She’s hot. So hot, so dry. She needs water, so much water, a bucket, a barrel, no... even the river that runs adjacent to the farm cannot provide enough water. Part of it is her desire for alcohol, flaring up after a week or two of sobriety, but that’s not all it is. Catnip pushes and pummels herself into wakefulness, and finds herself buried in something gritty but fine. Sand. So much sand. “I’m dead?” she thinks, “No, if I was dead, would I be this thirsty?” Her hands break free of the sand confining her, the air above is not cool. It is hot and dry, and she can feel the already hot morning sun burning into the bare flesh of her palms. “Kathrine?” She tries to say, getting a mouth full of sand for her trouble. It springs her awake fully, and she explodes from the dune with the force of her coughing and choking. It strikes her before the fit subsides that she is surrounded on all sides by sand, she’s never seen so much sand and hardpan and dirt, but no grass or leaves. No water. Never been so hot. “Where…” Catnip reaches for her hat, maybe even her sunglasses, but finds neither. She looks at herself and finds that is nude. Her clothes and tools are nowhere to be found. Not in the bowl, not buried beneath the brownish sand. “What the… Why am I…?” Catnip has never felt so dry, so thirsty, so exposed. She crests the rim of the bowl of sand, and the sight before her shocks her. “Where am I?” Comes her awestruck whisper. Stretching out around her in every direction, is a trackless waste she has never imagined existed. “What is this?” she asks, but there are none to answer her question.
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“Kathrine…” She says, her voice cracking on the second syllable. Had she thought the sun was bright at home? No, she’d been foolish then. She knew better now. The desert sun shone down on her with malevolent intent. It wanted to kill her, to dry her out, to turn her to no more than dust and a pile of bleached bones. “You’re going crazy Mistress.” That was Kathrine’s voice, but Kathrine wasn’t here. No one was here. Just Catnip and the sun and the indentations her feet and tail made in the shallow sand behind her as she pushed ever onwards into the desert. A thing she’d discovered about the desert, the things that bothered her the most, were the mirages. Natural heat illusions that put her withdrawal hallucinations to shame, promising distant water only to take her deeper into the heat blasted landscape. She pleaded for water from gods who were not listening, and she walked on.
Her tongue felt like a dry and cracked door mat on the floor of her mouth. A dusty dead thing, wanting only for water. Her tail too had swelled, taking in blood and cooling it before allowing it to flow back into her body. She would have thanked Agmen, if she’d had a mind to, if she knew the benefit her tail was providing. In the evening, hardpan and sand had given way to rocky fields and scrubby grass struggling to push out of the ground. Heat baked from every stone, and even in the shade there was no relief. “I will show you fear in a handful of dust…” Catnip mumbled again. Who had said that? Roxanne? Something Roxanne had quoted to her? Roxanne was a prodigious reader, reading and devouring every word like Catnip's voracious sister devoured viscera. She’d never understood those words, but now she thought she did. There was so much of the stuff, and not a drop of water to be seen. Not even in the dry river bed she’d come across. She could smell the water at that place, but there wasn’t any. She’d dug for it, thinking that perhaps the desert had swallowed up the stream, made it flow underground. She’d come away with nothing to show for it but dirty hands and eyes too dry to produce the tears they so desperately wanted in her frustration. There were trees at that place though. Scraggly dying things that provided no shade, and tall green things covered in vicious barbs that clung to Catnips fur like painful parasites. She had to watch where she was going now, thanks to those last. The thirst would kill her sure enough, but stepping in or, god forbid, falling into a patch of those nasty things would make her current misery seem like the thirst for a glass of water at the end of a warm day.