Then To Glory

Under the rays of the Absolute Moon, hanging low and fat over the dunes of the Desert-at-Night, the liminal world was silver and blue. The endless rolling dunes stretching out forever to meet a star-choked horizon.

Unknowable cosmic profundity surrounding him, and Daniel was dying of thirst.

Could he even die here? Daniel was unsure how much time had passed since he’d arrived in the Desert-at-Night, and while he had seen countless maddening, indescribable wonders, he hadn’t found even a single sign of water. Was his thirst just another distraction? Another wonder of the Desert-At-Night, leading him off course? It felt real enough, and he could think of nothing else.

He would need water before he could continue his journey to the Primordial Dome. If only he could pass through this plane of nightmares, he could reach the land from which all thought springs. He could finally join the ranks of his peers, he would steal a true story and then become a writer to rival them all.

Daniel had watched his friends and colleagues rise beyond him, becoming authors and pundits, while he had stayed behind, stymied by a thousand and one small, unique obstacles. He knew what they thought of him, how they whispered their embarrassment behind his back. But he’d found a new way. Sought out this path through the otherworlds past the fields. He'd spent years talking of his plans, but something always got in the way of his success. No longer. He would find a story of such power that they would forget his years of false starts and empty promises. But he would achieve nothing if he couldn’t see beyond his own thirst. So Daniel sought out a peddler.

After a timeless wander, he'd finally found a hunched merchant inching their way slowly across a wide mudcrack basin within a deep dune bowl. He stood before the crooked wanderer, a rag-wrapped nomad overburdened with chests, flasks, pots, and trinkets arranged on his back like a heaving boil.

“I only want water. Do you have water?”

A rotting linen head wrap covered his features, but the merchant lifted a desiccated hand to pull away enough of the indigo cloth to reveal a rictus grin. In response to the question, the strange peddler opened their mouth, and a finger emerged at each corner, dry wrinkles cracking with movement. The digits inched up the sides of its face like worms, pulling the grim merchant’s mouth into an impossibly wide grin. This fucking guy.

Daniel saw small bolts of lightning appear within the open maw, arcing up from a blackened tongue. He stepped back and a dark cloud flowed out from the peddler’s mouth, growing until it was a roiling storm engulfing the creature’s head. Forks of lightning arced across the thunderhead with little pops of thunder, painfully bright in the silver twilight of the Desert-at-Night.

Daniel blinked at the flashing light, but the bolts left an afterimage of strange runes behind his eyelids. He didn’t recognize the symbols, but he understood them. The peddler wanted a trade.

A hand emerged from the cluster of wares stacked on the figure’s back, and lowered a green glass bottle into view. By the light of the looming moon overhead, Daniel could see that the broken stem of the bottle had been sealed with wax. He hoped it was wax. Either way, he could see liquid inside.

Desperate with thirst, Daniel took an instinctive step towards the peddler, and the claw-like hand pulled the dusty bottle back within the jangling tangle of junk. More lightning flashed in the little storm, superimposing more symbols over Daniel’s vision.

It wanted the inner teeth. The grinding circlets of bone that grew within a particular creature found among the never-ending dunes. The singing moldwarps.

Daniel had encountered the creatures once before, when he’d first awoken in the Desert-At-Night. He remembered choking on the blue sands, hypnotized by the song of the creatures moving beneath, scarcely able to flee as one of them erupted from the ground. If he was to finally escape the dream desert he would need to live, and if he wanted to live, he needed water.

“Yes. Anything.”

The Desert-At-Night was not hot, nor was it cold. There wasn’t temperature at all as much as there were emotional states that hung in the deep valleys, flowing and receding from the moon's rays as they could. Daniel watched the peddler hobble off towards a rocky depression in the distance, and his skin prickled with excitement and purpose.

There was a clarifying quality to his thirst. It had crowded out all other thoughts, but the peddler’s request had silenced his desperation, replacing it with a pragmatic set of waypoints. Return to the moldwarps, slay one and harvest its inner teeth, return to the peddler for the water. Once he could slake his thirst, then he could begin his true quest in earnest: stealing a true story from the Primordial Dome. Definitely.

