CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Gwendolyn marched across the Great Waste beneath the relentless two suns of the desert sky, Krohn at her side, as she had been doing day after day, putting one foot before the other, stirring up dust, her legs aching with the endless monotony of marching. They had not stopped marching ever since they had left Darius’s people, all of them determined to cross this desert, to find the Second Ring, to find help.
Yet as she looked up ahead, as she had for days, all she saw before her was more monotony, an empty landscape, nothing on the horizon, just more of this red waste. The hard desert floor was cracked, stiff, stretching forever to nothing, and nothing to break up the monotony except the occasional passing dust cloud or thorn bush rolling in the wind. It was the emptiest
