She'd struggled out of her blankets at dawn, shivering miserably, thinking that she was about to throw up again.
Her entire body had been coated in clammy perspiration, her bright hair matted and stuck to her neck and temples in damp, flame-colored tendrils.
Her breaths had been coming short and erratic as a result of the shudders that wracked her. But despite the fact that the nausea was bad enough that she'd thought vomiting might actually bring her some relief, it had apparently not been bad enough to actually trigger a bout of retching.
It had simply settled in and stayed with her; a constant feeling of dull wretchedness at the very periphery of her awareness.
The idea of getting her blankets properly rolled up and back onto her horse had been so overwhelming, so thoroughly in the realm of the impossible, that she hadn't even attempted it. She'd dragged them around to the far side of the boulder instead, where no one else from the group was likely to encounter them, and had left them there, hoping that amid all the hustle and bustle of breaking camp, nobody would notice their absence.
And nobody had.
The notion of eating anything had seemed as pointless, undesirable, and overall impossible as the idea of packing all her belongings back onto her horse. She'd resolved to at least drink as much water as possible, but as it tuned out, "as much as possible" had been two sips. She literally could force no more down her throat.
But this was it. The final stretch. She'd be home in just a few hours. So she'd forced herself to put one foot in front of the other, to cross to her horse, and to drag herself up into the saddle.
It was time to go home, and everything would be all right once she got there.
She just had to get home.
OOOOO
And so it was that she was riding, no more than a couple of hours out from the castle, toward the back of the group, about as far from Gunther as she could manage to get.
They were so close to home. So close – she recognized this terrain, she'd been out this far numerous times on horseback – and had ranged out considerably further than this, hundreds of times on Dragon.
She was literally, practically in her own backyard.
Which made it all the more bitterly unfair when the moment came that she realized – she was done. Her body was well and truly done.
It came as a surging wave of… well just of wrongness that seemed to start right in the center of her, and then rolled out toward her extremities; toward all of them, it seemed, at once.
For just a second she stiffened with a gasp. She had a panicked instant of oh no, no not now, please not –
And then everything just gave out. She was sliding sideways off her horse and then she was falling and then –
God, why now!? Gunther is going to –
Impact.