Pressed into the ground as I was, with Corwin on top of me, it was all I could do just to breathe.
He was so heavy! But at least I could breathe. Had he not made it to me in time, I would have been choking on the tar dust and died of asphyxiation.
I groaned as my body began to cramp from being pressed into the hard ground by an equally hard, muscular body above me.
"Are you ok?" Corwin asked over the roar of the windstorm, his voice full of concern.
"Yeah," I managed to choke out. He slowly eased his body up a bit, giving me more room to expand my lungs.
I took that small reprieve and inhaled a lungful of oxygen, alleviating the sparks dancing around my vision.
The sandstorm, if that is what it was, did not last for more than five minutes, but it seemed like a very long time. Anyone who had been exposed to its fury would have expired by this time.
Even under the protection spell, Corwin had to keep replenishing our oxygen.
The bubble he had barely managed to create around us had to be small enough to remain stable.
It also had to be strong enough to withstand the onslaught of what felt like hurricane-strength winds and the intense pressure of tons of tar sands pressing in and around us.
When the roaring winds and the scouring black sand above us finally blew past, Corwin raised his head up, listening for any sign of further danger.
All was calm and still.
The unnatural buzzing and howling was gone. He expanded the bubble a bit and used a minor Seeing Command to check on conditions further than he was able to see from inside the tar encrusted exterior of the shield.
Sensing no other danger, Corwin collapsed the bubble with a ragged sigh.
I was about to thank him for having saved my life when suddenly, he yanked me up from the ground and crushed my body into his.
Corwin's arms held me tightly with something bordering on panic and desperation. He squeezed me so tightly I thought my ribs would crack.
His body was shaking, and his breathing was labored. For a split second, I thought he was furious with me again for something I'd done.
But then Corwin pulled back and all I could see in his intense blue eyes was pure fright.
"Are you sure you're ok?" He looked me all over, touching my hair and face and checking to make sure that I was not hurt in any way.
I smiled and nodded in as reassuring a manner as I could.
Corwin let out a long shuddering breath and clasped me tightly once more. "Don't you EVER scare me like that again!"
I sat there, crushed in the arms of a panic-stricken man, stunned and not daring to breathe.
Was this the same Corwin who had been keeping me at arm's length the entire time we had been together?
It was such a strange feeling, to be in such a passionate embrace by someone who had been so cold and distant towards me, that I was at a loss for words.
"Corey! Nana! Is everybody alright?" Connor called out as he came running towards us.
He came closer, his eyes taking in the way Corwin's arms kept holding onto me in a protective embrace even after the danger had passed.
He did not miss the way Corwin's hands kept reaching to touch my face, my head, my body—checking to make sure I was not hurt.
His eyes were uneasy, glancing back at me, and then returning to Corwin's distressed face.
Without saying a word, Connor reached out, offering a hand up to Corwin, who compressed his lips and nodded. He accepted Connor's outstretched hand of assistance.
Then, the brothers lifted me up from the tar-soaked ground.
From behind Connor, I could see Tarzan without his human façade. He was an orangutan once more, standing next to Max. His worried eyes were fixed on me.
I almost cried. Tarzan's beautiful orange fur had gotten clogged and matted with the black gunk making him look like some dark hulking monster.
Max looked even worse. His newly-washed beautiful white and grey malamute fur was so clogged with tar sands he looked like a crouching werewolf.
I sent a calming image into both their minds and received back an onslaught of images of concern. I sent more messages of reassurance until I was sure both Max and Tarzan were calmed and subdued.
Once the twins were assured that I was ok, they went to look for Simon and Abe.
The old driver stood near the caravan, his amber eyes dazed. He said nothing, looking dumbstruck.
Since we did not want to exacerbate his discomfort, we said nothing to him. If he wanted to talk to us, we would be there to address any of his concerns.
Simon stood nearby, covered head to toe with the sticky tar sand. "What in blazes was that?" He exclaimed, and then had to cough and spit out the sand that was clogging his mouth and throat.
"THAT—was nothing from this natural world." Abe responded with something akin terror.
It was a lucky break for Abe that he was not far from Simon when the storm hit.
Simon had kept his head and provided the same protection for the driver that Max, Tarzan and I had received from the twins.
If there had been any doubt in anyone's mind about Simon's status as a full-fledge mage with all the powers bestowed unto a graduate of the Academy of Magikal Arts, today blew all that doubt away.
As far as I was concerned, he had graduated with honors.
Abe scanned the horizon with worried eyes. Just because one of these horrors had blown through did not mean another one was not right on its heels.
We left him to his silent contemplation of the surroundings and took stock of the situation.
We were covered with the black sands, but nobody cared. We were just glad we had all survived the storm.
It took several tries of Corwin's now infamous Chuhdichingli Sterilization Command to get us all cleaned to some acceptable level.
