seen anything, not young wandering child nor withering elder. There are no reports of fangs, flashes of death, or blood-curling echoes of pain. But still they know.
The light rises, the sun rises from the desert. It spreads and grows, a hastily expanding ball of heat and force. This brillance lingers at the edges of their civlization, it is fierce and no man would be fool enough to mistake that.
It is the death to wander past the smatterings of a village, to become hopelessly lost and forgotten.
The sands writes the names of every thing it takes against the leathery skin of these struggling humans.
Sango has come, all this way. She brings nothing with her but her body and her being, her possessions. There are no accompaniments, no companions.
The wealth of sun and wind beats over her face, her back.
She loosens her sleeves, and seriously considers dropping the load she carries to sink beneath the drifting sands. But her life is held between the bands of tightened cloth. To seperate from water is to seperate from life, and she would not have that.
It is no instant gratification, the immortality of the desert takes it time stripping her skin to brazen patches of red and pain. She is burned from the inside out, and finds herself no cooler as the sun sets. Her sweat drips until it dries, the very source and root this barren.
She thirsts, but the canteen is empty.
From horizon to horizon the sky is blazed with orange. Brilliant gold combing hectic lines through the steep cliffs and hills. The setting sun paints stripes of red through both air and land, as if there is nothing seperating, as if they are but one.
Why has she come..?
The storms gather and linger.
They move, as if under some command, to sweep invisible brushes against the earth. Her tracks are erased as Sango lingers as she can beneath a thick cloth blanket, the torrents of heat lashing against her even through that.
The world tilts and for the life of her, she wouldn't be able to tell from whence she came. It is all one solid line of gold. Burning into eternity.
What she would do for water.
What wouldn't she do. Her throat burns and spasms with the effort of breathing. It is parched all the way down straight into her intestines. Her tongue sticks to the roof of her mouth and she gasps as she stumbles.
The day lingers, and her clothes peel off as she moves, clingling like glue to her body.
In the distance she can see a ball of light, slowly fading.
She prays for darkness to rise.
The night is living behind her eyelids.
She can feel the wind etching lines against her reddened and sore flesh, but Sango can't bring herself to rise. Her head sinks beneath the sand just by the weight of it all. She can no longer carry herself.
She doesn't even bother. Sango knows she should, but to venture further in any direction is to wither away from existance. She can see no signs of neither human nor demon.
She is lost far beyond the terms of where lost could define.
The sand chokes her breathes, and she tries to swallow against it, beating a fury at having to linger motionless. At being unable.
Against her side, a light roars and steadily rises. Has the sun risen already?
Her sight fades from vision to dreams, and she is not sure in which world that figure lingering at the edges of the light exists.