And now for a 2000 word snippet of my NaNoWriMo novel. :)

Aiden was out of water. In fact, he had been out of water for days. He gnawed on his last bit of food and tried to chew and swallow it slowly to make it last, but he was too hungry and exhausted. It was all gone. There were no creatures, no water, nothing around him at all but more mountains. He had been going for days on end and there was absolutely nothing there but dirt, rock, and dry shrubs.
“Mountains,” he snorted, sitting in a valley to keep the burning sun off his dirt streaked face. “Who invented these?”
He leaned back against the next mountain he was supposed to climb and started giggling to himself.
“Inventing mountains. Really. What a ridiculous idea. Lakes and rivers I can understand, but mountains?”
He laughed a little more about it and settled down, closing his eyes. He started dreaming, even though he was still awake, and he saw a man sitting on the clouds, playing with clay and forming a miniature version of the world. The man examined his ball of clay and carefully started making little mountains on the surface of the ball.
Wetness touched Aiden’s mouth and his dry, swollen tongue automatically stretched out to lick his lips. The liquid tasted salty and metallic, and it was thicker than water, but it was liquid. More dribbled onto his lips and he lapped up as much as he could. A drop of it fell on his hand and he opened his eyes and looked down.
Blood. He’d been drinking his own blood.
His stomach lurched and he leaned over and choked and gagged and heaved, losing the last bit of food he’d had. He groaned and wiped his mouth. His hand came away bloody and he realized numbly that his nose was probably bleeding.
“I gotta…” he gasped, scrambling to his feet. “I gotta…go…water…”
Using the side of the mountain as a crutch, he stumbled along its base, tripping over every bush and rock in his path. One stone caught him by surprise and he went toppling into the dirt, scraping his face and hands and knees. Groaning, he pushed himself up onto his hands and knees, and started crawling impossibly slowly. All he knew was that he needed water. He didn’t know where to look for it, but he needed it and he thought he could crawl forever if only he could find some water. Dignity be damned.
It was a struggle to keep his heavy limbs moving forward, a few inches at a time, but he kept at it, his head hanging and his nose bleeding, and the whole of his body aching with exhaustion and starvation.
A rushing sound filled his ears and he nearly cried out. He knew that sound. He’d lost consciousness a few times in his life and he always heard that sound before it happened. Next, the black dots would fill his vision from the side and he would know no more.
A peculiar thing happened then. The sound stopped. With the last of his energy, he lifted his head and looked right into the mouth of a cave, and there, standing just a few feet in front of him, was the girl with the electric blue eyes.
“Aiden?” she whispered.
The sound returned and he gasped and fell forward as the black dots invaded.

“ALEXA! JANIE! COME QUICKLY!”
Alexa and Janie’s heads snapped up as the flap of their tent flew open. Oriana looked in on them with wide, terror-filled eyes.
“It’s Aiden. He’s dying.”
Janie was up in a flash and pushing past Oriana. Alexa was hot on her heels. They ran through the city to reach the front entrance. Nikki and Sebastian were already beside their longtime brother and friend, holding his hands. He was scraped and bruised and covered in blood and vomit, but none of that phased Janie and Alexa. They fell to their knees beside him and started doing everything in their power to bring him back to consciousness and stop his bleeding.
Oriana caught up to them, out of breath, and stopped at Aiden’s feet.
“There was blood everywhere when I found him. He’s lost too much.”
“Go get water,” Janie snapped. “Lots of it.”
Oriana nodded and turned to run to the well in the center of camp. Once she was gone, Alexa shook her head.
“She’s right. He’s barely alive as it is.”
“Stop the bleeding and we can work on that,” Janie replied shortly, refusing to believe that Aiden, one of her favorite Warriors, would die right in front of her. She wouldn’t believe that there was nothing she could do. Until the last breath left his body, she wouldn’t stop trying to save him.
Oriana returned with Marid, who immediately turned pale white upon seeing Aiden.
“Oh, you sad idiot,” he murmured. “You tried to find us on your own.”
Janie snatched the bucket of water from Oriana and dumped half of it on Aiden’s head. His eyes flew open and he croaked something out.
“Sit him up,” Janie barked. Alexa and Nikki scrambled to get him into a sitting position and Aiden groaned in pain with every movement. Janie ignored his complaints, pulled his mouth open, and lifted the bucket to his lips. He gulped down as much water as he could manage and pulled back once he’d had enough.
“Food,” he mumbled, his eyes closing again.
“There’s nothing made right now,” Oriana said before Janie could even look at her.
“How soon could something be made?”
“Twenty minutes at best.”
“Go. Make something as quickly as possible.”
Oriana nodded dutifully and dashed away to find a cooking Witch.
Marid kneeled down in front of Aiden and grabbed hold of one of his hands.
“Aid, buddy, talk to me. What’re you doing out here?”
“Finding you,” Aiden breathed, his eyelids flickering feebly. “Magicians don’t lie. Says so in every history book. I figured you had it right, Lex.”
“So you left? How long ago?”
“Over a week.”
“When did you run out of water?”
“Uh…uh…I think four days ago.”
“Oh, for God’s sake. It’s a miracle you’re still alive. After three days, people become delusional,” said Alexa, propping Aiden’s head on her shoulder.
“Stay awake, Aid. When did you run out of food?”
“Today,” he mumbled, quickly losing consciousness again.
Janie bit her lip and handed the bucket to Marid.
“Make him drink more. I’ll be back.”
She left them and disappeared into the camp. Nikki opened Aiden’s mouth and Marid put the bucket to his lips. Aiden drank the rest of the water in the pale and immediately passed out on Alexa. Silent tears were streaming down Nikki’s cheeks.
“He’s not gonna make it,” she whispered, holding one of Aiden’s hands in both her own. Sebastian put an arm around her and kissed the side of her head.
“No, he’s not. But at least he’ll have died honorably and as a true Warrior.”
Alexa and Marid looked at each other, communicating silently. Someone needed to clean up whatever mess Aiden had left behind and it needed to happen soon. Creatures were attracted to blood and they didn’t know if Aiden had been followed or not. If he hadn’t been, they still couldn’t leave a blood trail leading right to the Magicians’ front door.
Marid kept his voice low and said, “After he passes.”
“I’ll go with you.”
He didn’t fight her and she silently thanked him for it.
Aiden’s stomach growled long and low, but Janie and Oriana still hadn’t come back. The four of them waited in torturous silence, listening to the inconsistent shallow breaths of their dying brother. Janie and Oriana appeared between the tents, carrying between them some sort of basket, but as they ran up the hill to them, Aiden’s last breath rattled to a stop.
Nikki put a hand over her mouth to stifle her sobs and Sebastian held her tightly, rocking her slowly, back and forth. Marid sat back on his heels and landed on his butt, his eyes wide and glazed over.
“No!” Janie screamed, dropping her side of the basket to run the rest of the way up to them. “No! Aiden!”
Alexa quickly pulled Marid over to hold Aiden and got up to restrain Janie.
“Janie, stop. Janie, listen to me. There’s nothing we could do. Please, Janie, calm down. Sit down, at least. Janie…Janie…”
And finally, after a minute of coaxing her, Janie sagged into Alexa and cried for the loss of her friend.

