Jeez, give me some slack. It is finals week after all. A big paragraph for each day that I missed, and two extra ones.

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I awoke and it was night. A cold night, one that huddled as close 'round the campfire as the cold men did. It was the kind of cold that sapped willpower and dulled reflexes and turned boisterous soldiers into shivering wrecks. The limits of human endurance were, after all, human things intended to be reachable by any human, even if some were stubborn enough to walk for longer than others before reaching them. Only a handful of the troop now remained mobile and their hearts had lost all fire. But who could blame them? It had been night when I went to sleep. It had been night for at least twenty hours before then. All told we were in perhaps our thirtieth hour of darkness but it had grown so very hard to keep track. We knew only that the moon had long since been down, and we'd as yet had no sight of the sun. Still. That was enough to invoke despair in each man - the sort of crushing uncertainty of being trapped in this witchnight. Of already being dead, maybe.

The bedroll was not comfortable. Nothing in this land was comfortable, not even the women. The people here were as ugly and inhospitable as the barren rocks that had spawned them (for it is said that even our natural historians, ever so prone to equivocation, do consider them a separate race entirely rather than a degenerate offshoot). But we hadn't seen any of them since the spell took hold apart from a local guide who we had not permitted to leave camp as a matter of security. That one was an interesting exception to this malady of the spirit, or of perceptions at the least (and maybe of reality at the most). I could not pronounce her name, but she was used to this, with the tongue of those people being so weirdly guttural. The merchants of the East with voices like tinkling crystal never even bothered attempting, or so is my understanding. It is from them that she received the name Sky for she was the tallest among them by virtue of reaching perhaps an average height for a woman of my race and having better posture than most of hers. She was also more beautiful than most for she had a queer set of refined features over a skull that remained unfortunately crude. It reminded me of nothing so much as a hand-made replica of a mass production piece, with finer craftsmanship, yet poorer adherence to the design. Better, perhaps, but not right.

The exception that I spot in her is not that her inner fire persists, for what the men have lost she never had in the first place. I believe that she retains her spirit because it is one made of shadow rather than flame. In her mannerisms she was like a candelit room's dancing shapes cavorting as they will yet always clinging close to their source to avoid the deeper, crueler things of true darkness. The shadows may play tricks or alarm or hide malice but even they cannot survive blackness, and are because of this those who have them in their spirits are not so different as could be expected from those beings besouled with sublime light. In the metaphysical our paths would diverge greatly but in the moment we were both faced with this curse laid on ourselves, or our surroundings, or whatever sort of hex this was - and so in the moment we both were powerless, both were threatened, both did not understand.

I was prone to philosophical introspection and this proceeded slower in the cold and slower still when without creature comforts. But after a while of thinking about the implications of my prior thought I felt emanating from my conscience a curious inclination that maybe I was wrong, and that maybe she actually knew something. She did not speak often, for as a faint wisp of a shadow she wilted away under examination. But I was more akin to a sensitive than the gruff interrogators that had as often tried to lay hands on her as on her thoughts, and she had some manner of strange magnetism that had made me suspect her of having some involvement with the mystical. They had not noticed that, I am sure, and I had not told them - they had singled her out merely because it was convenient. It had kept morale up for a while to have a captive outsider when the outside was all of a sudden so threatening, and for that purpose they were careful not to seriously harm anything other than her liberty.

That strange curiosity, though, made me consider that perhaps she really did know something of this fell happening and was simply too scared or hate-filled or disgusted at the foreigner men around her. I, too, was an outsider among them (albeit a more accepted one). And so I stood and dressed rapidly, as rapidly as any man in the camp had moved for some time, I suspect. It was more hope than my languid mind had felt for a while that maybe she would listen to me, speak to me - or if not speak, at least give away some hint. A false hope, perhaps, but even still better than none. Once my tall cap was on I pushed aside the flap to face the yawning blackness encircling camp, steeled myself with the thought that I would at least know now something more than I had lying on the ground, and began walking.