Randar was tired. She was hungry. She was lost.
She still could not remember, and now the home she had thought she found was long behind her. Where was she now? Where were her friends? Familiar faces? Anything at all? She did not know, and could not wrap her head around anything even close to a memory. She had started walking again, and had not stopped. This was where her paws had led her, to the point of exhaustion. This was as far as she could go.
She did not know where this was.
Randar’Reik collapsed to the ground in a heap, breathing heavily. Dust kicked up in front of her nose as she panted for breath, her body shuddering, her pelt slicked down by perspiration and a build up of muck that rain had not come to wash off while she walked, unstopping, through day and night. Her stomach was empty, her body lean and drawn.
Maktaba saw this wraith of a creature, laying in a lion’s shape on the yellow grass nearby, and was drawn to it. He passed over the cracking, sun dried earth slowly at first, thinking he was seeing a mirage of some sort. The eyes often played tricks on him if he walked too long under the heat of the day, and did not stop enough to drink water or feed himself. The sands and savannah could be dangerous terrains, but this place was no desert. This was a grass land, and there were patches of green where water pooled, and a river that ran nearby. It split and ran in small outlets under the earth, which is what allowed for the almost healthy plant life that gathered around watering holes.
There was one of these not too far away: the male lion had just come from there.
He hurried to the lioness, once he realized she was real and not a phantom of his mind. He drew closer and she did not move, though he saw the heavy, staccato way her side heaved and fell, and the puffs of dust that came in front of her muzzle at random intervals. She was breathing, but it was clear she was exhausted. He had to do something for her, but what? And where had she come from? Why had she run herself so ragged? Her condition was terrible, and he saw that it went beyond her breathing. Though her fur covered it from being visible, a light brush of his paw over her ribcage revealed how thin she was.
She needed his help, even if she had not asked him for it. She was not conscious enough to tell him to leave her alone, so he took it upon himself to help her out of the heat and toward the water. If he needed to, he would get her some food and hope to revive her that way. If he was too late, he was sure he would never forgive himself. No, he was in it now, and when she woke she would find herself stuck with him until she was better. He had a little bit of a hero in him, and that part of his mind would not quiet itself now.
He carefully took hold of her scruff and tried to drag her. She was heavy, despite her thin frame, and he did not want to drag her and hurt her as much as he imagined he might if he took her the whole distance back to the watering hole. It was not that far, really, as he had just walked that way after a nap there in the shade, but with an unconscious lioness with him he imagined things would be a lot more difficult.
Randar huffed and felt something strange in her dreams. Her body was being shifted, but in her head it was fluid. She was rising up, as if under water. Or as if she had become part bird. She was rising up, flying, suspended up in the air as she overlooked the lands below. She did not recognize these lands, though, some sort of amalgamation of all the places she had walked through of late piled together. In any case, she was hovering, moving slowly, and bobbing as she made a slow path toward some glowing point.
She wanted to reach that glowing point. Whatever it was, she wanted to reach it. It grew cooler as she drew closer, which was not what she was expecting it to do, but it was certainly not unwelcome. She got so close to the glowing point and, with a sense of urgent disappointment flooding over her, saw it diminish to nothing. It faded into darkness, leaving her floating blind. She struggled against the darkness, the creeping cold and the unsettling silence, and was greeted to her own surprise by something reasonably hard under her paw as she struck out wildly.
A yelp cut through the unsettling quiet of the darkness, and she opened her eyes quiet suddenly. The sensation of floating was gone, gravity weighing heavily on her as she found herself laying on the ground, bent over a rock or a log of some kind. It made her back ache, and she moved feebly off of it. Her paw touched that reasonably hard thing again, and she looked down to see a lion’s face under her paw.
“Oh!” she yelped, startled beyond believe. She pulled away from him and he took in a sharp breath, pushing himself to his feet slowly. The log turned out to be his body, though she could not fathom how she had come to be strewn across it. He had helped her, of course. Picking her up had been difficult at best, but he had managed to get some leverage and haul her onto his back. After that is was just slow walking under the burden of her weight back toward the watering hole. Which he would be in need of once he got there, considering the effort he was pouring into this endeavor.
They had at least reached the water before she had started thrashing and threw him off balance.
He smiled at her sheepishly, opening his mouth to introduce himself, but she was already on her feet. Revived from the short nap and the sharp scare, she turned and took off running into the trees growing around the water, a small pocket of forest. She was gone before he could do a thing about it.
He was left blinking in confusion.
(Word Count: 1,088 in Word)