Jon was leading the Hunters through a valley when his creature darted forward unexpectedly and started cantering faster. The other two creatures were doing the same, taking the control from the Warriors. The Hunters started sprinting to catch up with them.
The first creature reached a spot right next to a mountain and stopped short, nearly throwing Jon forward into the side of the mountain. Clutching the creature for dear life, Jon looked down at the ground and groaned. Not only was there blood, which the creatures had initially been attracted to, but there was also a pile of sick right next to it.
Snuffling with its nose close to the ground, the creature stepped forward carefully, following a sparse trail of blood until it stopped abruptly at the face of another mountain. The trail itself was about two hundred feet long.
“He was definitely here. How he made it this far with the amount of blood he had to have lost is beyond me,” said Jon, gazing around at his surroundings suspiciously. “Either someone found him and carried him away, or he found enough strength to send himself to the Regular world. I highly doubt the second option.”
Valerie clomped up beside him and looked around as well.
“Then we must be close.”
“There are no signs of civilization anywhere around here,” said David from behind them. “Magicians gotta drink water, too. We need to find a water source and then we’ll find the Magicians.”
“Right. Well, Aiden was heading this way. Maybe he knew there was water this way,” Jon mused.
“It’s worth a shot. C’mon.”
Valerie took the lead through the winding valley before them. The last of the Hunters was passing by when the mouth of the tunnel opened up. Marid and Alexa held their breath, preparing for the Hunters to realize that they’d heard something behind them, but they never turned back. They waited a good ten minutes anyway before they stepped out into the open just in case one of them looked back at all.
“He was being followed,” Marid murmured, creeping out of the tunnel with Alexa directly behind him.
“No shit. Look. The Warriors are leading them.”
Marid glanced over his shoulder and saw Jon, Valerie, and David riding atop huge black creatures.
“Hm. David doesn’t look to happy to be here, does he?”
“Well, he is stuck with Val.”
He chuckled and started erasing the trail of blood by scuffing the dirt with his feet. Alexa followed his lead and started doing the same a little further down the trail. Marid reached where she started and he checked his work before going to meet her at the end. She was holding her nose and facing away from the vomit on the ground.
“Oh, gross. How do we clean that up?” he asked.
Alexa shook her head and Marid sighed and looked around for something he could use to spread it around. Marla came crunching along at that moment with a frown on her lips.
“Need something to disappear?”
“Yeah, this stuff. You wanna check the blood trail, too, to make sure it’s all gone?”
“Oh, the blood’s gone, but it’s pretty obvious it’s been scrubbed out. Take a branch off a bush and make it look a bit more natural while I take care of this.”
“Gladly,” Alexa muttered, moving away from the puke as quickly as she could to find a bush.
Twenty minutes later, the three of them met back up at the entrance to the tunnel and gazed wordlessly out at the valley in front of them. The Warriors and Hunters were barely visible in the distance, but it didn’t look like they were going to turn around any time soon, so they went into the tunnel, closed the entrance, and started back to the city for an impromptu funeral.