Dragonworld: The Drive For Power

Part 11: Where The Eagles Fly

The Forever Grass

His tongue was scorched, dry as a desert, sticking to the roof of his mouth. Each time he tried to swallow, the inside of his throat felt like a thousand needles poking through it. His hands drifted to his cracked lips, but the effort to lick them brought no relief. Marching for so long, his internal fuel reserve had been depleted.

"Thirsty," he tried whispering. It didn't come out right, the sound barely passing through the throat. 

He had not noticed that his flask was empty. Shaking it, barely a drop came out. The human body can survive for weeks without food. Without water, it can only do so for a maximum of tree days.

Pafe's childhood guides often referred to the rule of 3 when teaching him about survival in the wild. You can survive 3 minutes without air, 3 days without a sip of water, and 3 weeks without food.

How much time has passed since his last drink? Pafe wasn't sure. In his state, he had only concentrated on moving forward. However, now his entire body was shutting down. It needed liquids. Fast.

Where to find water? There must be some source nearby. After all, he wasn't in a desert. He was surrounded by green. And green signified life. And life depended on water.

Squinting in the sun, he tried to catch a glimpse of anything that might point him in the right direction. There wasn't much to go on. Only grass everywhere.

The Forever Grass is a vast stretch of grass spreading out in all directions. It's so great that it can take months to cross it from one side to the other. The landscape is mostly flat, but varied in places. At different points, the tall grasses of the prairie are replaced by short grasses of the steppe, to be once again replaced by the tall grasses.

Pafe thought back to a lesson his teacher gave on it. He pictured the old man's face and his slow matter-of-fact way of talking. 

"The Forever Grass is located to the east of clan lands. It is inhabited by different types of nomadic peoples. You have the fierce raiders of the western steppes, who can cover long distances in short amounts of times. The vast prairies of the middle are inhabited by horse-mounted tribes who live in small camps made up of tepees. In the east, the herders of the plains survive off of breeding herds of cows, sheep, and camels," he recalled his teacher saying. 

Pafe didn't know much about the Forever Grass and what he could encounter there. He had heard stories, ones told around the campfires of his castle at night. However, most of these were embellished tall-tales which had very little to do with reality.

Walking on, he kept a lookout for anything that could help him out of his predicament. As time passed, this determination began to wane. His parched lips were beginning to crack. The pain kept increasing, weakening his concentration.

It felt useless. A hint of despair entrenched itself in the back of his mind, only prevented from growing bigger by the fact his head was spinning. It's as if the world had suddenly started shaking. 

His skull kept falling lower, the neck breaking under its weight. At that point, he had almost given up. His eye was no longer scanning the horizon. The legs were just trudging on.

Then, his feet stumbled into something. Mud. Continuing on, the ground started to feel wet. Straightening up his head, he opened his good eye wide. Spread in front of him was what he was searching for. 

He found a pond of water, nestled between the grass. There was horse manure all around, and flies everywhere, but not much of a smell.

At least he couldn't smell anything. He didn't know whether this was a reflection of there really being no odor, or rather because of the fact that his nose was plugged shut by dried up blood.