"Oof!"
Zann landed so hard that his head spun.
He stayed still for a moment to catch his breath.
Finally he was able to sit up.
There was no sign of the sand beast.
That was a relief.
But there was no sign of Zann's friends or Wyssa either.
"I guess that's why Wyssa didn't want us to zap," he muttered.
Looking around, he realized he'd landed in some kind of deep gully.
It looked like a dry riverbed.
"That figures," Zann told himself.
Whenever he zapped without focusing on his destination, he always seemed to land in water.
He supposed that this gully was the closest thing there was to water in the dry expanse of the Far Frontier.
Thinking about water made him thirsty.
But he tried to ignore that feeling.
He needed to find his friends before he did anything else.
Zann climbed to his feet with a groan.
The rocky gully hadn't been as soft a landing as the sand!
He approached the gully's bank.
When he tried to climb it, every rock he touched came loose and tumbled to the ground.
He grabbed a gnarled shrub that was growing out of the bank.
But the shrub's branches were lined with sharp thorns.
Soon he was filthy, sore, and totally discouraged.
"This is ridiculous." Zann pulled a thorn from his palm.
"Maybe zapping didn't work exactly how I expected it to, but it still worked."
That meant using magic wasn't out of the question.
It didn't matter what Wyssa had said.
Zann snapped his fingers. "Levitate."
For a second nothing happened.
Zann frowned, and then he rubbed his hands together.
Magic energy began to spark weakly around him.
"Levitate!" he said loudly.
This time he felt his feet lift off the sand.
He kept rubbing his hands, and slowly he rose into the air.
Then he felt himself sinking again.
"Levitate!" he cried again, rubbing his legs together too.
Finally he managed to levitate all the way out of the gully.
He landed on the sand at the edge.
"Whew," he said. "Hey!"
A swarm of insects buzzed around him, stinging his arms and face.
Zann swatted at them, but they kept attacking.
When he tried to zap them with magic energy, he missed.
"Ouch!" he yelled, trying to smack one of the insects.
But it was too fast.
Zann rubbed his hands together, ready to zap away.
He hesitated. What if he ended up even farther away from his friends?
He danced in place, trying to avoid the stinging insects.
His feet kicked up some sand, which gave him an idea.
Zann dropped to his hands and knees and started to dig.
He dug his way into the soft, warm sand until he was almost completely covered.
Fewer insects could reach him now.
The sand was hot, and after a few minutes, Zann couldn't stand it.
He didn't hear any more buzzing, so he carefully dug his way back out.
The insects were gone!
"Thank goodness," he muttered, quickly healing the stings with magic.
It took a few tries, since his magic energy kept fizzling out before he could touch the right spots.
But finally his skin stopped burning and itching.
But then Zann was thirstier than ever.
Since his healing magic had basically worked, he snapped his fingers to create a drink.
"Yuck!" he exclaimed as something soft and squishy appeared in his hand.
Instead of a cup of refreshing airberry juice, he'd conjured a handful of squashed, overripe airberries!
"Ugh!" Zann tossed the berries away and wiped his hand.
Then he tried again. He focused carefully.
This time it worked!
He gulped the cup of airberry juice, which made him feel better.
But why was magic so difficult here?
At the Cave of the Unknown, it was partly because of all the powerful relics that had been hidden there.
Could there be relics nearby now?
"Maybe Morb stole the relics and hid them out here where nobody would find them!" Zann thought with a shiver.
Just then he heard a sound.
He spun around and saw Darb riding toward him on a hoof beast.
Perda was sitting behind him, looking nervous.
Two more hoof beasts were trotting along behind the first one.
"I knew you could tame those animals!" Zann called, smiling, as his friends reached him.
"Where's Gliss?"
"We don't know." Perda jumped down.
"We hoped she was with you."
"We haven't seen Wyssa, either," Darb added.
"Luckily Perda and I landed near each other."
Perda nodded. "I ended up on a rocky little bluff.
I looked around and spotted Darb on some grassland below me."
"Grassland?" Zann looked around at the sand and rocks.
"The grass was pretty brown," Darb said with a smile.
He patted one of the hoof beasts. "But these guys were eating it."
"Yeah, and as usual Darb made friends right away!"
Perda said with a laugh.
"So we decided to ride around and look for everyone.
"You were only a ten-minute ride from where we landed," Darb said, scratching the hoof beast on the neck.
"This guy must have smelled you or something, because he led us this way."
"Good," Zann said. "Maybe that means he can help us find Gliss and Wyssa.
They're probably nearby too."
"I hope so." Darb whistled for the other two hoof beasts.
"I'll show you how to ride these guys, and then we can start searching."
Riding a hoof beast was like riding a dragon, except that the hoof beasts were furry instead of scaly, and they didn't fly.
Zann held onto the creature's long, silky mane as he settled onto its back.
"Come on," he told his hoof beast.
"Let's find our friends."