They hadn't left him for dead. They had to know he was still alive, had to see the shallow expansion and contraction of his blood-smeared rib cage as he lay on his face in the grass. But they had other stops to make and he took such a long time dying. A tery didn't merit a final stroke to end it all, so they left him to the scavengers.

Consciousness ebbed and flowed, and every time he opened his eyes he found the world filled with flies and gnats. He tried but could not lift his arms to brush them away. Each time he tried, the effort involved dropped him again into oblivion. Which wasn't a bad place to be. Dark and quiet, no pain there.

But he always came back. Soon, if he was lucky, he would remain sunken there forever. Why not stay there? Everyone who meant anything to him had been taken away.

The creak of a poorly lubricated wooden axle pulled him to consciousness again. He heard stealthy footsteps through the ground against his left ear and allowed himself to hope.

Maybe another tery…

Summoning whatever reserve was left in his body, he pushed against the ground with his right arm and tried to roll over. The daylight suddenly dimmed and he knew he was losing consciousness, but he held on and managed to get a little leverage from his left arm, which had been pinned under him. He moved. A shift in his shoulder girdle and suddenly he was rolling onto his back amid a cloud of angry flies.

The effort cost him another period of awareness. When he came to again, the creaking was gone. Despair crushed him. The furtiveness of the footsteps he had heard was proof enough that they belonged to another tery, for stealth simply was not the way of the human soldiers who trampled everything in their path. Now the footsteps were gone and with them his last hope of rescue.