Chapter 54: Buried Alive
Mark made quick work of the Bora’s carcass, carving strips of meat free. Blood and viscera clung to his hands as he buried them in the corpse, looking for parts of the beasts with the most meat. He did this with the efficient, practiced motion of someone who had done this exact grim task more times than he probably wanted to admit.
"Not gonna lie," he said, tossing a strip toward Lucas, "beast meat’s grown on me. Elle and I used to eat it a lot back then. It’s really good."
"Same. I ate it a lot with the people I traveled with too. We were worried about it tasting horrible" Lucas caught it, [Ignition] flaring low and somewhat controlled around his palm. He held the meat over the flame until it cooked properly, the smell of it rising rich and smoky into the desert air.
"Beast meat’s surprisingly good.... That’s one thing I’ll be thankful for in this hell hole."
Pyra watched the whole process with a faint, uncertain look on her face, though hunger clearly won once Lucas handed her a properly cooked piece.
"I’m trying very hard not to think about what this actually is."
"Best policy," Mark said, already halfway through his own portion. "Trust me, it’s either that, or starving out here." He took another bite. "Trust me, you do not wanna know what it’s like going through this shit without food..."
They ate in relative quiet after that, the desert sun beginning its slow descent toward the horizon, painting the dunes in shades of gold and deep orange.
Lucas ate in silence before his eyes widened, looking as though he just remembered something...
"Wait." He stretched out his hand and a small, familiar object materialised in his hands...
It was the water bottle he’d been given back during his very first day in the Edge. He turned it over in his hands, a strange, small comfort settling over him at the sight of it. "I still have this. [Water Bearer]. Forgot I even had it until just now."
"Please tell me that’s not the same water from your first day here," Mark said, eyeing it with a worried look.
"It’s a purifier, not a time capsule. Relax dude" Lucas twisted it open and handed it to Pyra first. "Here. It cleans whatever we pour into it. Bigger than it looks too. Nothing to worry about."
She accepted it gratefully, turning the small bottle over in her hands with open curiosity. "This thing’s been with you since the very beginning?"
"Since day one," Lucas said, nodding. "Feels like a lifetime ago."
"It probably was, if you think about it," Mark said quietly, and none of them argued at the point.
They all drank from it, taking gulp after gulp of water as they passed it around.
Later, they took turns filling the bottle from what little moisture they could find pooled in the shadow of a nearby rock formation.
"This should be enough as long as we don’t waste it. I don’t think there’s an Oasis anywhere..." Lucas said, collecting the bottle as it vanished back to wherever it came from...
***
They walked until the sun dipped low enough to give the dunes a long shadow, and eventually settled low enough that it had become nightfall...
"I’ll take the first watch," Mark said, already settling into position facing the open desert. "You sleep. You look like you’re about to fall over."
"I’m fine."
"You clearly don’t look fine to me.... Sleep, Lucas."
Lucas hesitated, the old, familiar dread curling tight in his chest at the mere thought of sleeping...
Sleep meant vulnerability.... It meant closing his eyes and trusting the dark not to swallow him the way it once had, back before he even understood what this place was, back when some winged monstrosity had ended him without a single warning back at a fire he once thought was safe.
Needless to say, he was terrified of sleeping....
He didn’t know what might attack him this time or when, or where it would come from.
And death doesn’t really feel less painful no matter how many times you experience it...
"I’d rather take the first watch," he said instead. "You sleep."
"I insist. You need to sleep. I’ve got this." Mark’s tone came hard, though he softened it a moment later. "We’ll switch after four hours. Deal?"
"Four hours," Lucas repeated, glancing up at a sky he didn’t recognize, stars scattered in patterns that matched nothing from home, nothing like the astronomy he studied back in college. "You sure time even works the same way out here?"
"No idea," Mark admitted, shrugging. "But it’s the best I’ve got, and standing here arguing about it isn’t going to make either of us less tired."
’Four hours,’ Lucas thought grimly. ’Assuming time even means the same thing here that it does back home. Assuming this hell hole doesn’t play any tricks..."
He didn’t voice the thought though. Arguing would only get him questions he didn’t want to give answers to, questions about exactly why the idea of closing his eyes terrified him more than facing another beast did. Questions he’d spent weeks carefully avoiding with everyone as much as he could...
"Deal," he said finally, and lay back against the cool sand, forcing his breathing to slow and forcing his body to accept an exhaustion it had stacked up...
