The sun rises in the sky and becomes unpleasantly hot; Mahdi casts something and then it stops being unpleasantly hot. At noon Fazil passes around sandwiches and a clear cool sweet drink of some kind. A while after noon, they pass a tall imposing black box.

She eats sandwiches and drinks the drink. She's bored by now but not about to make it anyone else's problem. She prays to the Maker, silently. She thinks about her friends. Sten would feel at home here, all the rules - and the stuff about women, come to think about it, Sten thought it was weird that she could fight too. He would be pretty freaked out about all of the mages walking around free, though, not even locked up in towers. Zevran wouldn't like it but he'd handle it. Shale... it's a good thing Shale isn't here, probably. Alistair would feel most of the same ways she feels and also be giving her snuggles whenever she needed them, although North is a passable substitute in his absence. 

She fidgets a little but doesn't try talking. Vaguely wishes she'd brought some knitting to do. 

And in late afternoon the carpet slows down and they start travelling closer to the ground, and a while after that they stop in the shadows of some towering building in the process of being slowly eroded into sand. They get out, and Mahdi opens the door. 

There's nothing inside. 

Everyone seems cheery about this and gets to setting up a camp. Hagan through some pantomime teaches the word 'stop' and also - pointing at Fazil and Mahdi - the word 'friendlies', or something like it.

Cool. She has two words, then. She can help with setting up camp, if there are obvious parts that don't require a lot of communication.

They're checking around for venomous spiders and scorpions and crushing them when they see them, and laying out bedrolls.

Well, she can check for spiders and scorpions and lay out a bedroll for herself.

They spend the last of the sunlight scouting out the other ruins in the area. There are some remnants of a wall and some remnants of fortress and some remnants of temples. They indicate they want to start at the fortress tomorrow, though she can't catch why.

Works for her. She waits to see whether they're keeping watches. They seem like the sort of people who would, but better to make sure.

Yep! They'll wake her when it's her turn.

Solid. Then she'll sleep.

(It's okay for her to sleep, nothing horrible and awful is going to happen, if she was going to have this anxiety she really should have brought it up before they trekked into the middle of the desert a day away from civilization. They've been decent. There is absolutely no reason to suspect that they are actually all horrible and evil.)

She sleeps.

Mahdi wakes her up when it's her shift.

Cool. She'll keep watch, then. 

It's a quiet night. There are some bats. There's, in the distance, a floating head with trailing...blood vessals or tentacles or something.

....how far in the distance?

Pretty distant. If the moon on the dunes weren't so bright it'd be hard to tell it was that and not just a roundish bird.

Okay, not worth waking anybody for. Creepy, though. Not as creepy as the broodmothers, or the settlements the darkspawn got to, but she'll give that a solid seven out of ten for creepiness.

In the morning Fazil casts Tongues again so she can be apprised of the plan. "The fortress should have six levels, standard for the time period. Food storage, armory, mess hall and chapel, bunks, battlements, watch towers. Usually when there's critters living there the ones up for a fight all come running at once, so we want to be in a defensible position when we start making noise. You're not evil, right, because I'm gonna do protection from evil - or magic circle against evil, depends on the layout of the place."

"I - don't know any objective tests for evilness? It would surprise me if I were?"

"Do you, you know, kill innocents, mistreat the vulnerable, consort with the lords of Hell, betray people, sell your soul... actually I'll just - Detect Evil. Yeah, you're not."

"Cool, good to know."

"The other one that's for you is sacred bond. It makes my touch-range healing reach you, which beats trying to run over and touch you in the middle of a fight. You have to wear a bracelet for it -" he produces one - "and I have to touch you to cast it, which I don't want to do now because it lasts seventy minutes. Yell at me if you need a heal, I don't want to track what kind of shape you're in."

"Cool, I'm used to that. Should work fine."

"Great." And they get ready to head out.

Cool. 

" - just checking, are floaty heads with tentacles normal around these parts? There was one hanging out way far over that way last night."

"Doru! Yeah, they are. Hard to kill, because they fly and turn invisible. Evil, if you hadn't guessed."