Daniel began the long journey back to where he had first began. He crested familiar dunes and crossed long alluvial plains, passing through fear, sadness, and longing. The Desert-At-Night was nearly featureless, but Daniel retraced the hurts and joys he’d experienced on his way.

Atop a towering butte, Daniel had to stare at the ground to keep the immensity of the starfield overhead from making him dizzy. Here he was nearly skewered by the bright, prismatic leg of a hallax kuagg’ua. While awake the long insectoid behemoths doled out chaos and random cruelties, creating silver sandstorms as they thrashed their limbless, segmented forms across the desert. As they slept, they dreamed thousands of shimmering legs into being, and their gigantic forms scuttled gracefully across the high points of the Desert-At-Night. From afar, Daniel had once thought that they were traveling rainbows. His thirst drove him forward.

He met a beautiful man in a deep pit, who claimed to be a lost prince from an empire of artisans. Strong and tall, the Maybe Prince was trying to bury his blighted epaulets, a pair of golden ornaments that shone in the moonlight, untarnished by the dulling sands. They were created to be a gift that would place the prince’s dynasty at the height of grace and beauty, but had instead made of his family a clan of paranoid misers, cursed to entropy. The vulnerable determination in the prince’s gaze as he asked Daniel to help him dig almost swayed him from his journey. But his thirst made it a simple decision. He would return once he had water.

As he traveled, he wondered at the true color of the sands, how they would appear under a more promising sun. That was just another secret of the Desert-At-Night. Also, who cares about the color of sand?

Finally he reached the place where he had awoken in the Desert-At-Night. Daniel remembered the feeling of hot desperation that settled in his gut, but moreover he could hear his quarry’s song.

The singing moldwarps were hairy moloid beasts with a single fan-like bone paddle at the end of their forelegs and an expandable mouth that came to a fleshy, puckered point at the tip of their snout. They traveled through the Desert-At-Night by humming a frequency that caused the sands to act as a liquid. From the surface it sounded like a wavering, peaceful drone. It was a calming sound, revealing new tones and angles as it approached. But, as he had nearly done once before, if you listened too long you could be taken beneath the liquid sands, and devoured by the spinning, grinding ring teeth in the creature’s belly.

Daniel walked toward the song, suddenly aware of the deep impressions his footsteps left in the sand. Desperation gave way to the warmth of contentment, but the dry thirst crawling up the back of his throat reminded him that the feeling was a lie. He could not let himself be deceived by the duplicitous sands.

The artful drone reached a heady crescendo and the sands exploded around Daniel. His feet were lost beneath him as he fell into the sand, splashing and kicking like a child thrown into a pool. He felt a thin membrane of muscle wrap around his lower half and squeeze, It was the creature's mouth and he was being swallowed.

Blinded and unable to breath beneath the sand, he lurched forward, reaching for the moldwarp’s small black eyes. His fingers traced the muscles in the monster’s face to its eyelids, and he pushed. The mouth enveloping his legs loosed as the creature screamed. It thrashed and flailed, but Daniel held on.

The crazed moldwarp burst out of the sand carrying Daniel in its mouth, landing on hard packed sand as its song turned to a shriek. It raised a blade-like paddle and made to swipe Daniel’s hands from its eyes. The blade came down hard, cutting through Daniel’s wrist, continuing on into the moldwarp's own skull. A final death spasm coursed through the beast before it flopped to the sand.

Daniel scooted out of the moldwarp’s mouth and plunged his severed wrist into the sand. The stump clotted quickly, and he wondered how much water he’d lost in his blood. Nonetheless, battle was done and he had won.

Using the dead monster’s own sharp bone paddle, Daniel carved into the moldwarp. It was difficult work, doubly so with a single hand. But it wouldn’t matter if he had a million hands should he die of thirst. After what felt like hours, waves of pride and vengeance passing through him while he cut, he removed the three jagged hoops of bone the moldwarp had held in its stomach. Slinging the inner teeth over his shoulder like a gruesome bandelero, Daniel once again started out across the Desert-At-Night.

