the barriers in your mind [open]

Asavvi Kouris I'll use you as a warning sign She'd woken up in a field. On its own that fact didn't seem all to outlandish, but given that Asavvi had no recollection of how she had gotten there was definite cause for alarm. On her back in the grass she’d looked up at the dull grey sky and for a moment wondered if this was a dream. No, she’d thought, if this was a dream there wouldn’t a stone digging into my back. She sat up slowly bringing a hand up to rub the sleep from her eyes and peered out over the grassy expanse. There was no one, at least that she could see, and nothing she recognized. Even the vegetation itself was unfamiliar; a far cry from the semiarid desert terrain of her home.   Home… "Nizho?" The murmur came off her lips and the first real threads of panic started to thrum in her mind. She stood, turning quickly on the spot to look around her again, but nothing had changed, there was no memory that came flooding in to explain where she was or why she seemed to be so very far from anything she knew. The gap was what alarmed her most, the total lack of elapsed time. She’d been working, it seemed, just hanging a length of freshly dyed cloth up to dry, she remembered so clearly reaching up to drape the cloth over the bar and then—nothing, she’d just woken up here. Asavvi’s eyes darted down to her hands and found the tips of her fingers still stained deep blue, she even still had on the same grey dress and stained white apron. "Nizho!" She shouted it this time, and then listened as only silence came back to her. Foolish, she thought, to think that even in this strange place he'd still be within shouting distance. We can't be tethered forever. The blue on her fingers gave her a clue at least, this kind had always faded from her skin within days so she couldn’t be missing that much time, a day at the most and that thought seemed a comfort for a brief moment but it did little to settle the confusion. She closed her eyes tight and drew in a deep breath, pushing the panic away and reaching for calm; she needed to be calm. Not for the first time she wished she could have been more like her siblings, like her parents. None of them would have been scared, Castor would have laughed and jumped into the ‘adventure’ of it. Asavvi? She could only try and think about what to do next. So she’d walked. It was the only thing to do really. There had to be something somewhere, she reasoned, so with no settlements in sight she’d picked a direction and stuck to it. The field seemed to stretch on for a ways but where it ended had her slowing. The transition from grass to a seemingly barren swath of land seem unnaturally abrupt and Asavvi hesitated at the divide, and altered her course to walk alongside the shift rather tan crossing over it. There was something unsettling about the place, she knew, but she found herself unable to focus enough to figure out why that was. The headache had come up on her quickly and she groaned before sinking down in the sparse grass again. She cradled her head in her hands telling herself to just think but the pressure in her temples was pounding to much for her to make sense of anything properly.