Fever Dreams

Lost's days were a nightmare of frozen frames of heat waves, hot and cold. He woke seating, his skin itching as it dried from the heat and sweat in vain to saturate his scalding limbs. Or he woke violently shaking, or cold beyond shaking, glaciers running icy channels through his veins and lungs gasping for warmth. Those few moments of clarity, scarce contrasted with feverish agony, collected disparate images of lying on a stretched, animal-skin litter hoisted by two burly blurs Lost couldn't quite discern.  The air wavered angrily, shimmering, as though a lens of gauze covered Lost's eyes, and Lost suspected they crossed a vast desert.

He would have been correct. Chaos, only kilometers behind, watched as the caravan carrying Lost progressed from oasis to oasis in the arid wasteland. The sands shone like reflective glass, a second crimson sun, leaving no solace from the sky or surface from the overbearing light, no remiss in the endless, rolling sands. Entropy had torn through this region as a detached and implacable force, crushing the iron stones into rust-red sands, a desert chaff full of scattered memories.  Small, finely sandblasted rocks littered the ever-shifting dunes, a flaky, craggy hide of earth that looked like the scabbed skin of some subterranean monstrosity.

The rolling hills eternal, Chaos thought, an ocean of stone and silicon in everlasting swells with scarce a cactus or shrub interrupting the cruel monotony. A halo of clouds coated the horizon like sea-foam, upsetting an otherwise perfect blue sky, glossed over with heat haze. Small rodents scampered along the cracks and seethes of the low ground, and the caravan ahead threw whirlwinds of sand into the air, leaving clouds of iron which Chaos carefully followed, always keeping low and silent, a huntress.

----notes----

While Lost tossed and turned, fighting an endemic illness, Chaos tracked, wondering what these strange people wanted, where they were going. They were not the same, she'd realized, as those that had attacked her near the ship. It wasn't until the fifth night that they reached a destination. The caravan stopped on the edge of a great forest of towering trees and fungus, stretching high as the hills.