His return journey to the peddler’s valley seemed the shortest yet.

As he walked, an ancient castle rose up around him, emerging from the sand and placing him in the middle of a thousand long halls and locked bed chambers. The thirst pulling him forward by the throat, Daniel would not be turned aside. He simply kept walking, and the castle walls turned and twisted to meet his path. The Castle Solved was a moving puzzle. A trap for those who believed reason was the whip that could force the very walls into submission. It would reward action and impulse. Daniel's thirst demanded both.

Daniel encountered a traveler like himself, an explorer of the Desert-At-Night in search of water. Her thirst beginning to take over her thoughts. She called him “Dry Hunter,” and asked after his secrets. He threatened to drink her blood for his water should she continue to haunt his path. His victory, his water, would not be taken by some poor soul who had never tried to traverse the silver sands as he had.

Daniel arrived back at the deep bowl valley where he had encountered the storming peddler. The mute hunchback had undergone a strange transformation while Daniel had been gone. The peddler was now embedded in a looming cliff face. Its body naked save for the tattered wrappings around its face, 16 arms stretching out in a fan from its torso, all crucified into the blue stone. The peddler’s wares, which looked to have grown in number since Daniel had been there, were piled on the ground at the merchant’s feet.

The inner teeth had bitten into Daniel’s shoulder, leaving a deep, sand-clogged wound when he lifted them over his head, letting them clatter on the ground before the strange merchant hanging in the wall above.

Again, a roiling black storm cloud formed around the peddler’s head, thin lines of lightning arcing from its 80 fingers to burn a message behind Daniel’s eyes.

Pleasure.

“I’ve given you what you asked. Now give me the water.”

Before he could even finish shouting at the embedded peddler, he felt a soft tap at his weather-beaten shoe. Unseen hands had placed the bottle at his feet. Without another word, Daniel swiped the bottle from the sand and ran.

He chose a bright lilac star in the celestial field before him and followed it. He ran from the peddler’s deep and the dunes beyond. He passed through regret and frustration and apprehension. Daniel ran further into the Desert-At-Night than he had yet come, before finally nestling himself in the shadow of a large rock.

An acrid, still stench escaped as Daniel pulled the old wax from the top of the broken bottleneck. He winced, revolted by the smell. But this was the answer.

Daniel threw the bottle to his lips, the sharp glass cutting his cracked skin, but the water poured down his throat. It carried the deep green taste of rotting moss, and it took all he had to stop from retching. But the flavor was soon forgotten as the sensation of the water filled his body with calm. The tension in his body released, and he felt as though his skin was settling back to his bones for the first time since he’d arrived. This was the answer.

The last drop of liquid fell to his tongue, and Daniel hurled the empty bottle into the distant sands. His thirst was gone, his head felt clear and his original path once again lay open before him.

He was wounded, but he could now continue to the Primordial Dome. He could take from that land of thought a true story. A powerful story. He could prove himself and his worth, and stand among his peers as an equal. It would no longer be theft. Had he not now suffered for the work?

Daniel left out from the shadow of the rock. He took handfuls of the silvery sand and patted it into the stump where his hand had been, and the deep tracks where the inner teeth had bitten into his shoulder. He added more and more until he could see no more wet blood glistening in the light of the Absolute Moon. The clots created small mounds on his wounds that began to look like the Desert-At-Night in miniature. As in sand, as in blood.

Qadil Sett Faith, the star Daniel followed to reach the Primordial Dome, burned bright ahead of him, and he set out on his way. Visions of his prosperous return filled his thoughts as he walked. He would return to the world a beacon of greatness, preeminence self-evident. His mind reeled as he passed through adoration and satisfaction.

The path to the Primordial Dome, the realm of concrete thought lay unbroken before him. But if he was to enter the land of art and beauty, he could not do so in his current disheveled state. He would need to find a peddler first, to barter for healing and raiments.

But then. Then to glory.

By Eric Grundhauser