Do your characters feel pain?

A terrific essay about bodily sensations and how often writers seem to forget them. Your characters see, hear, and occasionally taste or smell something, but what do they feel in their bodies?

###

Riordan opened his eyes to pain and fire and blackness. The fire lived under his skin, burning him up from the inside; the pain was a knife sawing at his joints and a mallet pounding behind his eyes. Darkness pressed smothering hands against his face and shivers broke over his flesh like combers sweeping a cold shore.

A monstrous thirst tormented him. He would have happily guzzled down the river itself, but the stone where he lay was dry.

With the vague feeling that he'd done this several times already, he groped for the waterskin attached to his belt. Its sides were collapsed and empty as a month-old carcass. His parched tongue quested out and licked at the stone. It was gritty and tasted slightly of salt. Where were the icy droplets he'd seen at the junction, the rivulets that ran like sweat into stony creases? Where was the river itself? He couldn't remember.

Something warm and wet swiped his ear. He moaned, almost weeping because his tongue could not curl around and reach that luscious patch of dampness. He lifted a trembling hand to touch it, to capture what moisture he could. His fingers encountered a puff of hot breath. An ecstatic whine sounded in his ear and the wet tongue washed his cheek in earnest.

Skah.

The hound circled Riordan, nails clicking and scratching on stone, breaking the intense silence. How had Skah gotten free? What had happened?

It took tremendous discipline to force his mind to recall, when it had no interest in anything but finding something to drink and burrowing back into pain-free oblivion. But gradually the memories came into focus: he had left the stone river, and through darkness and exhausting toil, found his way here. Wherever here was. The walls had fallen away from his searching fingers and then the elusive spark deep in his soul flared into a white inferno.

He remembered nothing after that except an endless drifting in and out of consciousness. Intense thirst had driven him to drain the waterskin, and still the fire raged. It was obvious that something had gone very wrong inside of him. In his more lucid moments he thought perhaps he'd picked up some contagion in the filthy Keldian cell and carried it here, hidden in the folds of his garments until it found its moment to strike. Other times, when dreams fluttered in and out of his thoughts like moths with wings afire, he imagined that all the pent-up power of the river had blown free somehow, slinging off wild flamelets to light where they would. One had found dry tinder inside him, and now it was killing him.

(from The Knife-Giver, ch. 49, "Fire in the Dark")