It Awakens... (Finish the fiction story entry)

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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...

They say in your last moments, a playback of your life passes right before your eyes. And as the Kunst Meister stared death straight in the face, he reminisced...

He had always been an ambitious fellow; from his younger days in the monastery to when he dropped his hood to hunt for treasures, his life had been defined by a raw desire to be better than others.
It had served him well afterall, he had done good for himself. But again, his insatiable pursuit of more had brought him out here to his death.

He looked down again at the multiple horrible reflections of his face on the sand, this wasn't how he expected it all to end. His thoughts went to Rachel; she had warned against these sort of journeys ever since they had met. He always considered it part of the whims that came with women, but now he realized with dreadful clarity that he did love her, and that was how she expressed her own feelings towards him.

Suddenly the Kunst Meister realized, or rather decided, that he wasn't ready to call it quits yet. Rachel was worth living for, and he would fight with his last breath if that was what it took, but he wouldn't give up, not just yet.

The Tesseract 19 remained at the background of his thoughts, and as he stood up with defiance, force of habit required that his first step take him towards the goal. Then a second step followed, and a third, then a fourth. Something in his head told him he was going the wrong way, but the Kunst Meister would always be the Kunst Meister.

When he fell, the wind from the sea along with the merciless dust of the desert, carried his lifeless body back to the abandoned helment.

For even love could not save him, only a rare treasure would... Death

#SladenSpeaks

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Written for @f3nix's Finish the story contest

I know I have genuine followers who read my posts, and some of you may have wondered why I have been absent a while. I've been seriously sick, and still kind of down. But I feel strong enough again to be consistent here. I love y'all...

Yours, Sladen

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