I could still feel the grit in places where nothing could come close to good old-fashioned soap and water. In my small and very humble opinion, surfactants were never overrated.
By the time we were no longer covered in the black gunk, I could feel a growing tension between the twins.
They were not talking to each other as freely as they did before the tar sands came blowing through.
As the afternoon wore on, their attitudes towards each other grew steadily worse. They managed to be civil to each other long enough to tackle the more critical problem, namely our mode of transportation.
The caravan had taken a beating and was covered almost to the rooftop with thick black sand and fine goopy dust.
Between Connor, Corwin, and Simon, they managed to dig the vehicle out using some basic lift-and-scoop magik Commands.
But that only took care of digging the caravan out. There was the other matter of the vehicle itself.
The mages did their best to magikally remove the black tar sands from the caravan's exterior, but the inside was a mess.
Sand had gotten into just about everything. To expedite the clean-up, I did what I could with my dinky little Dustball Command until Corwin shooed me away saying I was in the way of their clean-up efforts.
Once the sand and grit was out of the cracks of the seats and all the various tiny compartments of the van and our supplies, the twins, with Simon's assistance, started working on the engine compartment itself.
The work was grueling, even for mages of their advanced levels because they needed to keep the fixes fairly low-level and non-magikal.
To fix the vehicle by magikal methods would mean that once they were no longer there to maintain the magik, the caravan would once again be inoperable. They spent whatever daylight that was left physically cleaning grit and sand out of the engine and the air and water pumps.
As the evening melted into night, the mages labored on, stopping only when Simon signaled for a break and went looking for me.
He found me, sitting near a blue camp fire that I had managed to Command into being.
I was heating up some water for hot tea, and nursing along the tiny flame as it chewed through a torch of scrub brush that I found nearby.
"Nana! Did our food escape the storm?" Simon called out to me.
"No." I shook my head. "Our fresh food supply is destroyed."
"So we have nothing to eat?" Simon sounded disappointed.
"I didn't say that," I waved several large packages of beef jerky strips, some giant bags of chips, and a large bag of granola bars.
"Will this be good enough to tide you guys over until we get to the next refueling station?"
Simon danced with joy.
"I also have a bag of prunes for all your digestive needs." I pulled out a bag of dried fruit but he gave me a disgusted look.
"I'll just take these over to the guys and Abe." He grabbed the other food bags from my hands as well as several mugs of the tea that I had just brewed and took off in their direction.
I smiled and breathed a silent word of thanks to the innkeeper's wife who had insisted I purchase plenty of the non-perishables for the road, rather than the spoilables.
The fuel was a tough situation however.
Somehow, the pipeline between the engine and the fuel tank had developed cracks which allowed the sand and dust to enter the fuel tank.
After repairing the pipeline, the twins had to take the fuel out of the vehicle and extract the dust particles from the flammable liquid without causing an explosion.
Then they had to scrub the fuel tanks with magik to remove the gunk that had accumulated. Once that was done, they replaced the fuel and told Abe to try starting the engine.
Perhaps it was the vehicle's first true mage maintenance that was done almost at the molecular level, but as the crescent moon rose into the darkening sky, the engine started up with a smooth purr, sounding better than it ever had before.
The mages whooped with glee and gave each other high-fives. Then they ran to me and Connor swooped me up from where I was sitting, spinning me round and round all the while yelling in triumph.
"So, if we start moving now, when do you think we will make it into Zircon?" Corwin asked Abe. We had lost three hours due to the tar sandstorm.
Abe shook his head. "There's no reason to go there now."
We all looked at him in shock. The only sound was the crackling of the blue fire that I was still keeping alive with the plentiful scrub brush in the area.
He waved his hand in the general direction of Zircon. "We were only ten miles out of town. You saw the direction that the tar sands was headed."
He shook his head, his face pale and drawn. "It has now probably blown through Zircon and has most likely choked that little city until there's nothing left."
He turned to me with strange burning eyes.
"You asked me earlier why the wastes are like this. The answer is that thing that just blew through."
His eyes took on a faraway look. "It's called the Scourge Winds. Sometimes, they are dry sandstorms but other times, it's this black bitumen that gunks everything up."
He shivered. "We're lucky it wasn't a fire storm. That would have been bad."
Simon grimaced. "We went through a fire storm right before we got here." He shuddered. "We nearly got roasted alive."
He turned to Simon with incredulous eyes. "It's amazing you kids made it through two Scourge Winds without perishing. Anyone else would have died in the first one."
Abe shook his head. "This whole area could never recover because storms like that kept ravaging this place in the past until nothing would grow."
He sighed. "No animals could withstand the kind of scourging that those storms created. Without animals, no plants could reproduce itself. Without plants, the soil eroded within a matter of a few years."
"What is it and where does it come from?" Simon asked.
"That storm is a weapon that was created by powerful beings such as yourselves in the last terrible war that was waged between you and humans."