She was awakened by the heat. The heat burned her skin like an executioners iron.
She could not move her head, something held her back. She tugged and howled in pain, feeling the tears and splits from the skin on her temple. She opened her eyes. The stone on which she rested her head was brown from the dry clotted blood. She touched her temple; her fingers felt a hard, cracked crust. Her scab had been attached to the stone, and now flowed with blood from where she had pulled her head away. Ciri coughed and spat out sand and long sticky saliva. She raised herself up on her elbows; she looked around, then lay back down.
On all sides she was surrounded by a rocky plain, a red-grey, cut by ravines and faults, with mounds of stones piled here and there and huge boulders in bizarre shapes. O
