The Writer's Escape

4. The Caves

Serena's legs ached. 

She and Berry had only been walking through the dunes for half an hour, but it felt like days. The sand sucked down on the soles of her too-small shoes. Wind flung around sand over the dunes, the gritty grains stinging her skin. 

At least the thick sun-protection goggles Berry had lent her dimmed the angry glare of the sun high above. She tilted back her head and let more warm water from her canteen trickle into her mouth, leaving a coppery taste on her tongue. 

Berry marched ahead, her short legs somehow carrying her faster than Serena's. Serena hurried to catch up with her. 

"So," Berry said, looking over at Serena. Her voice was muffled by the scarf covering most of her face, and dark goggles obscured the rest of her face.

"What's it like, where you live?" 

"Considerably cooler," Serena said. "And much less dangerous. No magic, no spirits, no monsters." 

In her head, she scrolled through the lists of dangers she had written into the desert terrain: deceptively welcoming oases inhabited by evil spirits, giant sand-worms with a taste for human flesh, dust-devils, flame-storms, sandstorms, cursed sands, manticores, dragons, drakes . . . The list went on and on. She almost regretted thinking about it; every time she thought she saw something move in the sand, her heart jumped. 

"Sounds boring," Berry said. 

"My life there is not boring." Sarah White may have been boring, a college dropout working at a retail store and churning out endless fanfictions, but she had left that life, and name, behind. Serena Scarlet was glamorous, a published novelist. 

"Sure it ain't." 

"I'm famous where I'm from, you know," Serena said. It was only partially a lie. 

"Uh-huh. And how many monsters have you killed?" Before Serena could answer, Berry said triumphantly, "Me, I've got fifty-six. Been counting." 

"That's barbaric," Serena said, wrinkling her nose. "What do you even do with them?" 

"I sell 'em. Drake-skin fetches a pretty penny." 

Serena didn't remember that from her story notes. 

They kept marching through the sand. Serena's legs felt as though they were about to give, but she gritted her teeth and pushed through it. She wasn't about to admit to Berry that she needed a break. 

She passed the time replaying the fight scene with the drakes in her head, pulling apart the detail. She filed away observations in her head for later: the way the knives flashed in the sunlight, the fluid movements of the fighters, the stench of drake's blood. This will be so helpful for constructing action scenes, she thought. Already, a fight between the witches and sorceresses was taking shape in her mind. . . . She wished they could pause their trek so she could reach for the pen and paper in her bag.

After some time, they reached the craggy mountains scraping against the sky. A cave mouth gaped from the side of one of the mountains, and Serena staggered towards it. Finally. 

"That's them. C'mon, let's warn them about the attack," Berry said, trudging forward. 

In the distance, wind whistled over the dunes, but the caves were cool and sheltered. With solid ground under her feet, Serena breathed a sigh of relief. 

She craned her neck to look around at the caves in wonder. They were just as she had imagined them, like they had sprang from right out of her head. Yawning sandstone caverns stretched into darkness, the rock twisted into strange, smooth formations. Dusty beams of sunlight broke through the gloom from gaps in the rock.