It Awakens... (Finish The Story Contest Entry)

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.

---

He thought back to that fateful day, twenty years ago. The day he handed Moloch their greatest victory yet; the day he committed state sanctioned genocide.

They called it art, and he, he was the master.

The Tesseract 19, his masterpiece of design. The only one of it’s kind, it had bridged the dimensions. Turning the once lush farming plains into the now-famed macabre dunes of carnival horror that echo through the planes of existence. The depths of your soul refracted and malformed in black, shifting sand. The many faces of your mind rippling over the dunes.

He had known not to look; he had told the countless Kunst Lehrling, who’s bleached skeletons rolled through the moving obsidian mounds, not to look. It was as though the sands had known who he had been to them, regurgitating their hollow skulls from the parted lips of closer distorted reflections. He knew then why his warnings had never been enough. Every fear, every concern, amplified before your eyes. An echo chamber of desolation howling around you.

He never knew how he found his way through without the hoverbike or exoskeleton. He had fallen out of the exoshell, on the edge of surrender, yet lightened by the loss. He placed one foot in front of the other, and forced himself on. The only way out, was to keep going.

The sickening shift of sand shimmered with friezes of his twisted countenance. He had stumbled blindly on, the ragged fabric that had cushioned the helmet rippling in the cutting wind. He blinkered his vision with his hands, his upward gaze focused on the ethereal form of the monolith. The Tesseract 19. It’s bulking mass pulsated before his eye, the edges beyond his human comprehension.

Somehow, he had done it. The weight of responsible upon his back driving him on through the razor wind, chipped with lacerating flecks of black sand. His raised hands and arms were raw with bloody ribbons of skin and cloth, yet still he has pushed on. Past the multitude of agonised faces.

Lost in the concentration of perseverance, he had not known he was upon the goliath abomination until it loomed before him, filling his field of view.

What he had done in there, had wiped out millions of lives. Saved millions more.

He had never felt the slightest shadow of remorse for the necessary sacrifice, the greater good had won out. Yet now, all these years on, looking back at what he put those he sent before him through in those black, hellbound sands. At what he had done in there, the suffering of the millions of innocent people who died that day. The unlucky ones...

A niggle grew deep in his chest, a sick churning feeling. It chilled his core beyond the reach of the desert of death. Something was beginning to awaken.

I could have gone on with this one, but managed to keep to the word limit. There was so much to go off in the first half of this, I was very tempted by the desert jinn - it always makes me think of Rudyard Kipling, and how the camel got him hump(ph) but I had plenty of fun with a desert of death, a master of arts, a structure from the next dimension, I just had so much fun writing this

This is my entry to@f3nix 's Finish The Story Contest - another great first half to run with, this time by @f3nix himself - and still time left to enter, so if you would have taken the first half somewhere else, give it a go!

This is a great contest as you can just sit down and write, someone has already set up the actual setting for you, so you get to just flow out story!

Working with this opening was a bit like playing with beautiful antique glass marbles, it really felt like an honour!

Photo Credit by Pixabay User Milivanily who has some amazing kitty pictures <3