Sleep found him faster than he expected, dragging him despite every quiet, anxious part of him still straining to stay alert, still half listening for a growl or a shriek or the particular silence that had once preceded the worst night of his life.
***
Heat woke him not long after he slept...
Not the warmth of the desert sun that indicated the morning had come, but something sudden— a violent wave of scorching air that rolled towards him, engulfing his enter body in searing heat.
He bolted upright before conscious thought had fully caught up, every instinct screaming at him all at once.
Another pillar of fire erupted from the sand a few feet away, roaring skyward in a column of hot flame that lit the landscape in orange and yellow light.
The light was so intense that it threw long, shadows across the surrounding dunes.
Another pillar erupted beneath him, and Lucas’ instincts screamed danger as he rolled away from the pillar barely.
However, relief flooded his body as memory caught up...
"[Ignition]... I’m fireproof. This can’t hurt me."
The flames licked across his skin and clothes and simply didn’t burn, exactly as they hadn’t back at the Hestia fight.
Heaving a relieved sigh, he realised that Mark might not be so lucky...
He scrambled to his feet amid the flame, unharmed but disoriented with ears ringing from the roar of the blast...
"Mark!" He shouted , "Mark! Where are you?!"
He staggered forward through the dying flame, coughing against smoke and scanning the terrain frantically for any sign of movement, any sign that this was somehow less catastrophic than his instincts were telling him...
He found the jacket first....
It lay a few feet from where Mark had been keeping watch, scorched black and still smoking faintly at the edges.
Its fabric crumpled and burnt beyond recognition and Lucas stomach dropped as his eyes tracked further, finding what remained near the jacket.
A hand...
Blackened and unmistakable, still curled in the shape of a fist that had never gotten the chance to fight back, fingers frozen mid clench against a threat that had given him no time to defend himself at all.
"Shit—" The word came out broken with his mind refusing the evidence laid bare before him... "No, no, Mark—" His voice cracked. He was sure this was Mark— or rather, what was left of him...
The arm was burnt to a crisp but it was recognizable to touch. Lucas would never forget those big strong hands that had gripped him more than once...
There was no time to grieve. No time to process the horror properly because the second the thought of Pyra surfaced, ice cold panic replaced the shock entirely.
"PYRA—" He spun, sprinting toward where she’d been sleeping a short distance away, sand kicking up violently beneath his boots.
His heart pounded against his ribs hard enough to hurt as adrenaline flooded his body. "Pyra! Where are you?!"
The ground erupted...
Another pillar of flame roared skyward beneath his feet shooting him upwards...
He slammed against the sand hard, knocking the wind out of him as he tried to stand up...
However, something terrifying happened...
The sand beneath him gave way entirely the instant he landed, collapsing downward in a violent, sudden sinkhole that swallowed him whole before he even had time to scream, dragging him down into darkness and pressure and the suffocating, crushing weight of an entire dune collapsing in on itself.
He clawed instinctively and desperately, [Ignition] roaring to life around both fists in a futile attempt to burn his way free, but sand didn’t burn or rather, the sand pouring in didn’t allow it to burn.
The sand fell, filling every gap his failing limbs managed to create, packing into his mouth, his nose and his lungs, as oxygen was blocked out.
"Ack—!"
He clawed at the sand desperately, his eyes reddening and foam forming at the corner of his mouth.
His chest heaved against sand that refused to move, lungs screaming for air that no longer existed— the adrenaline flooding through him only making it worse...
The panic gave way to something worse as the horrible certainty that his own body was failing him, drowning in a substance that shouldn’t have been able to kill him in the first place.
Dirt filled his throat. It was thick and choking with each desperate, involuntary swallow only packing more of it deeper, and somewhere in the crushing dirty darkness his own heartbeat reached a frenzy as pressure increased on his ribs...
He tried to dig, but his arms failed to move as it was buried completely on both sides.
The pressure built until his ribs felt like it was about to crack under the weight bearing down from above, his lungs burning with desperation as he understood that he was dying.
Darkness crept into the edges of his vision as his body’s last reserves of oxygen finally gave out entirely, the carbon dioxide filling his bloodstream completely.
Slowly but surely, his movements slowed. The desperation no longer there and replaced with final, cold, acceptance...
Soon, the sand filled his eyes as his body went rigid.
[You have died.]