Thirty minutes had long passed since Mark began his journey across the grassy plains, and like many things, it went great at first but his body weakened as he went on, and his spirit crumbled.
It was like the sun took joy in evaporating every liquid from his body and his tongue hung out with thirst.
He stumbled on a depressed dent and fell to the ground. His nose hit the ground causing a low snapping sound.
"Owww." He groaned, and rolled over on his back.
Facing the sun was an even greater torture, his eyes even squinted couldn't withstand the brightness and it seemed hellbent on burning his face, so he turned to the side, weakly cupping his broken nose.
He closed his eyes and took a deep inhale ignoring the burning pain in his nose, and then opened them, his eyes had reddened from the moisture it had lost and from his tiredness, but there was something else present, a glimmer of hope, his face wore the dress of determination, and with sheer will, he got on his feet and went on his journey.
He walked some more and as he did, he occasionally spotted the large indentation the orcs made on the ground in their run, they covered quite a distance in their attempt to catch the Arcadi cow.
However, Mark didn't care about the orcs any longer, the prospect of meeting one didn't shake him, for beings that looked fierce enough to eat him whole in a bite, he was unafraid, he had escaped them before, and whether it was pure luck, it had lessened his sense of fear, and better to be eaten by an orc than to be slowly evaporated by the incessant heat of the sun.
Finally, he got to a spot where he saw trees on a slightly depressed slope and as he squinted his tired eyes, he made out a cart just before the rows of trees.
His brows went up in surprise and elation, something other than greenery, a possible help.
He took a step down, and another, and it all seemed well until his leg slipped from weakness and he fell, giving his body to the whims of gravity.
He slid down the grassy slope on his butt, the friction undoing his underwear.
His eyelids dangled unsure of whether to stay close or open until he came to a stop and then everything went dark.
***
"What a nasty thing, it smells too. What do you think it is Yudar? I have never seen it before"
"Hmmm… do you suppose it tastes good? it looks yummy."
"Ehhh." Mark released weak groans, his eyes struggling to open.
"Look! Its eyes are open."
Atop him was a short scrawny green thing with wide green eyes that sat on a large almost cuboid–shaped head, its ears jutted from its head at a length longer than Mark's index finger.
"It looks famished."
"Works for us, we'll just eat its corpse."
"Hmmm… eat my corpse, what… are you… talking about?" Words escaped his dried lips.
"It speaks!" It yelled and jumped with excitement and shock.
The second scuttled over and stood by Mark's head glaring down at him in observation.
It bore the same resemblance to it except…
"What did it say?"
It had a deeper, hoarse voice, a masculine one from what Mark could tell.
"Water," Mark uttered, his lips barely moving.
"Ahhh," the creature groaned with displeasure, turning away from Mark.
"Another thing that's going to ask for our help and is just going to disappear without paying us back,"
He turned back to the man, "Look at you, you have nothing, why should we help you, and not eat you instead?"
Mark's brows twitched from the statement, his caked lips trembled, and although the creatures were dwarfs compared to him, he wasn't in the position to flaunt that, he was all at their mercy.
"Please…" he mumbled.
"Ohhh! Interesting... You speak our tongue as well, but you're no Leminite, so why?" He bursted, and clicked his tongue, turning away from Mark.
"I'm not sure I'll be comfortable eating him." the other with a softer voice interjected.
"Of course not, he may be friends with our kind somewhere out there or maybe he serves our god as well, those are the only possible explainations on how he's so fluent, and we wouldn't want to hurt our kind." He explained, his voice hoarse and cold telling of his reluctance to let Mark go.
"Give him a cup of lemonade, and be quick."
Suddenly the second ran down the slope, her feet quick for one her size and she grabbed a wooden cup from their wooden cart that had a sign that said lemonade. She turned over a wooden barrel and poured some of the yellow content into the cup.
As soon as she did, she placed her little hand on the rim as a makeshift covering preventing it from spilling, but as she stormed forward, some of the contents inevitably spilled and when she got there, the cup was but half of its original volume.
"Ehhh… that will do. Now chug it down his throat."
She raised Mark's head gently and brought the cup to his mouth slowly turning it.
"There there."
Mark's lips quivered, and he slowly drank the juice with some of it rounding past his lips and pouring to the ground.
The juice, lemonade was what they called it was far from having the sweetness of the lemonade they had back on earth, but with the insurmountable thirst he was bequeathed, it felt like he was being fed an ambrosia–a fluid revitalizing him.
Life came to his eyes, his throat was soothed, and his body regained a little of its lost strength.
"Look at that!" The other blurted and chuckled.
"Any later, and you would have been reduced to bones, thank your gods that we spotted you, and that we hadn't decided to leave after missing the orcs."
"What do we do with him?"
"What we do to friends in trouble? We take him to our home."