She couldn’t help it. No matter what Kered had told her, she kept expecting the Gulap to come bounding up, a bloody Wartman’s hand dangling from its mouth. Despite the blistering heat and blazing red sun in the purple sky, Kered’s easy acceptance of the grizzly end of the Wartmen chilled her blood. His practical retrieval of his stars sickened her. It had taken grim determination to walk past the Gulap’s feast and follow Kered to this stark plain. Red dust matted the hem of her dress and rose in swirls around her ankles. Her lower legs were thick with it and her shoes were unrecognizable as black suede flats. She paused. Ahead of her loomed jagged, red-striated mountains that reminded her of the buttes of Monument Valley. The air had a similar dry scent. There appeared to be no way up the mountains and no safe way down. Unless, of course, you sprouted wings and took flight like the blue-hued hawks that occasionally soared overhead, cawing an eerie cry into the silent landscape.
