Finish the Fiction Story Contest - Week #15

It Awakens

As the Kunst Meister tried to move with caution, the twist brought him a chorus of pangs along the neck, till exploding within his head its white vowel of pain.

Far away, to the south, the white smoke of the stalled hoverbike no longer stood out from the purple sky.
Everything in that cursed place was wrong and the black powder was a whisk, shaken by the suffocating wind of a perverse and tireless djinn.

Now he had the certainty that all those stories whispered by candlelight were not only true, but also a pale and dull representation of the deafening truth in front of his eyes.

At every shallow breath, the macabre dunes of the Obsidian Desert reminded him of the long distance covered.

Since he had left the hoverbike behind him, he had tried to taunt himself about the creeping and imperceptible movements of the sand. By now, however, it was no longer possible to ignore it: the dunes had definitively assumed the shape of deformed faces. The Meister struggled not to look at them but could not ignore those soulless empty orbits, which peered his every uncertain step. Those mounds were reproducing his face, multiplied in a kaleidoscope of abomination.

Among the dunes, madness used to arrive well before dehydration.

He almost did not notice that the Tesseract 19 could be seen to the naked eye, right at the horizon. The column pierced the black sea and challenged the streaked clouds. The awareness of his distance made him wince. That construction was huge, that artifact was Moloch's sharpest tooth.

The warm wind delivered to him, intertwined with dust, an imperceptible howl: the bark of the monolith, an omen of death.

The man waited, an immobile exoskeleton bent over the black sand. The helmet laying abandoned beside him. Soon everything would be accomplished, one way or another.

My entry:

Madness in the shape of the face staring at him. Insanity in the sand salted wind drying his lips. The sun hovering like a wasp stinging his skin. He trudged forward a broken man.

Memories projected like movies on his mind’s eye. That lovely place long ago where comfort dwelled. Food and water in abundance.

Now back to the desert like awakening from a dream. Tesseract 19 still on the horizon. He’d only taken a few steps.

Back again to that wonderful place as his eyes drooped for a rest.

He fell forward flopping in the sand. Dust settled on him. His final resting place.

Then again to that place in his mind, peaceful. He could see his wife smiling. A cake in her hands. A birthday and friends.

Pain searing in his hand as a vulture dug in deep ripping flesh from the bone. The living dead unable to moan, or fight back. He watched the bird’s beak slice in again. Blood making mud of the sand.

No pleas to God. No demand for some other fate. Resigned to die here alone with a goal in sight. Nothing, empty, blackness . . .

Thank you,
Cyrus Emerson

Fear and Loathing in the State of Jefferson
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