Nan

1.
	Nan was tired and hungry. Here she was, out in the desert, searching for some dusk sage. She knew that mixing them into a broth would help to relieve even the most intense stomach cramps. She knew also that the desert was not the place to be traveling alone this time of year. More even than that she knew that she could not let young Verras continue to wither away in his bed, unable to keep food down. The look on his father’s face as she left that morning made her resolve on this absolute.
	As she crested the top of yet another short dune she lost her footing among a great deluge of sand. As she began to topple she submitted to the fall; she had been meaning to sit for a rest anyways. Coming to a stop a good 10 feet further down the dune than she started, she let out a wearisome sigh and simply lay there staring at the sky. She watched for a few minutes as the wisps turned ever more red. This red was so vibrant and pervasive that it masked the greying she had started to observe peppering her chin and chest. Grey hair is a crown of splendor, she thought to herself staring in the mirror that morning. She had chuckled. Ratfolk grayed on their chins and down to their bellies as they aged; she predicted in her future, rather than a glorious crown, a codpiece of splendor instead. Unsurprisingly, not as comforting of a thought.
	The other thought that accompanied her less and less frequent looks in the mirror was that she was much too young for such signs of age at just over thirty. “You care too much,” her best friend Fhif had told her over breakfast last week. “You put that much of yourself out there, it weighs on your soul.” Nan had laughed that off at the time. Fhif had a tendency to be a bit melodramatic, especially when it came to advice. Lately though, she could feel it. She could feel that grey seeping its way in: Deep down into her bones. In fact, her initial resolve that morning when she woke up was to take some “Nan time.” She had been at the market picking up some bread for a picnic lunch when she met Verras’s father.
	After a few more minutes, closing her eyes and seeing that crimson glow radiate through her eyelids, she brushed the sand out of her whiskers and hoisted herself back to her feet. You’re not old yet Nan, she thought to herself as she stopped for a minute to put on her glasses which she had started wearing just recently. She decided to skip taking a moment to appreciate the irony. She scanned the horizon, holding up one hand over her eyes to block out that crimson wash. While she still had her bearings, she had walked much further out into the desert than she had planned for. She knew that she would have to camp for the night at this point.
She opened her bag and took a quick stock of the contents: Her knitted shawl, a small herb journal, the bread from the marketplace that morning, a few sprigs of an herbal painkiller, and a small billy club she always carried for self-defense (even though Fhif insisted she had no reason for such a barbaric thing). Nan you twit, she said, half in her head, half under her breath, where are your matches? Although she had no reason to carry them since she had stopped smoking last year, she habitually bought them; the last holdover from that nasty habit. Maybe that’s where this silver came from, she pondered, stroking her chin, as she resumed trudging the rest of the way down the dune.

2.
	As the red satin wisps gave way to a rhinestoned velvet swath, Nan built a little bow out of a twig and some thread she had unlooped from the tassel on her shawl.  Although she had never successfully built a fire using this method, its techniques had been drilled into her by her father Niq across a series of camping trips during her preteen years. Catalyzed by a particularly nasty fight with her mother he had taken Nan and her sister Risse on a total of nine camping trips over a three year period. Risse, the older of the two, posited to her sister on trip number six that this was his way to make up for not being there for them. Instead of teaching them right from wrong or the birds and the bees or how to feel he was teaching them what he knew best: How to fish, how to make a camp, and how to navigate in the woods. Nan had thought that was very sweet of him at the time. Camping trip number ten he had taken with a strange girl named Zur that their mother had never wanted around the house. They would never see him again.
Bow and drill she half-mumbled to herself, suddenly remembering what the technique was called. She positioned the stick between a concave stone she had found and a wad of sage and began sawing furiously.

	Behind her sat a big pile of brush and grasses that she had gathered to try to make a bit of a lean-to. This would have been a simple task for her in the woods, but she felt a bit lost regarding building one in the desert. Materials were scarce and brittle. Luckily she had managed to find a sizable hunk of boulder, shattered off on one side into a great waterfall of gravel, right as a brisk wind started to kick up. The air felt crisp and damp and she smelled rain on it. She had hastily piled up brush next to a little overhang in the boulder, providing at least a slight barrier to the wind (and potentially rain), before scurrying off to gather some fuel for a fire.

	Suddenly, after what felt like an eternity of coaxing out little tufts of smoke, a bright ember seemed to skip off the drill like a first firework in a celebratory sky. She hunched over, blowing desperately on that little burst until she could see it spawn others; a spectacle of sparks and heat. And smoke. As the sparks turned to flames she finally gave in to the tickle in her lungs and began hacking and coughing. Good God, how did I miss this she wondered to herself as she felt what she was momentarily convinced was a bit of lung breaking loose. As soon as she had recovered enough to stand again she threw what little fuel she could scrounge together onto the fire and slumped back against the boulder. It’s been a long time since you’ve had to rough it Nan, she thought to herself as a jag of the boulder dug into her shoulder blade. Don’t know if I can say I missed it. She shimmied her way back into the almost-shelter she had constructed. As she drifted off she was only slightly conscious of the wind growing from its whisper to a full out howl.