Karuna Marinin is an Ovalisk and a traveler. She could've lived a gentle, sensible life at her Colony in the Ouroboros Valley but something drew her Westward, over the towering Fang Mountains that encircle the valley and into areas few Ovalisks speak of or remember. And so her story begins in the desert just past her valley.
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By Kerina
Prologue
A lone, slight female figure trudges through the desert. The harsh winds dry her lips and curl at her twinkling, long sky-blue hair. Her kind do not usually travel alone but she is on a journey.
On her back she carries an oddly-shaped pack twice her size. She tries to smile through the wind and sand and shields her large, sapphire eyes with a gloved hand. Her gloves were once a bright, foggy silver but the desert has saturated them with brown, mostly along the seams. The gloves join with a deep green, single-piece tunic. The tunic’s high collar presses at her neck and its sleeves dive inside her gloves. It ripples and sketches flat against her body in the wind, revealing the gentle outline of her chest. Her matching pants writhe on her legs as her crusted boots sink through the edge of a dune. Her feet stumble and she nearly staggers backward with the weight of her pack. She tries to get back on her feet but she can’t. They shake and tremble and won’t support her weight.
It’s been three days since she left the Colony and two days since she last slept. She buries her head in her pack to breathe but still she gets a mouthful of dust. She hacks, slides off her pack and searches within it. She carefully removes a long, sky-blue blanket and clings to it. She wraps it around herself and tucks the end inside her tunic. She tries breathing through the cloth. It’s harder she doesn’t cough as much and the acrid taste of dirt is muted.
Digging through the pack again, she pushes her food supplies aside and makes enough room for her to climb inside. It’s tight and stuffy but she’s incapable of sweating so it’s more comfortable than the conditions outside. She trembles a little at the tightness and reseals the pack.
Darkness wraps around her. She can almost hear a whisper in the dark but she logically dismisses it as the wind. The air inside is moist mostly from a set of aurora mushrooms in a bundle at her foot. She carefully tips the pack flat against the ground so she doesn’t crush them. Her mouth opens slightly at their smell and her nostrils flare. But she reminds herself there aren’t many. She has to conserve them.
She makes herself as comfortable as possible against the yielding ground of the small dune as curtains of sand scrape against the outside of the pack. She thinks of home, of the Clutch and the Colony, and slips off to sleep with the memory gently beckoning her.
