There's Crows In The Garden | 3rd Life AU

.: Blood In The Sand :.

TWs: blood, war, death

***

In the end, we never ended up going to Cookie. Instead, on the morning after the first conflict, we realized that we had gotten lost, so we went off in a random direction and hoped for the best. Miraculously, after a few days consisting of mostly panic and walking through forest that hadn't been touched by humans in millennia, we arrived at the edge of the desert. 

"Well, isn't this lucky!" Ren remarked. "We've found our way directly to our enemies' land!" Without a second thought, he started marching into the desert.

Quickly, I called out, "Shouldn't we go around the edge of the desert instead of straight through it? We don't know where we are relative to the Sand Castle; we could be trudging hopelessly through the sand for days!"

Ren turned back to me. "How would wandering through the desert for days be any different than wandering through the woods for days?" I gawked at him, and his eyebrows furrowed. "What?"

"My King, our flasks don't hold much water."

"What does that have to do with anything?" Ren looked thoroughly confused.

I sighed and continued spelling it out for him. "If we're walking around for days, we'll need to refill."

Nothing.

"Which place, do you think, will be easier to find water in?"

A wick lit in Ren's head. "Oh! We'll all die of dehydration if we go through the desert! Hand, you're a genius!"

"I do what I can," I said with half a smile. Behind me, Impulse stifled a laugh.

Ren returned to the edge of the desert and cleared his throat, looking a little embarrassed. "Let's carry on, shall we?"

I bobbed my head. "Lead the way, my liege."

***

The day after that event, Etho came back from doing some scouting to announce, "There's a village ahead, Southland. We'll want to start heading north into the desert."

Ren tilted his head. "Sorry, why do we want to go into the desert now? I thought we came to a consensus that we were staying on the edge of it." He turned to me, and I shrugged. I was just as confused as he was.

"Southland is just about directly south of the Sand Castle," BigB butted in. "If we turn north now, we have a straight shot to the castle."

"Oh!" said Ren. "Well, let's venture out into the desert, then! We can go siege the heck out of Scar and Grian!"

So, we wandered into the shifting sand, and within an hour, we were all complaining about specs of it in our shoes and in our clothes and in our armor (in the case of the soldiers). I actually didn't find it that bad (I'd been through many a desert in my lifetime), but I got swept up in the others' complaints, and, before long, I was also in a foul mood. We kept marching on, though, fueled by our collective misery. 

Around sunset, we came into sight of the mountain the Sand Castle was on, and so we set up camp. We were still far enough away that we couldn't see the castle itself, so hopefully the people in the castle couldn't see us. If they could, we'd probably end up getting ambushed in the middle of the night, which was less than ideal.

Thankfully, though, that didn't happen. 

Instead, I woke up at sunrise feeling well-rested and with sand in my hair. By the time the sky had shifted from orange to blue, everyone in the army had eaten and we were already on our way to the base of the mountain the Sand Castle sat atop. Our plan was to surround it and wait for a while, and then, if nothing happened, we'd storm up the mountain and take over the castle.