Someone from Rusalka, perhaps?
Shimmering white sand as far as the eye could see. Her mouth was dry and sticky and tasted foul. She had run far away from…
before… and ended up here, the opposite but the same. She had almost died from the flame, and now she would die from the heat of the sun. The hardened sand beneath her paws baked in the noonday heat and her paws were burning, drying out, reopening old wounds from before. Her head swam and before her eyes the fairies which had followed her out of the forest flitted about.
Keep going, they encouraged her.
Or die, some added, maliciously.
On the edge of collapsing, she stumbled ever onward, her mind fracturing between the present and the past. The heat,
the flame, the smoke, the sand, the distant sound of the ocean,
the cry of many animals fleeing the forest, the wavering, flickering air in front of her,
caused by flame… or was it just the sun playing tricks? She panted in an attempt to stay cool but the air baked her lungs.
Bloody paw prints left a trail behind her as she pushed herself forward.
A woman appeared before her like a vision, but Selina assumed her mind was simply playing tricks on her. Since leaving her home, she had often found herself at the mercy of wolves—strange or familiar—when between the state of awake and asleep. They tormented her dreams and followed her into the waking world until she finally gathered the strength to wake fully. Yet still, they seemed to linger at the corners of her vision, just out of reach, waiting for her to let her guard down so they could attack her.
Never had one appeared to her in the middle of the day, and never had one seemed so… real. So solid. It was the sun; it had caused a mirage. She blinked, expecting the ghost to disappear, but it remained, and now it spoke to her.
Come wid me. You bleed. You will soon be burnt to death.
It took an eternity for the words to make sense in her head, and all the while she swayed on the spot and stared at the vision with glassy eyes. A strange accent, one Selina had never heard before. You bleed.
Head still swimming, she glanced down at herself and saw no obvious wounds. She looked up at the woman again, though the action of moving her head made her feel she was about to pass out. She tried to speak, but the heat and dehydration seemed to have glued her throat closed. A strange, garbled sound was all that came out of her mouth. Dumbly, she nodded once, and began to walk again, stumbling from the pain in her paws and her lack of… everything: lack of sustenance, willpower… even her body itself seemed to be growing translucent, but that, of course, was simply another hallucination.
Selina allowed herself to be carried along by the woman, stumbling beside her incoherently. Even the fairies left her alone now, for she was too exhausted to conjure them. They made it to a palm forest, something Selina had never seen before, but she could not appreciate it now. The woman said something to her but her brain was too fuzzy to understand it; she simply sank down against the tree that the woman had left her beside and dozed off in the time it took for the woman to return.
Half-standing as she was, she did not fall into a deep sleep, and her dreams were strange and fleeting, causing her eyelids to flutter were anyone around to see them.
Selina awoke with a start at the woman’s command: “Drink.” She inhaled sharply, her eyes fluttering open and gazing unseeingly for a moment or two before reality crashed back down around her. She looked down at the water in the leaves and suddenly lurched forward, lapping at the liquid—the blood of the gods—with reckless abandon.
Too soon, she was asked for her name, and her brain scrambled and swam around inside her head in utter confusion. She did not answer for a time, licking the leaves until there was not a drop of water left on any of them. Feeling somewhat better, but still perilously close to death or unconsciousness, she lifted her head with a wobble and looked at the woman with her grey-blue eyes.
“Selina,” she whispered, the S-sound coming from her maw like a whiplash, while the rest of her name flowed from her tongue like mist in the early morning.
Erzulie’s strange accent made it difficult for Selina to follow what she was saying, though she was sure part of the confusion was due to dehydration. What she had gathered was that the woman wanted her to come with her somewhere. Selina did not care where they were going; she did not care about anything. She gazed at Erzulie with blank eyes and then stood on somewhat shaky legs and began to walk in the gestured direction.
Erzulie had given her water to keep her from dying, and that was enough encouragement for Selina to trust her for now. She had come from a group of fae deep in a forest untouched by others; she had never experienced the feeling of distrust. She was broken and and her mind was shattered, but she was no longer alone. It was enough.
Fairies danced just outside the edges of her vision, flitting about her as she followed Erzulie to Rusalka.
She is not like us, they warned her.
No one is like us, Selina replied.
Our kind is dead. I am the last.
End? Perhaps a new one at the borders of RUS?