Fever
an excerpt

Inzeppelled’s blood drips into my mouth, but I can’t move my head under the rocks burying us. I close my mouth and his blood drips onto my lips, salty, it runs slowly along my cheek. His dead eyes, even in the darkness, I can see above me, open, dry, and forgive me, I’ll need the moisture to survive. The tears come then, the pain in my body a scream, how they’ve broken me, cut me, stabbed me, raped me, my vision's flat, I know something is wrong with one of my eyes, which one, I can’t tell. I wish I could die like him, the pain, incandescent and everywhere, my throat already screamed raw, but they’ve gone, they won’t hear my screams and come back for me, they won’t come back and kill me.
Why can’t I die?
The pain takes me, and when I awaken, it flares back at me, Inzeppelled’s blood dry against my battered cheek, and I feel insects crawling over me. Inzeppelled’s body above me is now cool, cold from when I first awoke, first knew I was not dead, that the grey death that awaits us all, the plane of the dead, denies me. I wasn’t fit for death.
I cried more, from the pain, and tried to wriggle my fingers enough to heal myself. Most of the other magic I’d chosen today was useless, useless while Temmnya’s gang of elves and humans assaulted me, useless when they beat me, tortured me and burned me, burned me with hot metal. Useless spells when they finally stabbed me, useless spells when I passed out and they thought I was dead. Useless as they buried me with Inzeppelled. All for that spell book, all for a defiler.
But now, now that it was obvious I could either chose to live and heal myself, or chose to die a gradual death from thirst, pinned beneath Inzeppelled, though I had not yet come to love him, he had been the first, and like a child, like a stupid human child, I had daydreamed a whole life of daydreams of him, an imagined life with everything, our home, our children, our future.
Dead before me.
And rather than lie there for days and wait for death to finally come, I cast the healing spell, and the next. The pain started to subside, though the healing burned almost as badly, I knew it was temporary and found it easier to bear, even if I wasn’t used to the burning pain of my own healing magic. Like a foolish child I’d thought I was invincible because I’d never been hurt.
Now there was no telling what I would look like after what they did to me.
I struggled against Inzeppelled’s weight, the rocks, but beyond moving my fingers enough to cast magic, I couldn’t muster the strength to move from underneath his bones, I wriggled, and thought I heard a few rocks scrape against others, but all my efforts brought no results.
I lay there, the insects crawling over me, their stings and barbs keeping me from sleep, crawling over Inzeppeled’s body, already feeding on his corpse, not even a day dead.
I lay there, now able to shift my head slightly, struggling with the little energy my spells had given me, but couldn’t get free. I hadn’t rescued myself, I hadn’t decided to live. Now I’d only take longer to die. It seemed like hours I laid there, insects crawling over me and pinned like a skewered bug on the rocky plain somewhere near Altaruk, perhaps five days north of the caravan route. This was my cairn and I was going to take a long time to die, kept away from the drying sun, in the shade, unable to move. Already Inzeppelled smelled. Of blood and waste. I could only hope he would be warm enough to dry out, mummify rather than swell.
How long would it take me to die?
Five days? Ten days? Would I recognize them as days?
I started counting, one, two, three, and stopped at a hundred.
I did it again.
I did it again.
After what must have been hours of this, I fell asleep.