Finish the Story Contest - WEEK #15 with @f3nix

How is it the expression goes? Better late than never...

I have been meaning to do this contest for the longest time, but could never get around to it... But at last, I have some spare time, so what better way to spend it, than to enter @f3nix's cool contest where you have to finish his story. The start is his words, after the page break, they are my words.. Hope you enjoy it, and why not give it a go yourself? You could win a Steem Basic Income on all of your posts for life!

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.

---

The sight of Tesseract 19 was like a tonic. A fresh energy coursed through his veins. It was as if his very being realised his bloodline depended on it. He focused his mind. All his years of training and experience came to the fore, as he hatched a plan. He had no way of knowing for sure if Konrad was alive. He always trusted his gut, and his gut told him that he was alive, but time was running out.

The Dunes shifted in the wind, and where the serpentine ogre faces once resided, an arrow began to form. It pointed away from the most direct route to the cubic structure in the distance. It was counter intuitive to go this way. He remembered that instinct is your friend, as he diverted course, and continued along the sand with renewed resolve.

Konrad's shackles allowed no movement. He was held captive in the Tesseract with nineteen other ten year old boys. Each night for the last eighteen nights, child sacrifcices were carried out by the barbaric monster, who went by the name of Moloch. It started with one child at Tesseract 1, then two the next night at Tesseract 2, and so it continued. Last night at Tesseract 18, the penultimate sacrifice had been made, and the boys at Tesseract 19 knew their fate.

Moloch was evil incarnate. His followers obeyed his orders with steely precision. the alternative was to lose their head. They stoked the fires beside Tesseract 19 - the time had almost come. Moloch drank in the fear of the children, their whimpers brought a smile to his sunken face.

Meanwhile, one mile West of Moloch's camp, the Kunst Meister edged ever closer. He was stopped short. His heart sank. It was not Moloch's men though. It was the chief of the Azamato tribe, descendants of the Bedouin nomads of days of yore. Considered the fiercest warriors in the 27 kingdoms.

The Meister fell to his knees.

"Please chief, release me, I have to save my son from the clutches of Moloch"

With that, he helped him to his feet, and gave him a horse.

"We have a common foe. My son is one of the nineteen"

They set off with grit and determination to meet Moloch and his henchmen head on. An unholy war unfolded. Steel on steel. The sand ran red with death. Many died, but good prevailed in the end. Early the next morning the Kunst Meister, the Azamato chief, his remaining army and nineteen children left Tesseract 19 behind them.

Nobody saw Moloch being slayed that day though, and his remains were never found, so the stories abound of when he will return to complete his evil plot.

Good the victor, but for how long??