"It Awakens" Original Short Story (Fantasy)

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 wail 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.

He curled slowly into a fetal position, trying to gather his remaining strength, quickly slipping away like the twin suns on the horizon. He had crashed his hoverbike in a frantic attempt to reach the Tesseract by nightfall, no one survived the desert night. He could not fail to defeat Osiris the overlord, he was his people's last hope. The sand felt like broken glass, cutting into his skin at every opportunity. He tried to focus his thoughts, "it is only pain... just a message...just a message." It was too late to turn back, the Tesseract loomed before him, the lustrous black stone mocking him.

He slowly crawled towards the nearest dune. He forced himself to look at it, hundreds of faces stared at him, all a grotesque image of his own. As he drank from his water flask he watched the hundreds of mouths open and close in concert, as if he were the puppet master. The dune rose 60 feet in the air, but it might as well have been a mile high, Kunst knew he could not scale it in his condition. A spark of hope lit his eyes, and he opened his mouth wide. The grotesque faces yawned open in obedience. He began to climb the dune, using the many open mouths as handholds and footholds. His neck began to spasm, the agony only slightly overpowered by his will.

He heard the whine of a hoverbike approaching, and he climbed back down to face his fate. Osiris dismounted in full exo-armor, his two grey eyes flashing, barely visible through the visor of a black death's head mask. Kunst took a few shaky steps towards Osiris. Osiris spoke. "I had hoped to find someone worthy of my attention, but instead I find you, a half dead desert rat. Kunst drew his sword, "you have oppressed my people long enough, surrender or die". Osiris's harsh laughter rang out. "You would threaten me?" Osiris pulled a battle axe from his back and advanced purposefully on Kunst.

Kunst threw his sword at Osiris, grunting in pain at the effort. Osiris parried the weapon and it clattered against the dune. Osiris clucked his tongue, "how disappointing, now you are even more helpless, if that is even possible". Osiris walked over to the dune to retrieve the sword. As he bent to pick it up Kunst extended his arms and struck them together. Hundreds of Obsidian arms extended from the dune and crashed together like thunder. Osiris, caught between two arms, gasped for air, his exo-armor quickly buckling. Kunst crossed his arms and pulled them into his chest, and there was a wet crunch as Osiris was crushed into the dune. Kunst dropped his arms, and Osiris fell lifeless to the ground. Kunst sank to his knees, offering a prayer of thanksgiving, tears flowing. Kunst retrieved his sword and mounted Osiris's hoverbike. "All is not lost while light remains".

The End